Gravity's Rainbow (95 page)

Katje by now is in a bewildered state, but she knows a message when she sees it. Someone,
a hidden friend at “The White Visitation”—perhaps Silvernail himself, who’s been less
than fanatically loyal to Pointsman and his lot—has planted Osbie Feel’s screen test
deliberately here, where they knew she’d find it. She rewinds and runs the film again.
Osbie is looking straight into the camera: straight at her, none of your idle doper’s
foolery here, he’s
acting.
There’s no mistake. It
is
a message, in code, which after not too long she busts as follows. Say that Basil
Rathbone stands for young Osbie himself. S. Z. Sakall may be Mr. Pointsman, and the
Midget sheriff the whole dark grandiose Scheme, wrapped in one small package, diminished,
a clear target. Pointsman argues that it’s real, but Osbie knows better. Pointsman
ends up in the stagnant trough, and the plot/Midget vanishes, frightened, into the
dust. A prophecy. A kindness. She returns to her open cell, gathers a few belongings
in a bag, and walks out of “The White Visitation,” past the unclipped topiary hedges,
growing back into reality, past peacetime’s returned madmen sitting gently in the
sun. Once, outside Scheveningen, she walked the dunes, past the waterworks, past the
blocks of new flats replacing the torn-down slums, concrete still wet inside its shuttering,
with the same hope of escape in her heart—moved, a vulnerable shadow, so long ago,
toward her rendezvous with Pirate by the windmill called “The Angel.” Where is he
now? Is he still living in Chelsea? Is he even alive?

Osbie is at home, anyway, chewing spices, smoking reefers, and shooting cocaine. The
last of his wartime stash. One grand eruption. He’s been up for three days. He beams
at Katje, a sunburst in primary colors spiking out from his head, waves the needle
he’s just taken out of his vein, clamps between his teeth a pipe as big as a saxophone
and puts on a deerstalker cap, which does not affect the sunburst a bit.

“Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathborne. I was right,” out of breath, letting her bag fall
with a thump.

The aura pulses, bows modestly. He is also steel, he is rawhide and sweat. “Good,
good. There’s the son of Frankenstein in it, too. I wish we could have been more direct,
but—”

“Where’s Prentice?”

“Out scouting up some transportation.” He leads her to a back room fitted out with
telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over, desks littered with maps, schedules,
An Introduction to Modern Herero
, corporate histories, spools of recording wire. “Not very organized around here yet.
But it’s coming along, love, it’s coming.”

Is this what she thinks it is? Wakened from how many times and pushed away because
it won’t do to hope, not this much? Dialectically, sooner or later, some counterforce
would have had to arise . . . she must not have been political enough: never enough
to keep faith that it would . . . even with all the power on the other side, that
it really would. . . .

Osbie has pulled up folding chairs: hands her now a mimeographed sheaf, rather fat
it is, “One or two things, here, you should know. We hate to rush you. But the horse
trough is waiting.”

And presently, his modulations having flowed through the rooms in splendid (and for
a while distracting) displays of bougainvillea red and peach, it seems he has stabilized
for the moment into the not-quite-worldly hero of a lost Victorian children’s book,
for he answers, after her hundredth version of the same question, “In the Parliament
of Life, the time comes, simply, for a division. We are now in the corridors we have
chosen, moving toward the Floor. . . .”

• • • • • • •

Dear Mom, I put a couple of people in Hell today. . . .

—Fragment, thought to be from the
Gospel of Thomas
(Oxyrhynchus papyrus number classified)

Who would have thought so many would be here? They keep appearing, all through this
disquieting structure, gathered in groups, pacing alone in meditation, or studying
the paintings, the books, the exhibits. It seems to be some very extensive museum,
a place of many levels, and new wings that generate like living tissue—though if it
all does grow toward some end shape, those who are here inside can’t see it. Some
of the halls are to be entered at one’s peril, and monitors are standing at all the
approaches to make this clear. Movement among these passages is without friction,
skimming and rapid, often headlong, as on perfect roller skates. Parts of the long
galleries are open to the sea. There are cafés to sit in and watch the sunsets—or
sunrises, depending on the hours of shifts and symposia. Fantastic pastry carts come
by, big as pantechnicons: one has to
go inside
, search the numberless shelves, each revealing treats gooier and sweeter than the
last . . . chefs stand by with ice-cream scoops at the ready, awaiting only a word
from the saccharomaniac client to swiftly mold and rush baked Alaskas of any size
and flavor to the ovens . . . there are boats of baklava stuffed with Bavarian cream,
topped with curls of bittersweet chocolate, broken almonds, cherries as big as ping-pong
balls, and popcorn in melted marshmallows and butter, and thousands of kinds of fudge,
from liquorice to divinity, being slapped out on the flat stone tables, and taffy-pulling,
all by hand, that sometimes extends around corners, out windows, back in another corridor—er,
excuse me, sir, could you hold this for a moment? thank
you
—the joker is gone, leaving Pirate Prentice here, newly arrived and still a bit puzzled
with it all, holding one end of a candy clew whose other end could be anywhere at
all . . . well, he might as well follow it . . . prowling along looking quite wry,
reeling in taffy by the yard, occasionally stuffing a bit in his mouth—mm, peanut
butter and molasses—well, its labyrinthine path turns out, like Route One where it
passes through the heart of Providence, to’ve been set up deliberately to give the
stranger a tour of the city. This taffy trick is a standard orientation device here
it seems, for Pirate now and then will cross the path of some other novice . . . often
they’ll have a time getting their strands of taffy disentangled, which has also been
planned as a good, spontaneous way for the newcomers to meet. The tour now takes Pirate
out into an open courtyard, where a small crowd has formed around one of the Erdschweinhöhle
delegates in a rip-roaring argument with some advertising executive over what else
but the Heresy Question, already a pebble in the shoe of this Convention, and perhaps
to be the rock on which it will founder. Street-entertainers go by: self-taught tumblers
doing amazing handsprings on pavement that seems dangerously hard and slippery, choirs
of kazoos playing Gilbert & Sullivan medleys, a boy and girl who dance not along the
level street but up and down, usually at the major flights of steps, whenever there’s
a queue to be waited through. . . .

Gathering up his ball of taffy, which by now is growing quite cumbersome, Pirate passes
Beaverboard Row, as it is known: comprising the offices of all the Committees, with
the name of each stenciled above the doorway—A4 . . .
IG
 . . .
OIL
FIRMS
 . . .
LOBOTOMY
 . . .
SELF
-
DEFENSE
 . . .
HERESY
 . . .

“Naturally you’re seeing this all through a soldier’s eyes,” she’s very young, insouciant,
wearing a silly small young-woman’s hat of the period, her face clean and steady enough
for the broad-shouldered, high-waisted, no-neck profile they’re all affecting these
days. She moves along beside him taking long and graceful steps, swings her arms,
tosses her head—reaches over to grab some of his taffy, and touching his hand as she
does so.

“For you it’s all a garden,” he suggests.

“Yes. Perhaps you’re not such a stick after all.”

Ah, they do bother him, these free women in their teens, their spirits are so contagious,

Nev—ver,—mind, whatcha hear from your car,

Take a lookit just—how—keen—they are,

Nev—ver,—mind,—what, your calendar say,

Ev’rybody’s nine months old today! Hey,

Pages are turnin’ pages,

Nobody’s in—their,—ca,—ges,

Spirit’s just so—con,—ta,—gious—

Just let the Spirit—move,—for,—you!

The only office not physically touching the others on Beaverboard Row, intentionally
set apart, is a little corrugated shack, stovepipe coming out the top, pieces of automobile
lying around rusted solid in the yard, piles of wood under rain-colored and failing
canvas, a house trailer with its tires and one wheel tilted forlorn in the spanging
of the cold rain at its weathered outsides . . .
DEVIL’S
ADVOCATE’S
what the shingle sez, yes inside is a Jesuit here to act in that capacity, here to
preach, like his colleague Teilhard de Chardin, against return. Here to say that critical
mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of control have reached a certain
size, a certain degree of
being connected
one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to
have meaning. It’s a potent case Father Rapier makes here, not without great moments
of eloquence, moments when he himself is clearly moved . . . no need even to be there,
at the office, for visitors may tune in from anywhere in the Convention to his passionate
demonstrations, which often come in the midst of celebrating what hep humorists here
are already calling “Critical Mass” (get it? not too many did in 1945, the Cosmic
Bomb was still trembling in its earliness, not yet revealed to the People, so you
heard the term only in the very superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges). “I think that there
is a terrible possibility now, in the World. We may not brush it away, we must look
at it. It is possible that They will not die. That it is now within the state of Their
art to go on forever—though we, of course, will keep dying as we always have. Death
has been the source of Their power. It was easy enough for us to see that. If we are
here once, only once, then clearly we are here to take what we can while we may. If
They have taken much more, and taken not only from Earth but also from us—well, why
begrudge Them, when they’re just as doomed to die as we are? All in the same boat,
all under the same shadow . . . yes . . . yes. But is that really true? Or is it the
best, and the most carefully propagated, of all Their lies, known and unknown?

“We have to carry on under the possibility that we die
only
because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival. We are
their harvests. . . .

“It must change radically the nature of our faith. To ask that we keep faith in Their
mortality, faith that They also cry, and have fear, and feel pain, faith They are
only pretending Death is Their servant—faith in Death as the master of us all—is to
ask for an order of courage that I know is beyond my own humanity, though I cannot
speak for others. . . . But rather than make that leap of faith, perhaps we will choose
instead to turn, to fight: to demand, from those for whom we die, our own immortality.
They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe They can still die from violence.
If not, at least we can learn to withhold from Them our fear of Death. For every kind
of vampire, there is a kind of cross. And at least the physical things They have taken,
from Earth and from us, can be dismantled, demolished—returned to where it all came
from.

“To believe that each of Them
will
personally die is also to believe that Their system will die—that some chance of
renewal, some dialectic, is still operating in History. To affirm Their mortality
is to affirm Return. I have been pointing out certain obstacles in the way of affirming
Return. . . .” It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid. Pirate and
the girl have been listening to him as they linger outside a hall Pirate would enter.
It isn’t clear if she will come in with him. No, he rather thinks not. It is exactly
the sort of room he was afraid it would be. Jagged holes in the walls, evidently where
fixtures have been removed, are roughly plastered over. The others, waiting for him
it seems, have been passing the time with games in which pain is the overt commodity,
such as Charley-Charley, Hits ’n’ Cuts, and Rock-Scissors-and-Paper. From next door
comes a sound of splashing water and all-male giggling that echoes a bit off of the
tiles. “And
now,”
a fluent wireless announcer can be heard, “it’s
time
for? Drop—The
Soap!”
Applause and shrieks of laughter, which go on for a disagreeably long time.

“Drop the Soap?” Sammy Hilbert-Spaess ambles over to the thin dividing wall, puts
his nose around the end of it to have a look.

“Noisy neighbors,” remarks German film director Gerhardt von Göll. “Doesn’t this sort
of thing ever stop?”

“Hullo, Prentice,” nods a black man Pirate doesn’t recognize, “we seem to be old school
tie.” What
is
this, who are all these— His name is St.-Just Grossout. “For most of the Duration,
the Firm had me trying to infiltrate the Schwarzkommando. I never saw anyone else
trying to. It sounds a bit paranoiac, but I think I was the only one. . . .” This
forthright breach of security, if that’s what it is, takes Pirate a little aback.