Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Each time the lash struck, each attack, in her helplessness to escape, there would
come to her a single vision, only one, for each peak of pain. The Eye at the top of
the pyramid. The sacrificial city, with figures in rust-colored robes. The dark woman
waiting at the end of the street. The hooded face of sorrowing Denmark, leaning out
over Germany. The cherry-red coals falling through the night. Bianca in a Spanish
dancer’s costume, stroking the barrel of a gun. . . .
Out by one rocket site, in the pine woods, Thanatz and Gretel found an old road that
no one used any more. Pieces of pavement were visible here and there among the green
underbrush. It seemed that if they followed the road they would come to a town, a
station or outpost . . . it wasn’t at all clear what they would find. But the place
would be long deserted.
They held hands. Thanatz wore an old jacket of green suede, with patches on the sleeves.
Gretel wore her camel’s-hair coat and a white kerchief. In places, pine needles were
drifted across the old roadway, so deep as to silence their footsteps.
They came to a slide where years ago the road had been washed away. Gravel spilled
salt-and-pepper downhill toward a river they heard but couldn’t see. An old automobile,
a Hannomag Storm, hung there, nose-down, one door smashed open. The lavender-gray
metal shell had been picked clean as the skeleton of a deer. Somewhere in these woods
was the presence that had done this. They skirted the wreck, afraid to come too near
the spidered glass, the hard mortality in the shadows of the front seat.
Remains of houses could be glimpsed, back in the trees. There was now a retreat of
the light, though it was still before noon, and the forest grew no thicker here. In
the middle of the road, giant turds showed up, fresh, laid in twists like strands
of rope—dark and knotted. What could have left them?
At the same instant, she and Thanatz both realized that for hours now they must have
been walking through the ruin of a great city, not an ancient ruin, but brought down
inside their lifetime. Ahead of them, the path curved on, into trees. But something
stood now between them and whatever lay around the curve: invisible, impalpable . . .
some
monitor.
Saying, “Not one step farther. That’s all. Not one. Go back now.”
It was impossible to move any farther into it. They were both terrified. They turned,
feeling it at their backs, and moved away quickly.
Back at the Schußstelle they found Blicero in his final madness. The trunks in the
cold little clearing were stripped of bark, bleeding with beads of gum from the rocket
blasts.
“He could have banished us. Blicero was a local deity. He wouldn’t even have needed
a piece of paper. But he wanted us all to stay. He gave us the best there was, beds,
food, liquor, drugs. Something was being planned, it involved the boy Gottfried, that
was as unmistakable as the smell of resin, first thing those blue hazy mornings. But
Blicero would tell us nothing.
“We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened earth.
Jabos
flew over in diamond shapes, hunting us. Blicero had grown on, into another animal . . .
a werewolf . . . but with no humanity left in its eyes: that had faded out, day after
day, and been replaced by gray furrows, red veins in patterns that weren’t human.
Islands:
clotted islands in the sea. Sometimes even the topographic lines, nested on a common
point. ‘It is the map of my Ur-Heimat,’ imagine a shriek so quiet it’s almost a whisper,
‘the Kingdom of Lord Blicero. A white land.’ I had a sudden understanding: he was
seeing the world now in
mythical regions:
they had their maps, real mountains, rivers, and colors. It was not Germany he moved
through. It was his own space. But he was taking
us
along with him! My cunt swelled with blood at the danger, the chances for our annihilation,
delicious never knowing when it would come down because the space and time were Blicero’s
own. . . . He did not fall back along roads, he did not cross bridges or lowlands.
We sailed Lower Saxony, island to island. Each firing-site was another island, in
a white sea. Each island had its peak in the center . . . was it the position of the
Rocket itself? the moment of liftoff? A German Odyssey. Which one would be the last,
the home island?
“I keep forgetting to ask Thanatz whatever became of Gottfried. Thanatz was allowed
to stay with the battery. But I was taken away: driven in a Hispano-Suiza with Blicero
himself, out through the gray weather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked
us in a wheel at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered together,
a flame that always burned at the top of one stack. It was the Castle: Blicero looked
over, about to speak, and I said, ‘The Castle.’ The mouth smiled quickly, but absent:
the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on
into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can’t imagine,
tough cells with the smallest possible flicker inside, running on nothing but ice,
or less. He called me Katje. ‘You’ll see that your little trick won’t work again.
Not now, Katje.’ I wasn’t frightened. It was madness I could understand, or else the
hallucinating of the very old. The silver stork flew wings-down into our wind, brow
low and legs back, Prussian occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared
black swirls of limousines and staff cars in the driveway of the main office. I saw
a light plane, a two-seater, at the edge of the parking lot. The faces of the men
inside seemed familiar. I knew them from films, the power and the gravity were there—they
were important men, but I only recognized one: Generaldirektor Smaragd, from Leverkusen.
An elderly man who used a cane, a notorious spiritualist before the War, and, it seemed,
even now. ‘Greta,’ he smiled, groping for my hand. ‘Ah, we’re all here.’ But his charm
was shared by none of the others. They’d all been waiting for Blicero. A meeting of
nobles in the Castle. They went into the board room. I was left with an assistant
named Drohne, high forehead, graying hair, always fussing with his necktie. He’d seen
every one of my films. We moved off into the machinery. Through the windows of the
board room I saw them at a round conference table, with something in the center. It
was gray, plastic, shining, light moving on its surfaces. ‘What is it?’ I asked, vamping
Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. ‘I think it’s for the F-Gerät,’ he
whispered.”
“
F?”
sez Slothrop, “F-Gerät, you sure of that?”
“Some letter.”
“S?”
“All right, S. They are children at the threshold of language with these words they
make up. It looked to me like an ectoplasm—something they had forced, by their joint
will, to materialize on the table. No one’s lips were moving. It was a séance. I understood
then that Blicero had brought me across a frontier. Had injected me at last into his
native space without a tremor of pain. I was free. Men crowded behind me in the corridor,
blocking the way back. Drohne’s hand was sweating on my sleeve. He was a plastics
connoisseur. Flipping his fingernail against a large clear African mask, cocking his
ear—‘Can you hear it? The true ring of Polystyrene . . .’ and going into raptures
for me over a heavy chalice of methyl methacrylate, a replica of the Sangraal. . . .
We were by a tower reactor. A strong paint-thinner smell was in the air. Clear rods
of some plastic came hissing out through an extruder at the bottom of the tower, into
cooling channels, or into a chopper. The heat was heavy in the room. I thought of
something very deep, black and viscous, feeding this factory. From outside I heard
motors. Were they all leaving? Why was I here? Plastic serpents crawled endlessly
to left and right. The erections of my escort tried to crawl out the openings in their
clothes. I could do whatever I wanted. Black radiant and deep. I knelt and began unbuttoning
Drohne’s trousers. But two others took me by the arms and dragged me off into a warehouse
area. Others followed, or entered from other doors. Great curtains of styrene or vinyl,
in all colors, opaque and transparent, hung row after row from overhead. They flared
like the northern lights. I felt that somewhere beyond them was an audience, waiting
for something to begin. Drohne and the men stretched me out on an inflatable plastic
mattress. All around, I watched a clear crumbling of the air, or of the light. Someone
said ‘butadiene,’ and I heard
beauty dying. . . .
Plastic rustled and snapped around us, closing us in, in ghost white. They took away
my clothes and dressed me in an exotic costume of some black polymer, very tight at
the waist, open at the crotch. It felt alive on me. ‘Forget leather, forget satin,’
shivered Drohne. ‘This is Imipolex, the material of the future.’ I can’t describe
its perfume, or how it felt—the luxury. The moment it touched them it brought my nipples
up swollen and begging to be bitten. I wanted to feel it against my cunt. Nothing
I ever wore, before or since, aroused me quite as much as Imipolex. They promised
me brassieres, chemises, stockings, gowns of the same material. Drohne had strapped
on a gigantic Imipolex penis over his own. I rubbed my face against it, it was so
delicious. . . . There was an abyss between my feet. Things, memories, no way to distinguish
them any more, went tumbling downward through my head. A torrent. I was evacuating
all these, out into some void . . . from my vertex, curling, bright-colored hallucinations
went streaming . . . baubles, amusing lines of dialogue, objets d’art . . . I was
letting them all go. Holding none. Was this ‘submission,’ then—letting all these go?
“I don’t know how long they kept me there. I slept, I woke. Men appeared and vanished.
Time had lost meaning. One morning I was outside the factory, naked, in the rain.
Nothing grew there. Something had been deposited in a great fan that went on for miles.
Some tarry kind of waste. I had to walk all the way back to the firing site. They
were all gone. Thanatz had left a note, asking me to try to get to Swinemünde. Something
must have happened at the site. There was a silence in that clearing I’d felt only
once before. Once, in Mexico. The year I was in America. We were very deep in the
jungle. We came on a flight of stone steps, covered with vines, fungus, centuries
of decay. The others climbed to the top, but I couldn’t. It was the same as the day
with Thanatz, in the pine forest. I felt a silence waiting for me up there. Not for
them, but for me alone . . . my own personal silence. . . .”
• • • • • • •
Up on the bridge of the
Anubis
, the storm paws loudly on the glass, great wet flippers falling at random in out
of the night
whap!
the living shape visible just for the rainbow edge of the sound—it takes a certain
kind of maniac, at least a Polish cavalry officer, to stand in this pose behind such
brittle thin separation, and stare each blow full in its muscularity. Behind Procalowski
the clinometer bob goes to and fro with his ship’s rolling: a pendulum in a dream.
Stormlight has turned the lines of his face black, black as his eyes, black as the
watchcap cocked so tough and salty aslant the furrows of his forehead. Light clusters,
clear, deep, on the face of the radio gear . . . fans up softly off the dial of the
pelorus . . . spills out portholes onto the white river. Inexplicably, the afternoon
has been going on for longer than it should. Daylight has been declining for too many
hours. Corposants have begun to flicker now in the rigging. The storm yanks at rope
and cable, the cloudy night goes white and loud, in huge spasms. Procalowski smokes
a cigar and studies charts of the Oder Haff.
All this light. Are the Russian lookouts watching from shore, waiting in the rain?
Is this arm of the passage being kept in grease-pencil, X by dutiful X, across some
field of Russian plastic, inside where cobwebs whiten the German windows nobody needs
to stand at, where phosphor grass ripples across the A-scopes and the play you feel
through the hand-crank in the invisible teeth is the difference between hit and miss. . . .
Vaslav—is the pip you see there even a ship? In the Zone, in these days, there is
endless simulation—standing waves in the water, large drone-birds, so well-known as
to have nicknames among the operators, wayward balloons, flotsam from other theatres
of war (Brazilian oildrums, whisky cases stenciled for Fort-Lamy), observers from
other galaxies, episodes of smoke, moments of high albedo—your real targets are hard
to come by. Too much confusion out here for most replacements and late draftees. Only
the older scope hands can still maintain a sense of the appropriate: over the watches
of their Durations, jittering electric green for what must have seemed, at first,
forever, they have come to understand distribution . . . they have learned a visual
mercy.
How probable is the
Anubis
in this estuary tonight? Its schedule has lapsed, fashionably, unavoidably: it should
have been through Swinemünde weeks ago, but the Vistula was under Soviet interdiction
to the white ship. The Russians even had a guard posted on board for a while, till
the Anubian ladies vamped them off long enough to single up all lines—and so the last
long reprise of Polish homeland was on, across these water-meadows of the north, radio
messages following them in clear one day and code the next, an early and shapeless
situation, dithering between executioner’s silence and the Big Time. There are international
reasons for an Anubis Affair right now, and also reasons against, and the arguments
go on, too remote to gather, and orders are changed hour to hour.
Pitching and rolling furiously, the
Anubis
drives northward. Lightning flickers all around the horizon, and thunder that reminds
the military men on board of drumfire announcing battles they’re not sure now if they
survived or still dream, still can wake up into and die. . . . Weather decks shine
slick and bare. Party litter clogs the drains. Stale fat-smoke goes oozing out the
galley porthole into the rain. The saloon’s been set up for baccarat, and filthy movies
are showing in the boiler room. The second dog watch is about to come on. The white
ship settles, like the soul of a kerosene lamp just lit, into its evening routine.