Authors: Thomas Pynchon
They are approaching now a lengthy brick improvisation, a Victorian paraphrase of
what once, long ago, resulted in Gothic cathedrals—but which, in its own time, arose
not from any need to climb through the fashioning of suitable confusions toward any
apical God, but more in a derangement of aim, a doubt as to the God’s actual locus
(or, in some, as to its very existence), out of a cruel network of sensuous moments
that could not be transcended and so bent the intentions of the builders not on any
zenith, but back to fright, to simple escape, in whatever direction, from what the
industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless warrens, shrugging leather forests
of drive belts, flowing and patient shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying
about the chances for mercy that year. The grimed brick sprawl is known as the Hospital
of St. Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases, and one of
its residents is a Dr. Kevin Spectro, neurologist and casual Pavlovian.
Spectro is one of the original seven owners of The Book, and if you ask Mr. Pointsman
what Book, you’ll only get smirked at. It rotates, the mysterious Book, among its
co-owners on a weekly basis, and this, Roger gathers, is Spectro’s week to get dropped
in on at all hours. Others, in Pointsman’s weeks, have come the same way to “The White
Visitation” in the night, Roger has heard their earnest, conspirators’ whispering
in the corridors, the smart rattle of all their shoes, like dancing pumps on marble,
destroying one’s repose, refusing ever to die with distance, Pointsman’s voice and
stride always distinct from the rest. How’s it going to sound now with a toilet bowl?
Roger and Jessica leave the doctor at a side entrance, into which he melts, leaving
nothing but rain dripping from slopes and serifs of an unreadable legend on the lintel.
They turn southward. Lights on the dash glow warmly. Searchlights rake the raining
sky. The slender machine shivers over the roads. Jessica drifts toward sleep, the
leather seat creaking as she curls about. Windscreen wipers brush the rain in a rhythmic
bright warp. It is past two, and time for home.
• • • • • • •
Inside St. Veronica’s hospital they sit together, just off the war-neurosis ward,
these habitual evenings. The autoclave simmers its fine clutter of steel bones. Steam
drifts into the glare of the gooseneck lamp, now and then becoming very bright, and
the shadows of the men’s gestures may pass through it, knife-edged, swooping very
fast. But both faces are usually reserved, kept well back, in the annulus of night.
Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder,
come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal. Kevin Spectro will take his syringe
and spike away a dozen times tonight, into the dark, to sedate Fox (his generic term
for any patient—run three times around the building without thinking of a fox and
you can cure anything). Pointsman will sit each time waiting for their talking to
resume, glad to rest these moments in the half-darkness, the worn gold-leaf letters
shining from the spines of books, the fragrant coffee mess besieged by roaches, the
winter rain in the downspout just outside the window. . . .
“
You’re
not looking any better.”
“Ah, it’s the old bastard again, he’s got me down. This fighting, Spectro, every
day
, I don’t . . .” pouting downward at his eyeglasses that he’s wiping on his shirt,
“there’s more to damned Pudding than I can
see
, he’s always springing his . . . senile little surprises. . . .”
“It’s his age. Really.”
“Oh,
that
I can deal with. But he’s so damned—such a
bastard
, he
never
sleeps, he
plots
—”
“Not senility, no, I meant the position he’s working from. Pointsman? You don’t have
the priorities he does quite yet, do you? You can’t take the chances he can. You’ve
treated them that age, surely you know that strange . . .
smugness. . . .”
Pointsman’s own Fox waits, out in the city, a prize of war. In here the tiny office
space is the cave of an oracle: steam drifting, sybilline cries arriving out of the
darkness . . . Abreactions of the Lord of the Night. . . .
“I don’t like it, Pointsman. Since you did ask.”
“Why not.” Silence. “Unethical?”
“For pity’s sake, is
this
ethical?” raising an arm then toward the exit into the ward, almost a Fascist salute.
“No, I’m only trying to think of ways to justify it, experimentally. I can’t. It’s
only one man.”
“It’s Slothrop. You know what he is. Even Mexico thinks . . . oh, the usual. Precognition.
Psychokinesis. They have their own problems,
that
lot. . . . But suppose
you
had the chance to study a truly classical case of . . . some pathology, a perfect
mechanism. . . .”
One night Spectro asked: “If he hadn’t been one of Laszlo Jamf’s subjects, would you
be all this keen on him?”
“Of course I would.”
“Hmm.”
Imagine a missile one hears approaching only
after
it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out . . . a few feet of
film run backwards . . . the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound—then growing
out of it
the roar of its own fall, catching up to what’s already death and burning . . . a
ghost in the sky. . . .
Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere
on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from
dark, dominance from submission. . . . But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize,
shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders
of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this
idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master,
yet now feels himself a slave . . . who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference,
and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the
ultraparadoxical phase
which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.”
Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile—
Spectro shakes his head. “You’re putting response before stimulus.”
“Not at all. Think of it. He’s out there, and he can
feel them coming
, days in advance. But it’s a reflex. A reflex to something that’s in the air
right now.
Something we’re too coarsely put together to sense—but
Slothrop can.
”
“But that makes it extrasensory.”
“Why not say ‘a sensory cue we just aren’t paying attention to.’ Something that’s
been there all along, something we could be looking at but no one is. Often, in our
experiments . . . I believe M. K. Petrova was first to observe it . . . one of the
women, quite early in the game really . . . the act merely of bringing the dog
into the laboratory
—especially in our experimental neurosis work . . . the first sight of the test stand,
of the technician, a stray shadow, the touch of a draft of air, some cue we might
never pin down would be enough to send him over, send him transmarginal.
“So, Slothrop. Conceivably. Out in the city, the ambience alone—suppose we considered
the war itself as a
laboratory
? when the V-2 hits, you see, first the blast, then the sound of its falling . . .
the normal order of the stimuli reversed that way . . . so he might turn a particular
corner, enter a certain street, and for no clear reason feel suddenly . . .”
Silence comes in, sculptured by spoken dreams, by pain-voices of the rocketbombed
next door, Lord of the Night’s children, voices hung upon the ward’s stagnant medicinal
air. Praying to their Master: sooner or later an abreaction, each one, all over this
frost and harrowed city . . .
. . . as once again the floor is a giant lift propelling you with no warning toward
your ceiling—replaying now as the walls are blown outward, bricks and mortar showering
down, your sudden paralysis as death comes to wrap and stun
I don’t know guv I must’ve blacked out when I come to she was gone it was burning
all around me head was full of smoke
. . . and the sight of your blood spurting from the flaccid stub of artery, the snowy
roofslates fallen across half your bed, the cinema kiss never completed, you were
pinned and stared at a crumpled cigarette pack for two hours in pain, you could hear
them crying from the rows either side but couldn’t move . . . the sudden light filling
up the room, the awful silence, brighter than any morning through blankets turned
to gauze no shadows at all, only unutterable two-o’clock dawn . . . and . . .
. . . this transmarginal leap, this surrender. Where ideas of the opposite have come
together, and lost their oppositeness. (And is it really the rocket explosion that
Slothrop’s keying on, or is it exactly
this depolarizing
, this neurotic “confusion” that fills the wards tonight?) How many times before it’s
washed away, these iterations that pour out, reliving the blast, afraid to let go
because the letting go is so final
how do I know Doctor that I’ll ever come back?
and the answer
trust us,
after the rocket, is so hollow, only mummery—trust you?—and both know it. . . . Spectro
feels so like a fraud but carries on . . . only because the pain continues to be real. . . .
And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new children, painless,
egoless for one pulse of the Between . . . tablet erased, new writing about to begin,
hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests shivering
under their government blankets, drugged, drowning in tears and snot of grief so real,
torn from so deep that it surprises, seems more than their own. . . .
How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of his are
full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use their innocence, to write on
them new words of himself, his own brown Realpolitik dreams, some psychic prostate
ever in aching love promised, ah hinted but till now . . . how seductively they lie
ranked in their iron bedsteads, their virginal sheets, the darlings so artlessly erotic. . . .
St. Veronica’s Downtown Bus Station, their crossroads (newly arrived on this fake
parquetry, chewing-gum scuffed charcoal black, slicks of nighttime vomit, pale yellow,
clear as the fluids of gods, waste newspapers or propaganda leaflets no one has read
in torn scythe-shaped pieces, old nose-pickings, black grime that blows weakly in
when the doors open . . .).
You have waited in these places into the early mornings, synced in to the on-whitening
of the interior, you know the Arrivals schedule by heart, by hollow heart. And where
these children have run away from, and that, in this city, there is no one to meet
them. You impress them with your gentleness. You’ve never quite decided if they can
see through to your vacuum. They won’t yet look in your eyes, their slender legs are
never still, knitted stockings droop (all elastic has gone to war), but charmingly:
little heels kick restless against the canvas bags, the fraying valises under the
wood bench. Speakers in the ceiling report departures and arrivals in English, then
in the other, exile languages. Tonight’s child has had a long trip here, hasn’t slept.
Her eyes are red, her frock wrinkled. Her coat has been a pillow. You feel her exhaustion,
feel the impossible vastness of all the sleeping countryside at her back, and for
the moment you really are selfless, sexless . . . considering only how to shelter
her, you are the Traveler’s Aid.
Behind you, long, night-long queues of men in uniform move away slowly, kicking AWOL
bags along, mostly silent, toward exit doors painted beige, but with edges smudged
browner in bell-curves of farewell by the generation of hands. Doors that only now
and then open let in the cold air, take out a certain draft of men, and close again.
A driver, or a clerk, stands by the door checking tickets, passes, furlough chits.
One by one men step out into this perfectly black rectangle of night and disappear.
Gone, the war taking them, the man behind already presenting his ticket. Outside motors
are roaring: but less like transport than like some kind of stationary machine, very
low earthquake frequencies coming in mixed with the cold—somehow intimating that out
there your blindness, after this bright indoors, will be like a sudden blow. . . .
Soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen. One by one, gone. Those who happen to be smoking
might last an instant longer, weak little coal swinging in orange arc once, twice—no
more. You sit, half-turned to watch them, your soiled sleepy darling beginning to
complain, and it’s no use—how can your lusts fit inside this same white frame with
so much, such endless, departure? A thousand children are shuffling out these doors
tonight, but only rare nights will even one come in, home to your sprung, spermy bed,
the wind over the gasworks, closer smells of mold on wet coffee grounds, cat shit,
pale sweaters with the pits heaped in a corner, in some accidental gesture, slink
or embrace. This wordless ratcheting queue . . . thousands going away . . . only the
stray freak particle, by accident, drifting against the major flow. . . .
Yet for all his agonizing all Pointsman will score, presently, is an octopus—yes a
gigantic, horror-movie devilfish name of Grigori: gray, slimy, never still, shivering
slow-motion in his makeshift pen down by the Ick Regis jetty . . . a terrible wind
that day off the Channel, Pointsman in his Balaclava helmet, eyes freezing, Dr. Porkyevitch
with greatcoat collar up and fur hat down around his ears, their breaths foul with
hours-old fish, and what the hell can Pointsman do with this animal?
Already, by itself, the answer is growing, one moment a featureless blastulablob,
the next folding, beginning to differentiate. . . .
One of the things Spectro said that night—surely it was that night—was, “I only wonder
if you’d feel the same way without all those dogs about. If your subjects all along
had been human.”