Authors: Thomas Pynchon
“Do you think you could—well, give me a sort of sitrep on all this?”
“Oh, Geoffrey. Oh, my.” Here comes Sammy Hilbert-Spaess back from watching the shower-room
frolic, shaking his head, pouched and Levantine eyes continuing to stare straight
down his nose, “Geoffrey, by the time you get
any
summary, the whole thing will have changed. We could shorten them for you as much
as you like, but you’d be losing so much resolution it wouldn’t be worth it, really
it wouldn’t. Just look
around
you, Geoffrey. Have a nice look, and see who’s here.”
Pirate is surprised to find Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck more fit than he ever looked
in his life. The man is
actively at peace
, in the way of a good samurai—each time he engages Them fully expecting to die, without
apprehension or remorse. It is an amazing change. Pirate begins to feel hope for himself.
“When did you turn?” He knows Sir Stephen won’t be offended at his asking. “How did
it happen?”
“Oh, no, don’t let
this
one fool you?” who in the world is this, with this greasy pompadour combed nearly
as high again as his face, through which shows the peened, the tenderized soul of
a fighter who’s not only taken dives, but also thought heavily about them all the
way down. It is Jeremiah (“Merciful”) Evans, the well-known political informer from
Pembroke. “No, our little Stevie’s not ready for sainthood
quite
yet, are we my fine chap?” Slapping him, playful, clubbing slaps on the cheek: “Eh?
eh? eh?”
“Not if they’ve thrown me in wiv v’ likes o’ you,” replies the knight, churlishly.
But it’s hard to say really who’s provoking whom, for Merciful Evans now bursts into
song, and a terrible singer he is, a discredit to his people, in fact—
Say a prayer for the common informer,
He came out of a quim, just like yoooou—
Yes be kind what you chortle,
For narks are as mortal
As any, Kilkenny to Kew . . .
And the next time you sigh in your comfort,
Ask yourself how he’s doing, today—
Is it worse being sold,
For those handfuls of gold,
Than to sigh all your real-life, away?
“I don’t know that I’m going to like it in here,” Pirate, an unpleasant suspicion
growing on him, looking about nervously.
“The worst part’s the shame,” Sir Stephen tells him. “Getting through that. Then your
next step—well, I talk like an old hand, but that’s really only as far as I’ve come,
up through the shame. At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill
you know, wondering if
any
action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do . . .
regardless of what I
believe
, you see . . . I’ve been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth
problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose. It’s driving me really, clinically
insane. I rather imagine that’s the whole point of it. And who knows what comes
next?
Good God. I don’t find out, of course, till I break through this one. . . . I don’t
mean to discourage you so soon—”
“No, no, I’ve been wondering something else—are all you lot my Group or something?
Have I been
assigned
here?”
“Yes. Are you beginning to see why?”
“I’m afraid I am.” With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each
other: and Pirate has always been one of them. “I’d been hoping for—oh, it’s foolish,
a bit of mercy . . . but I was at the all-night cinema, around the corner from Gallaho
Mews, the intersection with the extra street, the one you can’t always see because
it comes in at such a strange angle . . . I had a bad stretch of time to get through,
poison, metallic time . . . it smelled as sour as a burned pot . . . all I wanted
was a place to sit for a while, and they don’t care who you are really, what you eat
or how long you sleep or who—whom you get together with. . . .”
“Prentice, really it’s all right,” it’s St.-Just Grossout, whom the others call “Sam
Juiced” when they want to shout him down, during the passages in here when there is
nothing for it but a spot of rowdyism.
“I . . . just can’t . . . I mean if it is true, then,” a laugh it hurts him, deep
in his windpipe, to make, “then I defected for nothing, didn’t I? I mean, if I haven’t
really defected at all. . . .”
The word reached him during a government newsreel. FROM CLOAK-AND-DAGGER TO CROAK-AND-STAGGER,
the sequin title twinkled to all the convalescent souls gathered for another long
night of cinema without schedule—shot of a little street-crowd staring in a dusty
show-window, someplace so far into the East End that no one except those who lived
there had ever heard of it . . . bomb-tilted ballroom floor of the ruin slipping uphill
behind like a mountain meadow, but dodgy as a trampoline to walk upon, conch-twisting
stucco columns tilted inward, brass elevator cage drooping from the overhead. Right
out in front was a half-naked, verminous and hairy creature, approximately human,
terribly pale, writhing behind the crumbled remains of plate glass, tearing at sores
on his face and abdomen, drawing blood, scratching and picking with dirt-black fingernails.
“Every day in Smithfield Market, Lucifer Amp makes a spectacle of himself. That’s
not so surprising. Many a demobilized soldier and sailor has turned to public service
as a means of keeping at least body and soul together, if nothing else. What is unusual
is that Mr. Amp used to work for the
Special Operations Executive. . . .”
“It’s quite good fun, actually,” as the camera moves in for a close-up of this individual,
“only took me a week to pick up the knack of it. . . .”
“Do you feel a sense of belonging now, that you hadn’t when you came, or—have they
still not accepted you out here?”
“They—oh the people, the people have been just wonderful. Just grand. No, no problems
there
at all.”
At which point, from the bishopwise seat behind Pirate, came an alcohol smell, and
warm breath, and a pat on the shoulder. “You hear? ‘Used to work.’ That’s rich, that
is. No one has ever left the Firm alive, no one in history—and no one ever will.”
It was an upper-class accent, one Pirate might have aspired to once in his rambling
youth. By the time he decided to look back, though, his visitor was gone.
“Think of it as a handicap, Prentice, like any other, like missing a limb or having
malaria . . . one can still live . . . one learns to get round it, it becomes part
of the day—”
“Being a d—”
“It’s all right. ‘Being a—’?”
“Being a double agent? ‘Got round’?” He looks at the others, computing. Everyone here
seems to be at
least
a double agent.
“Yes . . . you’re down here now, down here with us,” whispers Sammy. “Get your shame
and your sniffles all out of the way, young fellow, because we don’t make a practice
of indulging
that
for too long.”
“It’s a
shadow,
” cries Pirate, “it’s working under a shadow, forever.”
“But think of the free-dom?” sez Merciful Evans. “I can’t even trust myself? can I.
How much freer than that can a man be? If he’s to be sold out by anyone? even by
himself
you see?”
“I don’t want that—”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dodson-Truck replies. “The Firm know perfectly well that
you’ve come here. They’ll expect a full report from you now. Either voluntary or some
other way.”
“But I wouldn’t . . . I’d never tell them—” The smiles they are putting on for him
now are deliberately cruel, to help him through it a bit. “You don’t, you really don’t
trust me?”
“Of course not,” Sammy sez. “Would you—really—trust any of us?”
“Oh, no,” Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody else’s. But
it’s still a passage They can touch quite as easily as that of any client. Without
expecting to, it seems Pirate has begun to cry. Odd. He has never cried in public
like this before. But he understands where he is, now. It will be possible, after
all, to die in obscurity, without having helped a soul: without love, despised, never
trusted, never vindicated—to stay down among the Preterite, his poor honor lost, impossible
to locate or to redeem.
He is crying for persons, places, and things left behind: for Scorpia Mossmoon, living
in St. John’s Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, a small kennel of Weimaraners whose
racial purity she will go to extravagant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who
shows up now and then, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lost
to Pirate now for good, no chance for either of them to turn again . . . for people
he had to betray in the course of business for the Firm, Englishmen and foreigners,
for Ion so naïve, for Gongylakis, for the Monkey Girl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce
who got burned . . . for nights up in partisan mountains when he was one with the
smell of living trees, in full love with the at last undeniable beauty of the night . . .
for a girl back in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who never came
to pass . . . for his dead mother, and his dying father, for the innocent and the
fools who
are
going to trust him, poor faces doomed as dogs who have watched us so amiably from
behind the wire fences at the city pounds . . . cries for the future he can see, because
it makes him feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment to high
moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test of the new Cosmic
Bomb—“Well,” a wise old face, handing him the black-lensed glasses, “there’s your
Bomb . . .” turning then to see its thick yellow exploding down the beach, across
the leagues of Pacific waves . . . touching famous assassins, yes actually touching
their human hands and faces . . . finding out one day how long ago, how early in the
game the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly when the hit will
come—every morning, before the markets open, out before the milkmen, They make Their
new update, and decide on what’s going to be sufficient unto the day. Every morning
Pirate’s name will be on a list, and one morning it will be close enough to the top.
He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks
for a minute he’ll pass out. Later, having drawn back a bit, gathering heart for the
next sortie, it seems to him he’s done with the shame, just as Sir Stephen said, yes
past the old shame and scared now, full of worry for nothing but his own ass, his
precious, condemned, personal ass. . . .
“Is there room here for the dead?” He hears the question before he can see her asking
it. He isn’t sure how she came into this room. From all the others now flow impressions
of male jealousy, a gruff sort of women-on-ships-is-bad-luck chill and withdrawal.
And here’s Pirate left alone with her and her question. He holds out to her the ball
of taffy he’s been carrying, boobish as young Porky Pig holding out the anarchist’s
ticking bomb to him. But there’s to be no sweetness. They are here instead to trade
some pain and a few truths, but all in the distracted style of the period:
“Come now,” what sort of idiotic trouble does she think she’s in now? “you’re not
dead. I’ll wager not even figuratively so.”
“I meant, would I be allowed to bring my dead in with me,” Katje explains. “They
are
my credentials, after all.”
“I rather liked Frans van der Groov. Your ancestor. The dodo chap.”
It’s not quite what she meant by her dead. “I mean the ones who owe their deadness
directly to me. Besides, if Frans were ever to walk in here you’d only stand around,
all of you, making sure he understood just how guilty he was. The poor man’s world
held an inexhaustible supply of dodoes—why teach him about genocide?”
“
You
could tell him a thing or two about
that
, couldn’t you, girly?” sneers Evans, the tone-deaf Welsh stoolie.
Pirate is moving against Evans, forearms out from his sides saloon-fighter-style,
when Sir Stephen intervenes: “There’ll be talk like this all the time, Prentice, we’re
a case-hardened lot. You’d better start learning to make it work
for
you here. No telling how long we’re in for, is there? The young woman has grown herself
all the protection she needs, it seems to me. She doesn’t want you to fight for her.”
Well, he’s right. She’s put her warm hand on Pirate’s arm, shaking her head twice
with embarrassed small laughs, “I’m glad to see you anyway, Captain Prentice.”
“No one else is. Think about it.”
She only raises her eyebrows. It
was
a shitty thing to say. Remorse, or some late desire to be pure, rush into his blood
like dope.
“But—” astonished to feel himself beginning to
collapse
, like a stack of rifles, around her feet, caught in her gravitation, distances abolished,
waveforms unmeasurable, “Katje . . .
if I could never betray you—
”
He has fallen: she has lost her surface. She is staring at him amazed.
“Even if the price for that were . . . betraying others, hurting . . . or killing
others—then it wouldn’t matter who, or how many, no, not if I could be your safety,
Katje, your perfect—”
“But those, those are the sins that might never happen.” Here they are bargaining
like a couple of pimps. Do they have any idea what they sound like? “
That’s
easy enough to pledge, doesn’t cost you a thing.”
“Then even the sins I did commit,” he protests, “yes I’d do
them
over—”
“But you can’t do that, either—so you get off just as cheap. Hm?”
“I can repeat patterns,” more grim than she really wants him to be.
“Oh, think . . .” her fingers are lightly in his hair, “
think
of the things you’ve done. Think of all your ‘credentials,’ and all of mine—”
“But that’s the only medium we’ve
got
now,” he cries, “our gift for bad faith. We’ll have to build everything with it . . .
deal it, as the prosecutors deal you your freedom.”