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ALSO BY

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ALSO BY THOMAS PYNCHON

v.

The Crying of Lot 49



 



THOMAS PYNCHON
The Vikirefj Press

New York



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for Richard Farina

D D D D D D D

Copyright © 1973 by Thomas Pynchon
All rights reserved
First published in 1973 in a hardbound and paperbound edition by
The Viking Press, Inc" 625 Madison Avenue
New York, NY. 10022
Published simultaneously in Canada by
The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited
SBN 670-34832-5 (hardbound)

670-00374-3 (paperbound)
Library of Congress catalog card number: 72-83804
Printed in U.S,A, by the Colonial Press Inc,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Harvard University Press: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and
the Trustees of Amherst College from Thomas H. Johnson, Editor, The Poems
of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Copyright 195], 1955, by The President and Fellows of
Harvard College.

Little, Brown and Company: From "Because I Could Not Stop for
Death" from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson edited by Thomas
H. Johnson.

W, W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Insel Verlag: From Duino Elegies
and Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke.



Beyond the Zero

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transfor­

mation. Everything science has taught me, and continues
to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of
our spiritual existence after death.

-WERNHER VON BRAUN



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A)creami
noiliing to

!tis too

arena Iigh
old as an ir

ll�llt of daX
I�-soon­

in�down i
olecrashinr

Inside t
een darkn
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to anyone,
tOlalvatio
half')llvere
bered behi

They hal
outoldo�
oillie

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meRllromlsecretentr
de�ass , ,
overhead, I

1 of naphtha
coral·hke aC
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rust, devell
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events to A
inous seen
ilie waUs I

hght. The



o 0 DOD 0 0

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before,
but there is

nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There

are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above
him lift girders

old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that
would let the

light of day through. But it's night. He's
afraid of the way the glass will

fall-soon-it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But com­

ing down in total blackout, without
one glint of light, only great invisi­

ble crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels,

he sits in velvet­

een darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer
and farther

rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's

frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the
others pressed in around, feeble

ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks,
old veterans still in

shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers
in city clothes, dere­

licts, exhausted women with more children
than it seems could belong

to anyone, stacked about among
the rest of the things to be carried out

to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all,
and at that only as

half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained
VIP faces remem­

bered behind bulletproof windows speeding through
the city. . . .

They have begun to move. They pass
in line, out of the main station,

out of downtown, and begin pushing into older and more
desolate parts

of the city. Is this the way out?
Faces turn to the windows, but no one

dares ask, not out loud. Rain comes down. No,
this is not a disentangle­

ment from, but a progressive knotting into-they go
in under archways,

secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops
of an un­

derpass . . . certain trestles of
blackened wood have moved slowly by

overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days
far to the past, smells

of naphtha winters, of Sundays
when no traffic came through, of the

coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the
blind curves and

out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock
absence, of maturing

rust, developing through those emptying days
brilliant and deep, espe­

cially at dawn, with blue
shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring.

events to Absolute Zero ... and it is poorer
the deeper they go ru-

inous secret cities of poor, places whose names he has
never heard .

the walls break down, the roofs get fewer
and so do the chances for

light. The road, which ought to
be opening out into a broader highway,

3



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instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and
tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the final arch:
brakes grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no
appeal.

The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are
ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those mar­
shaling them wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is
some vast, very old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and
switchery by which they have come here. . . . Globular lights, painted
a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron eaves, unlit for centuries
. . . the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors
straight and functional as warehouse aisles ... velvet black surfaces
contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty
all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold
plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave­
painting, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls . . . the evacuees are
taken in lots, by elevator-a moving wood scaffold open on all sides,
hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped
like Ss. At each brown floor, passengers move on and off ... thousands
of these hushed rooms without light. . . .

Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisi­
ble, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Under­
foot crunches the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city
had denied, threatened, lied to its children. Each has been hearing a
voice, one he thought was talking only to him, say, "You didn't really
believe you'd be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one
was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow....

"

There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screamingholds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it
bring its own light? Will the light come before or after?

But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, lighthas come percolating in, along with the cold morning air flowing now
across his nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken
wastrels, some in uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-emptybottles, here draped over a chair, there huddled into a cold fireplace, or
sprawled on various divans, un-Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down
the different levels of the enormous room, snoring and wheezing at
many rhythms, in self-renewing chorus, as London light, winter and
elastic light, grows between the faces of the mullioned windows, grows
among the strata of last night's smoke still hung, fading, from the waxed
beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal here, these comrades in arms,

look ju
resurre

His n

tnick bla
of metal

Just a
ofthemi
somebod]
ebony b

opening,
an empt
now-

By no
olink abo
cloth rip,
sponses,
Bloat's d'
strum of
Pirate, B

Pirate's B
Bloat i

century,
acquaint�
vatepha
has latel

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an�thing
spair by
on the r
Fort-La
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sian by

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right ho

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tighter ane
e final arc1,
'n thereisnt

e evacuees atl
'e. Tbose m�

ot peak]!,
[ the track aJI(
T llcrht

I �ain\�
r�t for centuri�

down corriQo�
bhckllirfacf

look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of
their certain

resurrection in the next few minutes.

His name is Capt. Geoffrey ("Pirate") Prentice. He is wrapped in a
thick blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made

of metal.

Just above him, twelve feet overhead, Teddy Bloat is about
to fall out

of the minstrels' gallery, having chosen to collapse just at the spot where

somebody in a grandiose fit, weeks before, had kicked out two
of the

ebony balusters. Now, in his stupor, Bloat has been inching through
the q

opening, head, arms, and torso, until all that's keeping
him up there is I (J

an empty champagne split in his hip pocket, that's got hooked
some- (t

how- I'l_

By now Pirate has managed to sit up on his narrow
bachelor bed, and { ?

blink about. How awful. How bloody awful . . . above him, he hears ,,,

cloth rip. The Special Operations Executive has
trained him to fast re- 0-"

sponses. He leaps off of the cot and kicks it rolling
on its casters in (t

Bloat's direction. Bloat, plummeting, hits square amidships with a great (1

strum of bedsprings. One of the legs collapses. "Good morning,"
notes I k

Pirate. Bloat smiles briefly and goes back to sleep, snuggling well into '1
Pirate's blanket. Lo

Bloat is one of the co-tenants of the place, a maisonette erected last 2(

century, not far from the Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Throsp,
an 2l

acquaintance of the Rossettis' who wore
hair smocks and liked to culti- 2.3

vate pharmaceutical plants up on the roof (a tradition young
Osbie Feel Z'1

has lately revived), a few of them hardy enough
to survive fogs and 21'

frosts, but most returning, as fragments of peculiar alkaloids,
to rooftop 2.<­

earth, along with manure from a trio of prize
Wessex Saddleback sows �7

quartered there by Throsp's successor, and dead
leaves off many deco- 2,r

rative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and the
odd un- <--1

stomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive epi- 30
curean-all got scumbled together, eventually, by

the knives of the sea- 3 (

sons, to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable
black topsoil in which s�

anything could grow, not the least being
bananas. Pirate, driven to de- n

spair by the wartime banana shortage,
decided to build a glass hothouse 3>"

on the roof, and persuade a friend who flew the
Rio-to-Ascension-to- S3

Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling banana
tree or two, in exchange 3�

for a German camera, should Pirate happen across one on his
next mis- '] 7

sion by parachute.
S�

Pirate has become famous for his Banana
Breakfasts. Messmates 3�

�6

'-r)throng
here from all over England, even some who are allergic or

out­

right hostile to bananas, just to
watch-for the politics of bacteria, the

5



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soil's stringing of rings and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes
of, have seen the fruit thrive often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes
amazing but true.

Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing, without a thought in his head.
Then he threads himself into a wool robe he wears inside out so as to

keep his cigarette pocket hidden, not that this works too well, and cir­
cling the warm bodies of friends makes his way to French windows,
slides outside into the cold, groans as it hits the fillings in his teeth,
climbs a spiral ladder ringing to the roof garden and stands for a bit,
watching the river. The sun is still below the horizon. The day feels like
rain, but for now the air is uncommonly clear. The great power station,
and the gasworks beyond, stand precisely: crystals grown in morning's
beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and
smoke....

"Hhahh," Pirate in a voiceless roar watching his breath slip away
over the parapets, "hhaahhh!" Rooftops dance in the morning. His giant
bananas cluster, radiant yellow, humid green. His companions below
dream drooling of a Banana Breakfast. This well-scrubbed day ought to
be no worse than any-

Will it? Far to the east, down in the pink sky, something has just
sparked, very brightly. A new star, nothing less noticeable. He leans on
the parapet to watch. The brilliant point has already become a short
vertical white line. It must be somewhere out over the North Sea . . . at
least that far . . . icefields below and a cold smear of sun. . . .

What is it? Nothing like this ever happens. But Pirate knows it, after
all. He has seen it in a film, just in the last fortnight . . . it's a vapor
trail. Already a finger's width higher now. But not from an airplane. Air­
planes are not launched vertically. This is the new, and still Most Se­
cret, German rocket bomb.

"Incoming mail." Did he whisper that, or only think it? He tightens
the ragged belt of his robe. Well, the range of these things is supposed
to be over zoo miles. You can't see a vapor trail zoo miles, now, can you.

Oh. Oh, yes: around the curve of the Earth, farther east, the sun over
there, just risen over in Holland, is striking the rocket's exhaust, drops
and crystals, making them blaze clear across the sea. . . .

The white line, abruptly, has stopped its climb. That would be fuel
cutoff, end of burning, what's their word ... Brennschluss. We don't
have one. Or else it's classified. The bottom of the line, the original star,
has already begun to vanish in red daybreak. But the rocket will be here
before Pirate sees the sun rise.

The trail, smudged, slightly torn in two or three directions, hangs in
6

ilie sk)
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at Stan

ally, L
down t

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others?

pick
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Pirate

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count 0

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e meshes
balf, yes

the sky. Already the rocket, gone pure ballistic, has risen higher.
But in­

visible now.

Oughtn't he to be doing something . . . get on to the operations
room

at Stanmore, they must have it on the Channel radars-no: no time, re­

ally. Less than five minutes Hague to here (the time it
takes to walk

down to the teashop on the corner . . . for light from the sun to reach
the planet of love ... no time at all). Run out in the street?

Warn the

others?
Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in to the hothouse.

He feels he's about to shit. The missile, sixty miles high, must be coming

up on the peak of its trajectory by now . . . beginning
its fall . . .

now....

Trusswork is pierced by daylight, milky panes beam beneficently
down. How could there be a winter-even this one-gray enough to

age this iron that can sing in the wind, or
cloud these windows that

open into another season,
however falsely preserved?

Pirate looks at his watch. Nothing registers. The pores of his face are

prickling. Emptying his mind-a Commando
trick-he steps into the

wet heat of his bananery, sets about picking the ripest and the best,

holding up the skirt of his robe to drop them
in. Allowing himself to

count only bananas, moving barelegged among the pendulous bunches,

among these yellow chandeliers, this tropical twilight
....

Out into the winter again. The contrail is gone entirely from the sky.
Pirate's sweat lies on his skin almost as cold as ice.

He takes some time lighting a cigarette. He won't hear the thing
come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get
of it is the blast. Then, if you're still around, you hear the sound of it

coming in.
What if it should hit exactly-ahh, no--for a split second you'd have

to feel the very point, with the terrible mass above,
strike the top of the

skull....
Pirate hunches his shoulders, bearing his bananas down the cork­

screw ladder.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

Across a blue tile patio, in through a door to the kitchen.
Routine: plug

in American blending machine won from Yank last summer,
some poker

game, table stakes, B.O.Q.
somewhere in the north, never remember

now. . . . Chop several bananas into pieces. Make
coffee in urn. Get

7



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can of milk from cooler. Puree 'nanas in milk. Lovely. I uxnild coat all
the booze-corroded stomachs of England. . . . Bit of marge, still smells
all right, melt in skillet. Peel more bananas, slice lengthwise. Marge siz­
zling, in go long slices. Light oven whoomp blow us all up someday oh,
ha, ha, yes. Peeled whole bananas to go on broiler grill soon as it heats.
Find marshmallows....

In staggers Teddy Bloat with Pirate's blanket over his head, slips on a
banana peel and falls on his ass. "Kill myself," he mumbles.

"The Germans will do it for you. Guess what I saw from the roof."
"That V-2 on the way?"
«A4, yes."
"I watched it out the window. About ten minutes ago. Looked queer,

didn't it. Haven't heard a thing since, have you. It must have fallen
short. Out to sea or something."

"Ten minutes?" Trying to read the time on his watch.
"At least." Bloat is sitting on the floor, working the banana peel into a

pajama lapel for a boutonniere.
Pirate goes to the phone and rings up Stanmore after all. Has to go

through the usual long, long routine, but knows he's already stopped be­
lieving in the rocket he saw. God has plucked it for him, out of its airless
sky, like a steel banana. "Prentice here, did you have anything like a pip
from Holland a moment ago. Aha. Aha. Yes, we saw it." This could ruin
a man's taste for sunrises. He rings off. "They lost it over the coast.
They're calling it premature Brennschluss."

"Cheer up," Teddy crawling back toward the busted cot. "There'll
be more."

Good old Bloat, always the positive word. Pirate for a few seconds
there, waiting to talk to Stanmore, was thinking, Danger's over, Banana
Breakfast is saved. But it's only a reprieve. Isn't it. There will indeed be
others, each just as likely to land on top of him. Noone either side of the
front knows exactly how many more. Will we have to stop watching the
sky?

Osbie Feel stands in the minstrels' gallery, holding one of the biggestof Pirate's bananas so that it protrudes out the fly of his striped pajama
bottoms-stroking with his other hand the great jaundiced curve in tri­
plets against 4/4 toward the ceiling, he acknowledges dawn with the
following:

Time to gather your arse up off the floor,
(have a bana-na)

Brush your teeth and go toddling off to war.
8

The
Osbie
stout u

("Saxo:
marshn
soon be

ingly tl
which,

nervou

batter

winter

orously
quentl
the bal
DeCo
the Ju
painsta
large t
with r

mirror

hairl S



coat all
\\ smells

m the roof,"

Wave your hand to sleepy land,
Kiss those dreams away,
Tell Miss Grable you're not able,
Not till V-E Day, oh,
Ev'rything'll be grand in Civvie Street

(have a bana-na)
Bubbly wine and girls wiv lips so sweet­
But there's still the German or two to fight,
So show us a smile that's shiny bright.'
And then, as we may have suggested once before­
Gather yer blooming arse up off the floor!

There's a second verse, but before he can get quite into it, prancing
Osbie is leaped upon and thoroughly pummeled, in part

with his own

stout banana, by Bartley Gobbitch, DeCoverley Pox, and
Maurice

("Saxophone") Reed, among others. In the kitchen,
black-market

marshmallows slide languid into syrup atop Pirate's double boiler,
and

soon begin thickly to bubble. Coffee brews. On a
wooden pub sign dar­

ingly taken, one daylight raid, by a drunken Bartley Gobbitch,
across

which still survives in intaglio the legend SNIPE AND SHAFT, Teddy
Bloat

is mincing bananas with a great isosceles knife,
from beneath whose

nervous blade Pirate with one hand shovels the blonde mash
into waffle

batter resilient with fresh hens' eggs, for which Osbie
Feel has ex­

changed an equal number of golf balls, these being
even rarer this

winter than real eggs, other hand blending the fruit in, not overvig­

orously, with a wire whisk, whilst surly Osbie himself, sucking
fre­

quently at a half-pint milk bottle filled with
Vat 69 and water, tends to

the bananas in the skillet and broiler. Near the exit
to the blue patio,

DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a
concrete scale model of

the Jungfrau, which some enthusiast back during
the twenties spent a

painstaking year modeling and casting
before finding out it was too

large to get out of any door, socking the slopes
of the famous mountain

with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pul­
verize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of

beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata
of foul breath, DeCover­

ley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging
on a tardy glacier.

Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle
from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss
into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving

mirrors, slap water with no clear plan in mind
onto heads of thinning

hair, strllggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against
rain later in the day

9



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with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs
whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed,
in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin
tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have
to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their
noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not with­
out provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old
smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:
flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight,
taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by
the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's
secret by which-though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck
off-the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to pre­
serve some human face down ten or twenty generations ... so the
same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fra­
grance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open
every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell,
against falling objects. . . .

With a clattering of chairs, upended shell cases, benches, and otto­
mans, Pirate's mob gather at the shores of the great refectory table, a
southern island well across a tropic or two from chill Corydon Throsp's
mediaeval fantasies, crowded now over the swirling dark grain of its
walnut uplands with banana omelets, banana sandwiches, banana casse­
roles, mashed bananas molded in the shape of a British lion rampant,
blended with eggs into batter for French toast, squeezed out a pastry
nozzle across the quivering creamy reaches of a banana blancmange to
spell out the words C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre (attrib­
uted to a French observer during the Charge of the Light Brigade)
which Pirate has appropriated as his motto ... tall cruets of pale ba­
nana syrup to pour oozing over banana wafHes, a giant glazed crock
where diced bananas have been fermenting since the summer with wild
honey and muscat raisins, up out of which, this winter morning, one
now dips foam mugsfull of banana mead . . . banana croissants and ba­
nana kreplach, and banana oatmeal and banana jam and banana bread,
and bananas flamed in ancient brandy Pirate brought back last year
from a cellar in the Pyrenees also containing a clandestine radio trans­
mitter ...

The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hang- I
overs, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter
chuckles, like a rude metal double-tart, and Pirate knows it's got to be

, l

10

for him.

fashionaB
valving d

swallows.
"Your e

"It's no

ups yet."
The voi

hands and
tells Pirate
wich.

"Iteam

Do come

whack, co
rocket lana
He gazes
others, wal

hunger 10
himself. A
meshes of

touch, as n
watching

He's dri

Lagonda 0
colder the
of America

nearby,5i

�o, the
lasi, of COl
him-they
the� know
heh, here
least expe

,

«
--

'q!�� .• :�.",a.�,,-;., '''i''''''''-�'�'''--''-'''''''�.�'' .. ��., •.• ,.;., " •. ;'"j�<�t; '-�." •• �' -,,�.. •
---.

-

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, -:::;:;-�------:---



for him. Bloat, who's nearest, takes it, forkful of bananes glacees poised
fashionably in the air. Pirate takes up a last dipper of mead, feels it go
valving down his throat as if it's time, time in its summer tranquility,

he

swallows.
"Your employer."
"It's not fair," Pirate moans, "I haven't even done me morning push­

ups yet."
The voice, which he's heard only once before-last year at a briefing,

hands and face blackened, anonymous among a dozen other listeners­

tells Pirate now there's a message addressed to him, waiting at Green­

wich.

"It came over in a rather delightful way," the voice high-pitched and
. sullen, "none of my friends are that clever. All my mail arrives by post.

Do come collect it, won't you, Prentice." Receiver hits cradle a
violent

whack, connection breaks, and now Pirate knows where this morning's
rocket landed, and why there was no explosion. Incoming mail, indeed.
He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory

at the

others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of
their

hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning
between them and

himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the

meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and

touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window,

watching strangers eat breakfast.
He's driven out, away, east over Vauxhall Bridge in a dented green

Lagonda by his batman, a Corporal Wayne. The morning
seems to grow

colder the higher the sun rises. Clouds begin to gather after all.
A crew

of American sappers spills into the road, on route to clear some
ruin

nearby, singing:

It's
Colder than the nipple on a witch's tit!
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!
Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!

No, they are making believe to be narodnik, but
I know, they are of

Iasi, of Codreanu, his men, men of the League, they . . . they
kill for

him-they have oath! They try to kill me . . . Transylvanian Magyars,

they know spells . . . at night they whisper.
. . . Well, hrrump, heh,

heh, here comes Pirate's Condition creeping
over him again, when he's

least expecting it as usual-might as well
mention here that much of

1 1



,t

what the dossiers call Pirate Prentice is a strange talent for-well, for
getting inside the fantasies of others: being able, actually, to take over
the burden of managing them, in this case those of an exiled Rumanian
royalist who may prove needed in the very near future. It is a gift the
Firm has found uncommonly useful: at this time mentally healthy lead­
ers and other historical figures are indispensable. What better way to
cup and bleed them of excess anxiety than to get someone to take over
the running of their exhausting little daydreams for them . . . to live in
the tame green lights of their tropical refuges, in the breezes through
their cabanas, to drink their tall drinks, changing your seat to face the
entrances of their public places, not letting their innocence suffer any
more than it already has . . . to get their erections for them, at the
oncome of thoughts the doctors feel are inappropriate . . . fear all, all
that they cannot afford to fear ... remembering the words of
P. M. S. Blackett, "You can't run a war on gusts of emotion." Just hum
the nitwit little tune they taught you, and try not to fuck up:

now, no

words, rno
usual list o�
someindoo)
that well

'jwill call aIt took c
timewouldl
wllOmitm1
Eu�ene Su1
zation of d�In 1935 �
-it was d�
could see �
no Deer fOI
would be m
lore oroken
meoicinein
Creasy �OSI
heard, , ,
eyea, in the
repetition 01
playing on
velop for p:

went, th

aid point
that cert

through a
knew, BLI

owner of

park, aver
scaped rim
soft to slee]
and drooH
and watch
fountain,
of white c

tle buttOCK

laughed an
extraordina
will be the

Yes-I'm-the-
Fellow that's hav-ing other peop-le's fan-tasies,
Suffering what they ought to be themselves­
No matter if Cirly's on my knee-
If Kruppingham-Jones is late to tea,
I don't even get to ask for whom the bell's

[Now over a lotta tubas and close-harmony trombones]
It never does seem to mat-ter if there's daaaanger,
For Danger's a roof I fell from long ago-
I'll be out-one-day and never come back,
Forget the bitter you owe me, Jack,
Just piss on m' grave and car-ry on the show!

He will then actually skip to and fro, with his knees high and twirling
a walking stick with W. C. Fields' head, nose, top hat, and all, for its
knob, and surely capable of magic, while the band plays a second cho­
rus. Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real one, rushing toward
the screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an ele­
gant Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight con­
ceived fancifully but not vulgarly so-then rushing back out again, in
and out, the images often changing scale so quickly, so unpredictably
that you're apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green in with your
rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate's career as a fan­
tasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he

12



well) fo
taKe ow
l\\1manllli

\ a giht1
ea\tbyh
etter \Va)'1

e to takeolt
, , ,tolilt
eC'l.e thro�,
at to face 1

went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongol­
oid point, right out of the middle of his head. He had known for a while
that certain episodes he dreamed could not be his own. This wasn't

through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but just because he
knew. But then came the day when he met, for the first time, the real
owner of a dream he, Pirate, had had: it was by a drinking fountain in a

park, a very long, neat row of benches, a feeling of sea just over a land­

scaped rim of small cypresses, gray crushed stone on the walks looking
soft to sleep on as the brim of a fedora, and here comes this buttonless
and drooling derelict, the one you are afraid of ever meeting, to pause
and watch two Girl Guides trying to adjust the water pressure of the
fountain. They bent over, unaware, the saucy darlings, of the fatal strips
of white cotton knickers thus displayed, the undercurves of baby-fat lit­
tle buttocks a blow to the Genital Brain, however pixilated. The tramp
laughed and pointed, he looked back at Pirate then and said something
extraordinary: "Eh? Girl Guides start pumping water ... your

sound

will be the sizzling night . . . eh?" staring directly at no one but Pirate

now, no more pretense.... Well, Pirate had dreamed
these very

words, morning before last, just before waking, they'd been part
of the

usual list of prizes in a Competition grown crowded and perilous, out
of

some indoor intervention of charcoal streets ... he couldn't remember

that well ... scared out of his wits by now, he replied, "Go away, or I
will call a policeman."

It took care of the immediate problem for him. But sooner or later the
time would come when someone else would find out his gift, someone to
whom it mattered-he had a long-running fantasy of his own, rather a

Eugene Sue melodrama, in which he would be
abducted by an organi­

zation of dacoits or Sicilians, and used for unspeakable purposes.
In 1935 he had his first episode outside any condition of known sleep

-it was during his Kipling Period, beastly Fuzzy-Wuzzies
far as eye

could see, dracunculiasis and Oriental sore rampant among
the troops,

no beer for a month, wireless being jammed by other Powers who
would be masters of these horrid blacks, God knows why, and all folk­

lore broken down, no Cary Grant larking in and out slipping elephant
medicine in the punchbowls out here ... not even an Arab With

A Big

Greasy Nose to perform on, as in that wistful
classic every tommy's

heard ... small wonder that one fly-blown four in the afternoon, open­

eyed, in the smell of rotting melon rinds, to the seventy-seven-millionth
repetition of the outpost's only Gramophone record, Sandy

MacPherson

playing on his organ "The Changing of the Guard,"
what should de­

velop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode: vaulting lazily

13



and �ell over the fence and sneaking in to town, to the Forbidden
Quarter. There to stumble into an orgy held by a Messiah no one has
quite recognized yet, and to know, as your eyes meet, that you are his
John the Baptist, his Nathan of Gaza, that it is you who must convince
him of his Godhead, proclaim him to others, love him both profanely
and in the Name of what he is ... it could be no one's fantasy but
H. A. Loaf's. There is at least one Loaf in every outfit, it is Loaf who
keeps forgetting that those of the Moslem faith are not keen on having Choru
snaps taken of them in the street . . . it is Loaf who borrows one's shirt and jac
runs out of cigarettes finds the illicit one in your pocket and lights up in Blather
the canteen at high noon, where presently he is reeling about with a nOld, so
loose smile, addressing the sergeant commanding the red-cap section by wardla
his Christian name. So of course when Pirate makes the mistake of ver- square
ifying the fantasy with Loaf, it's not very long at all before higher eche- 01 the j
Ions know about it too. Into the dossier it goes, and eventually the Firm, Ing up j
in Their tireless search for negotiable skills, will summon him under It'S cho
Whitehall, to observe him in his trances across the blue baize fields and tlon, a
the terrible paper gaming, his eyes rolled back into his head reading old, Office'
glyptic old graffiti on his own sockets. . . . knows

The first few times nothing clicked. The fantasies were O.K. but be- don, bl
longed to nobody important. But the Firm is patient, committed to the bridges
Long Run as They are. At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London stead H
evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate from a dark street "Any so
lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialized a giant, organlike form. dousno
Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It no, , ,
began to slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a the tra
snail, leaving behind some slime brightness of street-wake that could Teams
not have been from fog. In the space between them was a crossover wlthhu
point, which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled back, in olgaughorror, back past the point-but such recognitions are not reversible. It full of
was a giant Adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul's, and growing hour byhour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!

This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharnyxof Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the N ovi Pazar
desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous centuryof British policy on the Eastern Question, for on this obscure sanjak had
once hinged the entire fate of Europe:

Nobody knows-where, it is-on-the-map,
Who'd ever think-it, could start-such-a-flap?
Each Montenegran, and Serbian too,

14



Forbidde,
no one ha

t you are h

I',hed pharn,r
r \ovi Paz�

"rJOllS centu�
Ire anjak ha�

Waitin' for some-thing, right outa the blue-oh honey
Pack up my Glad-stone, 'n' brush off my suit,
And then light me up my bigfat, cigar-
If ya want my address, it's
That O-ri-ent Express,
To the san-jak of No-vi Pa-zar!

Chorus line of quite nubile young women naughtily attired in Busbies
and jackboots dance around for a bit here while in another quarter Lord
Blatherard Osmo proceeds to get assimilated by his own growing Ade­
noid, some horrible transformation of cell plasma it is quite beyond Ed­
wardian medicine to explain . . . before long, tophats are littering the

squares of Mayfair, cheap perfume hanging ownerless in the pub lights
of the East End as the Adenoid continues on its rampage, not swallow­

ing up its victims at random, no, the fiendish Adenoid has a master plan,
it's choosing only certain personalities useful to it-there is a new elec­

tion, a new preterition abroad in England here that throws the Home
Office into hysterical and painful episodes of indecision . . . no one
knows what to do ... a halfhearted attempt is made to evacuate Lon­

don, black phaetons clatter in massive ant-cortege over the trusswork

bridges, observer balloons are stationed in the sky, "Got it in Hamp­
stead Heath, just sitting breathing, like . . . going in, and out . . ."

"Any sort of sound down there?" "Yes, it's horrible . . . like a stupen­
dous nose sucking in snot . . . wait, now it's . . . beginning to . . . oh,
no ... oh, God, I can't describe it, it's so beast-" the wire is snapped,
the transmission ends, the balloon rises into the teal-blue daybreak.
Teams come down from the Cavendish Laboratory, to string the Heath
with huge magnets, electric-arc terminals, black iron control panels

full

of gauges and cranks, the Army shows up in full battle gear
with bombs

full of the latest deadly gas-the Adenoid is blasted, electric-shocked,

poisoned, changes color and shape here and there, yellow
fat-nodes ap­

pear high over the trees ... before the flash-powder cameras
of the

Press, a hideous green pseudopod crawls toward the cordon of troops
and suddenly sshhlop! wipes out an entire observation post with

a del­

uge of some disgusting orange mucus in which
the unfortunate men are

digested-not screaming but actually laughing, enjoying
them­

selves....

Pirate /Osmo's mission is to establish liaison with the Adenoid.
The

situation is now stable, the Adenoid occupies all of St. James's, the his­

toric buildings are no more, Government offices have
been relocated,

but so dispersed that communication among them is highly
uncertain-

15



postmen are being snatched off of their rounds by stiff-pimpled Adenoid
tentacles of fluorescent beige, telegraph wires are apt to go down at any
whim of the Adenoid. Each morning Lord Blatherard Osmo must put
on his bowler, and take his briefcase out to the Adenoid to make his
daily demarche. It is taking up so much of his time he's begun to neglect
Novi Pazar, and F.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power think­
ing was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis,
spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Otto­
man rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tat­
tooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mus­
taches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then
grafted over the messages by the Firms' plastic surgeons' . . . their lips
were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by
which they all knew each other.

Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a croix mystique on the palm of Eu­
rope, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm
knew just the man.

Every day, for 2% years, Pirate went out to visit the St. James Ade­
noid. It nearly drove him crazy. Though he was able to develop a pidgin
by which he and the Adenoid could communicate, unfortunately he
wasn't nasally equipped to make the sounds too well, and it got to be an
awful chore. As the two of them snuffled back and forth, alienists in
black seven-button suits, admirers of Dr. Freud the Adenoid dearly had
no use for, stood on stepladders up against its loathsome grayish flank
shoveling the new wonderdrug cocaine-bringing hods full of the white
substance, in relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing gland­
creature, and into the germ toxins bubbling nastily inside its crypts,
with no visible effects at all (though who knows how that Adenoid felt,
eh?).

But Lord Blatherard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to
Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in
a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess.
Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World
War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from N ovi Pazar. Pirate
Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men
dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its grandeur-though not from
World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowmg Pirate only
tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up,
but not enough for it to poison him.

16

Tedd

�aroo
midgel
capsic
Gener
the fla

him al

His

neithe

just 0
routes

pause
can bo

Street,
the girl

Flag
starve

crats alabout
which

Isandba
gods' 0
throug�
will, yo

Girljwaves
W.C,s,
he's a

they, tf
The

ACHT1

many,l
its blac
are no

looks II
("Tant



D D D D D D D

Teddy Bloat's on his lunch hour, but lunch today'll be, ack, a soggy ba­
nana sandwich in wax paper, which he's packing inside his stylish kan­

garoohide musette bag and threaded around the odd necessities­

midget spy-camera, jar of mustache wax, tin of licorice, menthol and

capsicum Meloids for a Mellow Voice, gold-rim prescription sunglasses
General MacArthur style, twin silver hairbrushes each in the shape of
the flaming SHAEF sword, which Mother had Garrard's make up for
him and which he considers exquisite.

His objective this dripping winter noon is a gray stone town house,
neither large nor historic enough to figure in any guidebook, set back

just out of sight of Grosvenor Square, somewhat off the
official war­

routes and corridors about the capital. When the typewriters happen to

pause (8:20 and other mythical hours), and there are no flights of
Ameri­

can bombers in the sky, and the motor traffic's not too heavy in Oxford

Street, you can hear winter birds cheeping outside, busy at the
feeders

the girls have put up.
Flagstones are slippery with mist. It is the dark, hard,

tobacco­

starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureau­
crats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it, many
about now are already into the second or third pint or highball glass,
which produces a certain desperate aura here. But Bloat, going

in the

sandbagged entrance (provisional pyramids erected to gratify
curious

gods' offspring indeed), can't feel a bit of it: he's
too busy running

through plausible excuses should he happen to get caught,
not that he

will, you know. . . .
Girl at the main desk, gumpopping, good-natured bespectacled ATS,

waves him on upstairs. Damp woolen aides on the way to staff meetings,
W.C.s, an hour or two of earnest drinking, nod, not really seeing him,
he's a well-known face, what's'isnames mate, Oxford chums aren't

they, that lieutenant works down the hall at
ACHTUNG. . . .

The old house has been subdivided by the slummakers of war.

ACHTUNG is Allied Clearing House, Technical Units, Northern Ger­

many. It's a stale-smoke paper warren,
at the moment nearly deserted,

its black typewriters tall as grave markers. The floor
is filthy lino, there

are no windows: the electric light is yellow, cheap, merciless. Bloat

looks into the office assigned to his old Jesus College friend, Lt. Oliver

C'Tantivy") Mucker-Maffick. No one's about. Tantivy
and the Yank are

1 7



---

��������+·"'::I�;·��J,;,��b��P.HfiW#IJJ�f�ft1',,:��.:'"!:!,·_·.\��. ..;.":.,, :--::. >:.�: ,)"�.,...,,j.< �.... �.

both at lunch. Good. Out wiv the old camera then, on with the goose­
neck lamp, now aim the reflector just so . . .

There must be cubicles like this all over the ETO: only the three
dingy scuffed-cream fiberboard walls and no ceiling of its own. Tantivy
shares it with an American colleague, Lt. Tyrone Slothrop. Their desks
are at right angles, so there's no eye contact but by squeaking around
some 90°. Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't
been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have
fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts
steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls
of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of
sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris
picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste,
broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips,
Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs,
stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including
the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons,
Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nal­
line, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . .
above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books,
phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper,
the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny
Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather
snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "he's a sort of American
George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided
he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to dif­
ferent jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of a Weimar­
aner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant
cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in
the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up
girl . . . a few old Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted
corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many col­
ors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slo­
throp now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of
reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall-a
dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town
Plan-and usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of
the World somewhere too-Slothrop's a faithful reader.

Tacked to the wall next to Slothrop's desk is a map of London, which
Bloat is now busy photographing with his tiny camera. The musette bag
is open, and the cubicle begins to fill with the smell of ripe bananas.

18

knoW S

click,
simply
telltale

Too �

lllm,BI
no one l

available
constell
strays Al

through
Garden,
bleyand
multicolj
Annes, S

But p
are not

Know he

onlyabl
about tn
ACHTU

death, t�
paper st,
to be fo
and tha�
ofharml
track of

upon go
constabl

involvin,
Preston

providen
Bloat reI

WelL

perhaps1for a cothe \Yea
Bloat u
nais d



e goose-

bananas.

Should he light a fag to cover this? air doesn't exactly
stir in here, they'll

know someone's been in. It takes him four exposures,
click zippety

click, my how very efficient at this he's become-anyone nips
in one

simply drops camera into bag where
banana-sandwich cushions fall,

telltale sound and harmful G-Ioads alike.

Too bad whoever's funding this little caper won't spring for
color

film. Bloat wonders if it mightn't make a difference, though he knows
of

no one he can ask. The stars pasted up on Slothrop's map cover
the

available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled "Darlene") sharing
a

constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as
the eye

strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys-mostly
red and blue

through here-a cluster near Tower Hill, a
violet density about Covent

Garden, a nebular streaming on into Mayfair, Soho,
and out to Wem­

bley and up to Hampstead Heath-in every
direction goes this glossy,

multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Carolines, Marias,

Annes, Susans, Elizabeths.

But perhaps the colors are only random,
uncoded. Perhaps the girls

are not even real. From Tantivy, over weeks of casual questions (we

know he's your schoolmate but
it's too risky bringing him in), Bloat's

only able to report that Slothrop began
work on this map last autumn,

about the time he started going out to look at rocket-bomb
disasters for

ACHTUNG-having evidently the time, in his
travels among places of

death, to devote to girl-chasing. If there's a
reason for putting up the

paper stars every
few days the man hasn't explained it-it

doesn't seem

to be for publicity, Tantivy's the only one who
even glances at the map

and that's more in the spirit of an amiable anthropologist-"Some
sort

of harmless Yank hobby," he tells his friend Bloat. "Perhaps
it's to keep

track of them all. He does lead rather a complicated
social life," there­

upon going into the story of
Lorraine and Judy, Charles the homosexual

constable and the piano in the pantechnicon, or the
bizarre masquerade

involving Gloria and her nubile mother,
a quid wager on the Blackpool­

Preston North End game, a naughty version of
"Silent Night," and a

providential fog. But none of these yarns,
for the purposes of those

Bloat reports to, are really very illuminating
....

Well. He's done now. Bag zipped, lamp off and moved
back in place.

Perhaps there's time to catch Tantivy
over at the Snipe and Shaft, time

for a comradely pint. He moves back
down the beaverboard maze, in

the weak yellow light, against a tide of incoming girls
in galoshes, aloof

Bloat unsmiling, no time for slap-and-tickle
here you see, he still

has his

day's delivery to make ....

19



-_.
.

- -_ -.lli /;......

::,:!
-. �;.��.. -ll'-� .... ;��-t.;;;�t:if�Mtl.:;:f.WU.u:!�,Jt".�.....�.�.,;.�:<:;�_:.:"'��-_:_:·;_;!.; .• ;·;�I"�-_._� . �.w. �,.

Wind has shifted around to the southwest, and the barometer's falling.
The early afternoon is already dark as evening, under the massing rain­
clouds. Tyrone Slothrop is gonna be caught out in it, too. Today it's
been a long, idiot chase out to zero longitude, with the usual nothing to
show. This one was supposed to be another premature airburst, the
lumps of burning rocket showering down for miles around, most of it
into the river, only one piece in any kind of shape and that well sur­
rounded, by the time Slothrop arrived, with the tightest security he's
seen yet, and the least friendly. Soft, faded berets against the slate
clouds, Mark III Stens set on automatic, mustaches mouthwide covering
enormous upper lips, humorless-no chance for any American lieuten­
ant to get a look, not today.

ACHTUNG, anyhow, is the poor relative of Allied intelligence. At
least this time Slothrop's not alone, he's had the cold comfort of seeing
his opposite number from T.!., and shortly after that even the man's
section chief, come fussing onto the scene in a '37 Wolseley Wasp, both
turned back too. Hal Neither of them returning Slothrop's amiable nod.
Tough shit, fellas. But shrewd Tyrone hangs around, distributing Lucky
Strikes, long enough to find at least what's up with this Unlucky Strike,
here.

What it is is a graphite cylinder, about six inches long and two in di­
ameter, all but a few flakes of its Army-green paint charred away. Only
piece that survived the burst. EVidently it was meant to. There seem to
be papers stashed inside. Sergeant-major burned his hand picking it up
and was heard to holler Oh fuck, causing laughter among the lower pay­
grades. Everybody was waiting around for a Captain Prentice from
S.O.E. (those prickly bastards take their time about everything), who
does presently show up. Slothrop gets a glimpse-windburned face, big
mean mother. Prentice takes the cylinder, drives away, and that's that.

In which case, Slothrop reckons, ACHTUNG can, a bit wearily, sub­
mit its fifty-millionth interbranch request to that S.O.E., asking for some
report on the cylinder's contents, and, as usual, be ignored. It's O.K.,
he's not bitter. S.O.E. ignores everybody, and everybody ignores
ACHTUNG. A-and what does it matter, anyhow? It's his last rocket for
a while. Hopefully for good.

This morning in his IN basket were orders sending him TDY some
hospital out in the East End. No explanation beyond an attached carbon

D D D D D D D

20

copy a

the p,

ExecutJ
shit, no

which i
Once

way,A)
the first

aropped
buzzbolll
aenly he
on, risin

else'swo
its dive,

�ot 10 Sfj
After a
or two,
next doD

But tn
You cou

surprise�
sleeping

'sucker.j"I
saYI"Nerv

"Well
"Two

The Iieu�

day dee�ana Tan�
their tab]

Atlantl
the one \

ago, Barl

evening (
them bot
of DeCal
ram a CI

aismayin,
Tantivy (
when it'�



tel' \allin�

TDY some

ed carbon

copy of a note to ACHTUNG requesting his reassignment
"as part of

the P.W.E. Testing Programme." Testing? P.W.E. is Political Warfare
Executive, he looked that up. Some more of that Minnesota Multiphasic
shit, no doubt. But it will be a change from this rocket-hunting routine,
which is beginning to get a little old.

Once upon a time Slothrop cared. No kidding. He thinks he did, any­
way. A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now. He can remember
the first Blitz only as a long spell of good luck. Nothing that Luftwaffe

dropped came near him. But this last summer they started in with those
buzzbombs. You'd be walking on the street, in bed just dozing off sud­

denly here comes this farting sound over the rooftops-if it just keeps
on, rising to a peak and passing over why that's fine, then it's somebody
else's worry ... but if the engine cuts off, look out Jackson-it's begun
its dive, sloshing the fuel aft, away from the engine burner, and you've
got 10 seconds to get under something. Well, it wasn't really

too bad.

After a while you adjusted-found yourself making small bets, a shilling
or two, with Tantivy Mucker-Maffick at the next desk, about where the

next doodle would hit. . . .

But then last September the rockets came. Them fucking rockets.
You couldn't adjust to the bastards. No way. For the first time, he was

surprised to find that he was really scared. Began drinking heavier,

sleeping less, chain-smoking, feeling in some way he'd been
taken for a

·'sucker. Christ, it wasn't supposed to keep on like this....
"1 say Slothrop, you've already got one in your mouth-"
"Nervous," Slothrop lighting up anyway.
"Well not mine," Tantivy pleads.
"Two at a time, see?" making them point down like comicbook fangs.

The lieutenants stare at each other through the beery shadows, with the

day deepening outside the high cold windows of the Snipe
and Shaft,

and Tantivy about to laugh or snort oh God across the wood
Atlantic of

their table.
Atlantics aplenty there've been these three years, often rougher

than

the one William, the first transatlantic Slothrop, crossed many ancestors

ago. Barbarities of dress
and speech, lapses in behavior-one horrible

evening drunken Slothrop, Tantivy's guest at the Junior Athenaeum, got
them both 86' d feinting with the beak of a stuffed owl after the jugular
of DeCoverley Pox whilst Pox, at bay on a billiard table, attempted

to

ram a cue ball down Slothrop's throat. This sort of thing goes on

dismayingly often: yet kindness is a sturdy enough ship
for these oceans,

Tantivy always there blushing or smiling and Slothrop surprised
at how,

when it's really counted, Tantivy hasn't ever let him down.

21



He knows he can �pill what's on his mind. It hasn't much to do with no one
today's amorous report on Norma (dimply Cedar Rapids subdeb legs), to talk
Marjorie (tall, elegant, a build out of the chorus line at the Windmill) Still
and the strange events Saturday night at the Frick Frack Club in Soho, best, it I
a haunt of low reputation with moving spotlights of many pastel hues, demolit
OFF LIMITS and NO JITTERBUG DANCING signs laid on to satisfy the many borings
sorts of police, military and civilian, whatever "civilian" means nowa- here or �Idays, who look in from time to time, and where against all chance, feeling 0
through some horrible secret plot, Slothrop, who was to meet one, walks bit in a
in sees who but both, lined up in a row, the angle deliberately just for of, ' ,
him, over the blue wool shoulder of an engineman 3rd class, under the adrene,
bare lovely armpit of a lindy-hopping girl swung and posed, skin stained Ions one
lavender by the shifting light just there, and then, paranoia flooding up, brtheli
the two faces beginning to turn his way. . . . �irl voice

Both young ladies happen to be silver stars on Slothrop's map. He needle 0
must've been feeling silvery both times-shiny, jingling. The stars he blackout
pastes up are colored only to go with how he feels that day, blue on up ci�arette
to golden. Never to rank a Single one-how can he? Nobody sees the tmikabi
map but Tantivy, and Christ they're all beautiful ... in leaf or flower "Wha
around his wintering city, in teashops, in the queues babushkaed and when th
coatwrapped, sighing, sneezing, all lisle legs on the curbstones, hitchhik- �oing on
ing, typing or filing with pompadours sprouting yellow pencils, he finds ering, in
them-dames, tomatoes, sweater girls-yes it is a little obsessive maybe throp-"
but ... "I know there is wilde love and joy enough in the world," "I don
preached Thomas Hooker, "as there are wilde Thyme, and other in�, He �herbes, but we would have garden love, and garden joy, of Gods owne sleeves, �
planting." How Slothrop's garden grows. Teems with virgin's-bower, Presen
with forget-me-nots, with rue-and all over the place, purple and yel- when the
low as hickeys, a prevalence of love-in-idleness. Tanti�

He likes to tell them about fireflies. English girls don't know about a bit.
I

fireflies, which is about all Slothrop knows for sure about English girls. "Of co
The map does puzzle Tantivy. It cannot be put dow!' to the usual "Yesbjloud-mouthed American ass-banditry, except as a fraternity-boy reflex shivering,in a vacuum, a reflex Slothrop can't help, barking on into an empty lab, Ma�be ylinto a wormholing of echOing hallways, long after the need has vanished plode firs

and the brothers gone to WW II and their chances for death. Slothrop dead, YOl
really doesn't like to talk about his girls: Tantivy has to steer him diplo- "�ame
matically, even now. At first Slothrop, quaintly gentlemanly, didn't talk �etsyou,at all, till he found out how shy Tantivy was. It dawned on him then "Uh, bthat Tantivy was looking to be fixed up. At about the same time, Tan- "Thinl
tivy began to see the extent of Slothrop's isolation. He seemed to have "Jesus

22

.�.:��:; �� ',"'< =: .���' =�-'
'

: "':_::
..

_"' � ..
� .. ,. .. _-.. �



n'l 'nolI aoor

u [1l�llln �r�
II .0 ilie\L�

mll-bor felt
1) lIIemptylJf
I has 1'3nisflr:

.Ith,Slothrof
r him dipJ�

,
didn'ttaJt

no one else in London, beyond a multitude of girls he seldom saw again,
to talk to about anything.

Still Slothrop keeps his map up daily, boobishly conscientious. At
its

best, it does celebrate a flow, a passing from which-among the sudden

demolitions from the sky, mysterious orders arriving out of the dark la­

borings of nights that for himself are only idle-he can save a
moment

here or there, the days again growing colder, frost in the morning, the

feeling of Jennifer's breasts inside cold sweater's wool held to
warm a

bit in a coal-smoke hallway he'll never know the daytime despondency
of . . . cup of Bovril a fraction down from boiling searing his bare

knee

as Irene, naked as he is in a block of glass sunlight, holds up precious ny­
lons one by one to find a pair that hasn't laddered, each struck flashing
by the light through the winter trellis outside ... nasal hep

American­

girl voices singing out of the grooves of some disc up through
the thorn

needle of Allison's mother's radiogram . . . snuggling for warmth,
blackout curtains over all the windows, no light but the coal of their last

cigarette, an English firefly, bobbing at her whim in cursive writing
that

trails a bit behind, words he can't read....

"What happened?" Silence from Slothrop. "Your two Wrens
. . .

when they saw you ...
"

then he notices that Slothrop, instead of

going on with his story, has given himself up
to shivering. Has been shiv­

ering, in fact, for some time. It's cold
in here, but not that cold. "Slo­

throp-"
"I don't know. Jesus." It's interesting, though. It's the weirdest

feel­

ing. He can't stop. He turns his Ike jacket
collar up, tucks hands inside

sleeves, and sits that way for a while.

Presently, after a pause, cigarette in motion,
"You can't hear them

when they come in."
Tantivy knows which "they." His eyes shift away.

There is silence for

a bit.
"Of course you can't, they go faster than sound."
"Yes but-that's not it," words are bursting out between the pulses of

shivering-"the other kind, those V-IS, you
can hear them. Right?

Maybe you have a chance to get out of
the way. But these things ex­

plode first, a-and then you hear them coming
in. Except that, if you're

dead, you don't hear them."
"Same in the infantry. You know that. You never hear the

one that

gets you."
"Uh, but-"
"Think of it as a very large bullet, Slothrop. With fins."

"Jesus," teeth chattering, "you're such a
comfort."

23



Tantivy, leaning anxiously through the smell of hops and the brown damn
I

gloom, more worried now about Slothrop's shaking than any specter of years 0
his own, has nothing but established channels he happens to know of to truce w
try and conjure it away. "Why not see if we can get you out to where are eac
some of them have hit. . . ." fragme

"What for? Come on, Tantivy, they're completely destroyed. Aren't �lothroH
they?" ner and

"I don't know. I doubt even the Germans know. But it's the best Heha
chance we'll have to one-up that lot over in T.!. Isn't it." ten on it·

Which is how Slothrop got into investigating V-bomb "incidents." bilitiesf
Aftermaths. Each morning-at first-someone in Civil Defence routed them a tl
ACHTUNG a list of yesterday's hits. It would come round to Slothrop "Yes,
last, he'd detach its pencil-smeared buck slip, go draw the same aging it, especl
Humber from the motor pool, and make his rounds, a Saint George after useful.
the fact, going out to poke about for droppings of the Beast, fragments "Whol'of German hardware that wouldn't exist, writing empty summaries into through
his notebooks-work-therapy. As inputs to ACHTUNG got faster, often but, , ,
he'd show up in time to help the search crews-following restless-rnus- time, the
cled RAF dogs into the plaster smell, the gas leaking, the leaning long nothing
splinters and sagging mesh, the prone and noseless caryatids, rust al- It's no
ready at nails and naked threadsurfaces, the powdery wipe of Nothing's upon the
hand across wallpaper awhisper with peacocks spreading their fans ing into
down deep lawns to Georgian houses long ago, to safe groves of holm beyond �
oak . . . among the calls for silence following to where some exposed promisinj
hand or brightness of skin waited them, survivor or casualty. When he down all
couldn't help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, , , , not
first time since the other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were It was
dying, and presently, seeing no point, he stopped. Bond Sir,

Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a lit- his two \1tle girl, half-suffocated under a Morrison shelter. Waitipg for the fromlea�
stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand, gone purple with the cold. suddenly
Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and saw him her mori a s�first words were, "Any gum, chum?" Trapped there for two days, gum- like a cia
less-all he had for her was a Thayer's Slippery Elm. He felt like an frontofh
idiot. Before they took her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, eted, �ol
her mouth and cheek in the flare lamps cold as frost, the city around puzzled,
them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling and no surprises in- "�ome
side ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he knew day,elbo
that's what he'd been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if "No it
this exactly canceled all they'd found her down in the middle of. What a cnecked

24

:i':r� .• ; .. , >.�.-::;�•••••__ ." •.• '::� , � •• "';:,::,;;.:: [1 = I; -, ",.
---.

-

- . ���.---



\t'. the �

damn fool thing. He hangs at the bottom of his blood's avalanche, 300
years of western swamp-Yankees, and can't manage but some nervous
truce with their Providence. A detente. Ruins he goes daily to look in
are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least

fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death . . .

Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any cor­
ner and he can find himself inside a parable.

He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name writ­

ten on it-if they're really set on getting him ("They" embracing possi­
bilities far far beyond Nazi Germany) that's the surest way, doesn't cost
them a thing to paint his name on everyone, right?

"Yes, well, that can be useful," Tantivy watching him funny, "can't

it, especially in combat to, you know, pretend something like that. Jolly
useful. Call it 'operational paranoia' or something. But-"

"Who's pretending?" lighting a cigarette, shaking his forelock

through the smoke, "jeepers, Tantivy, listen, I don't want to upset you
but ... I mean I'm four years overdue's what it is, it could happen any
time, the next second, right, just suddenly . . . shit . . . just zero, just
nothing . . . and . . ."

It's nothing he can see or lay hands on-sudden gases, a
violence

upon the air and no trace
afterward ... a Word, spoken with no warn­

ing into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond
its invisibility,

beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking,
promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing
down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies . . . no, no bullet with fins, Ace

. . . not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day. . . .
It was Friday evening, last September, just off work, heading for

the

Bond Street Underground station, his mind on the weekend ahead and

his two Wrens, that Norma and that Marjorie, whom he must each keep
from learning about the other, just as he was reaching

to pick his nose,

suddenly in the sky, miles behind his back and up the
river memento­

mori a sharp crack and a heavy explosion, rolling right behind,
almost

like a clap of thunder. But not quite. Seconds later, this
time from in

front of him, it happened again: loud and clear, all over the city.
Brack­

eted. Not a buzzbomb, not that Luftwaffe. "Not thunder either," he

puzzled, out loud.
"Some bloody gas main," a lady with a lunchbox, puffy-eyed

from the

day, elbowing him in the back as she passed.
"No it's the Germans," her friend with rolled blonde fringes under a

checked kerchief doing some monster routine here, raising her
hands at

oyed, .\refl'

'lIO\Vot\(
�t to wneli

smile, asr
of lVhatl

25



-_.
.

T ����::�':�""···";��·�·�·��:;'�ilttil;r�i��J:rf�tu;::. '.�"'�"��';.�:;.:;�,t '�"':ic·_-_ • -.- r A/' .: ...'

Slothrop, "coming to get him, they especially love fat, plump Ameri­
cans-" in a minute she'll be reaching out to pinch his cheek and wob­
ble it back and forth.

"Hi, glamorpuss," Slothrop said. Her name was Cynthia. He managed
to get a telephone number before she was waving ta-ta, borne again into
the rush-hour crowds.

It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun
being teased apart by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward
without shame. This smoke is more than the day's breath, more than
dark strength-it is an imperial presence that lives and moves. People
were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses were
grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts
smeared with years' pitiless use and no pleasure, into haze-gray, grease­
black, red lead and pale aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered
high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving curves into roads clogged with
Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries, bicycles and cars,
everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing,
hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun
among the smokestacks, the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys
brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing deeper, approaching black
through an instant-perhaps the true turn of the sunset-that is wine to
you, wine and comfort.

The Moment was 6:43: 16 British Double Summer Time: the sky,
beaten like Death's drum, still humming, and Slothrop's cock-say
what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts here's a sneaky hardon stir­
ring, ready to jump-well great God where'd that come from?

There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a pe­
culiar sensitivity to what is revealed in the sky. (But a hardon?)

On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard
back home in Mingeborough, Massachusetts, the hand of God emerges
from a cloud, the edges of the figure here and there eroded by 200 years
of seasons' fire and ice chisels at work, and the inscription reading:

Eachoneir
the next lin
ers,salters
lectmen, b
around gOJ
breaths, th
where aCT(
wa� out t

consta!
out of the

unbearabl
blue Berk
Siothrop B

blin� baCK
nrst,lying
and willow
of rot,leacl
faced ang
death's he
and broken

eyes peeki
nin�from
bouncy Sta
iah Siothro]

Adie
Whfj
Till
I m�
Marl

Andl
Wh�
And

To the curl
calsarcas�
out a credij

In Memory of Conftant
Slothrop, who died March
y 4� 1 766, in y 2 9�
year of his age.
Death is a debt to nature due,
Which I have paid, and fo muft you.

.:�':r: ...... �, .. -;�� .. ,. .. _ .. � __ . _�....�.� . '�"'.'"'' ' .... ...:__ � -::::. [�:.; ./ "".
---.

-

- . ��)..oo,--_--:---



\) Amen·
ana w �

Constant saw, and not only with his heart, that stone hand pointing
o

out of the secular clouds, pointing directly at him, its edges traced in
unbearable light, above the whispering of his river and slopes of his long

e manaOt bl kshi
"

,

.�. ue Ber shires, as would hIS son Vanable Slothrop, mdeed all of the
e agalnl!I'. Slothrop blood one way or another, the nine or ten generations

tum-

'\
bling back, branching inward: everyone, except for William the very

� :eloh first, lying under fallen leaves, mint and purple loosestrife, chilly elm
\nmOUnWt d 'II h d h

"

� r an WI ow s a ows over t e swamp-edge graveyard m a long gradIent
'n, mO!1� of rot, leaching, assimilation with the earth, the stones showing round­

mO\e1.r�+ faced angels with the long noses of dogs, toothy and deep-socketed
. Bus)5wc death's heads, Masonic emblems, flowery urns, feathery willows upright
I e llaaQ, and broken, exhausted hourglasses, sunfaces about to rise or set with
,aU1eI1 eyes peeking Kilroy-style over their horizon, and memorial

verse run­

iliattOlltll ning from straight-on and foursquare, as for Constant Slothrop, through
c10':l�f(h: bouncy Star Spangled Banner meter for Mrs. Elizabeth, wife of

Lt. Isa­

� I aflatl iah Slothrop (d. 1812):
, �I �O\\l

Adieu my dear friends, I have come to this grave
Where Insatiate Death in his reaping hath brought me.
Till Christ rise again all His children to save,
I must lie, as His Word in the Scriptures hath taught me.

Mark, Reader, my cry! Bend thy thoughts on the Sky,
And in midst of prosperity, know thou may'st die.
While the great Loom of God works in darkness above,

And our trials here below are but threads of His Love.

To the current Slothrop's grandfather Frederick (d. 1933), who
in typi­

cal sarcasm and guile bagged his epitaph from Emily Dickinson,
with­

out a credit line:

Because I could not stop for Death

He kindly stopped for me

Each one in turn paying his debt to nature due and leaving
the excess to

the next link in the name's chain. They began as fur traders, cordwain­

ers, salters and smokers of bacon, went on into glassmaking,
became se­

lectmen, builders of tanneries, quarriers of marble. Country
for miles

around gone to necropolis, gray with
marble dust, dust that was the

breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian
monuments going up else­

where across the Republic. Always elsewhere. The money seeping
its

way out through stock portfolios more
intricate than any genealogy:

27



Ruin is formal, devil's work,
Consecutive and slow-
Fail in an instant no man did,
Slipping is crash's law,

what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose dimin­
ishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper-toilet
paper, banknote stock, newsprint-a medium or ground for shit,
money, and the Word. They were not aristocrats, no Slothrop ever
made it into the Social Register or the Somerset Club-they carried on
their enterprise in silence, assimilated in life to the dynamiC that sur­
rounded them thoroughly as in death they would be to churchyard
earth. Shit, money, and the Word, the three American truths, powering
the American mobility, claimed the Slothrops, clasped them for good to
the country's fate.

But they did not prosper ... about all they did was persist-though
it all began to go sour for them around the time Emily Dickinson, never
far away, was writing

ond or t
of big an
cause so 0

or Hogan,
into the co

They sc
to swing o�
to show hi

But this

ange, the SI

neighbors
falling do
said, "Lik
were the 0

kids doze

still they would keep on. The tradition, for others, was clear, everyone
knew-mine it out, work it, take all you can till it's gone then move on
west, there's plenty more. But out of some reasoned inertia the Slo­
throps stayed east in Berkshire, perverse-close to the flooded quarries
and logged-off hillsides they'd left like Signed confessions across all that
thatchy-brown, moldering Witch-country. The profits slackening, the
family ever multiplying. Interest from various numbered trusts was still
turned, by family banks down in Boston every second or third genera­
tion, back into yet another trust, in long rallentando, in infinite series
just perceptibly, term by term, dying . . . but never quite to the
zero....

The Depression, by the time it came, ratified what'd been under way.
Slothrop grew up in a hilltop desolation of businesses going under,
hedges around the estates of the vastly rich, half-mythical cottagers
from New York lapsing back now to green wilderness or straw death, all
the crystal windows every single one smashed, Harrimans and Whitneys
gone, lawns growing to hay, and the autumns no longer a time for fox­
trots in the distances, limousines and lamps, but only the accustomed
crickets again, apples again, early frosts to send the hummingbirds
away, east wind, October rain: only winter certainties.

In 1931, the year of the Great Aspinwall Hotel Fire, young Tyrone
was visiting his aunt and uncle in Lenox. It was in April, but for a sec-

about to �
ever proch
these aut�

countdow�washing tit does It
cloud, , ,

On the wa
laminar an
tury called
orince, fad
above, a g
chan�es in
leave, eacl
chance, Tl
your whit,



()se dim "ond or two as he was commg awake m the strange room and the racket
a.�er-tol .

J [
of bIg and little cousins' feet down the stairs, he thought of winter, be-

no lOr � f'
...

�otnr
cause so 0 ten he d been wakened like this, at this hour of sleep, by Pop,

o� tl or Hogan, bundled outside still blinking through an overlay of dream
��. ."

L
mto the cold to watch the Northern LIghts.

annc tllat
t l They

scared the shit out of him. Were the radiant curtains just about
o cliUltfll . ? Wh ld h h
tb

to swmg open. at wou t e g osts of the North, in their finery, have
ru s, �I\t' to show him?
n'rnlolu,

�' But this was a spring night, and the sky was gusting red, warm-or-

ange, the sirens howling in the valleys from Pittsfield, Lenox, and
Lee­

neighbors stood out on their porches to stare up at the shower of sparks
falling down on the mountainside ... "Like a meteor shower," they
said, "Like cinders from the Fourth of July ...

"

it was 1931, and those

were the comparisons. The embers fell on and on for five
hours while

kids dozed and grownups got to drink coffee and tell fire stories
from

other years.
But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose,

in the next moment, all of it, the complete night, were to go out of con­

trol and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . .
.

6:43: 16 BDST-in the sky right now here is the same unfolding, just
about to break through, his face deepening with its light, everything
about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside

has

ever proclaimed . . . slender church steeples poised up
and down all

these autumn hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of

countdown away, rose windows taking in Sunday light, elevating
and

washing the faces above the pulpits defining grace, swearing
this is how

it does happen-yes the great bright hand reaching out of
the

cloud....

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

On the wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze, a gas jet burns,

laminar and gently Singing-adjusted to what scientists of
the last cen­

tury called a "sensitive flame":
invisible at the base, as it issues from its

orifice, fading upward into smooth blue light that
hovers several inches

above, a glimmering small cone that can respond
to the most delicate

changes in the room's air pressure. It registers
visitors as they enter and

leave, each curious and civil as if the round
table held some game of

chance. The circle of sitters is not at all distracted or
hindered. None of

your white hands or
luminous trumpets here.

29



---

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30

imagine
ably fro
suddenl]
she lea

Jessic�
idlrplu
top verte
her li�ht
and bre
seems he

to have

Outsi
rocKet 0
dives fo

ward the

a�ain,
dim roo

ten yea
It see

Hair SWJ

lapel. A
Milton �

sponde1
The �

Anybod)
liKe

anYlbasic, fa
land Fel

(themeJ
haustion

rangem�
sighs a�
booK, sh

Presel
not sure

shy, isn'
"Rog�

graph tl
dart inc'

"Au\(

Camerons officers in parade trews, blue puttees, dress kilts drift in
conversing with enlisted Americans ... there are clergymen, Home
Guard or Fire Service just off duty, folds of wool clothing heavy with
smoke smell, everyone grudging an hour's sleep and looking it . . . an­
cient Edwardian ladies in crepe de Chine, West Indians softly plaiting
vowels round less flexible chains of Russian-Jewish consonants. . ..
Most skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some are off again to
other rooms, all without breaking in on the slender medium who sits
nearest the sensitive flame with his back to the wall, reddish-brown
curls tightening close as a skullcap, high forehead unwrinkled, dark lips
moving now effortless, now in pain:

"Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found
that all the signs had turned against him.... Lights he had studied so
well as one of you, position and movement, now gathered there at the
opposite end, all in dance ... irrelevant dance. None of Blicero's tradi­
tional progress, no something new . . . alien. . . . Roland too became
conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discov­
ered it so . . . so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had
been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the
secular wind . . . he means, only his personal wind. Yet . . . Selena, the
wind, the wind's everywhere. . . ."

Here the medium breaks off, is silent awhile . . . one groan . . . a
quiet, desperate moment. "Selena. Selena. Have you gone, then?"

"No, my dear," her cheeks mottled with previous tears, "I'm listen­
ing."

"It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For
the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No
more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'-to veer into any
wind. As if ...

"A market needed no longer be run by the Invisible Hand, but now
could create itself-its own logic, momentum, style, from inside.
Putting the control inside was ratifying what de facto had happened­
that you had dispensed with God. But you had taken on a greater, and
more harmful, illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But
that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen, A and
B are unreal, are names for parts that ought to be inseparable ....

"

"More Ouspenskian nonsense," whispers a lady brushing by on the
arm of a dock worker. Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous Ie Vent mingle as
they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS
private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up, hmm, the frock she



n on a grea!e1.
� COlJd aD R:

II happen,.\.
't'parable, '
hing by on:
Vent mingJr
rm of an AI

the frock g

imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, prob­

ably from Harrods and would do more for me, she's also sure.
The lady,

suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes? My gosh,
did

she hear? Around this place almost certainly.
Jessica's been standing near the seance table with a

handful of darts

idly plucked from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape
and

top vertebra visible above the brown wool
collar and through some of

her lighter brown hair, fallen either side along her cheeks.
Brass throats

and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow of her hand. She

seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips,
to have slid into a shallow trance. . . .

Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of
another

rocket bomb. The windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame

dives for shelter, shadows across the table sent adance, darkening to­

ward the other room-then it leaps high, the shadows drawing inward

again, fully two feet, and disappears completely.
Gas hisses on in the

dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge
ten years ago, abandons his

shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.

It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a
dart: one dart.

Hair swinging, breasts bobbing marvelously beneath
each heavy wool

lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into the sticky fibers,
into the dead center.

Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind, always gathering
corre­

spondences, thinks it has found a new one.
The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his

trance.

Anybody's guess what's happening over on
the other side. This sitting,

like any, needs not only its congenial circle
here and secular, but also a

basic, four-way entente which oughtn't, any
link of it, be broken: Ro­

land Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control),
Carroll Eventyr

(the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor).
Somewhere, through ex­

haustion, redirection, gusts of white noise out
in the aether, this ar­

rangement has begun now to dissolve. Relaxation,
chairs squeaking,

sighs and throatclearings . . .
Milton Gloaming fusses with his note­

book, shuts it abruptly.
Presently Jessica comes wandering over.

No sign of Roger and she's

not sure he wants her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though

shy, isn't as horrid as some of Roger's
other friends....

"Roger says that now you'll count up
all those words you copied and

graph them or something," brightly
to head off any comment on

the

dart incident, which she'd rather avoid. "Do you
do it only for seances?"

"Automatic texts," girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods,
"one or two

31



---

.

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/

; .. , _'

32

what n

at first,

deed.
"Majo
"We 'I'

premises
"Then

Ouija-board episodes, yes yes ... we-we're trying to develop a vocabu­
lary of curves-certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes you
see-"

''I'm not sure that 1-"
"Well. Recall Zipf's Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the fre­

quency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on logarithmic axes,"
babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, "we should
of course get something like a straight line . . . however we've data that
suggest the curves for certain-conditions, well they're actually quite
different-schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the
upper part then progressively steeper-a sort of bow shape ... I think
with this chap, this Roland, that we're on to a classical paranoiac-"

"Ha." That's a word she knows. "Thought I saw you brighten up
there when he said 'turned against.'

"

"

'Against,' 'opposite,' yes you'd be amazed at the frequency with this
one."

"What's the most frequent word?" asks Jessica. "Your number one."
"The same as it's always been at these affairs," replies the statistician,

as if everyone knew: "death."
An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy, stands on

tiptoe to relight the sensitive flame.
"Incidentally, ah, where's your mad young gentleman gone off to?"
"Roger's with Captain Prentice." Waving vaguely. "The usual Myste­

rious Microfilm Drill." Being transacted in some distant room, across a
crown-and-anchor game with which chance has very little to do, billows
of smoke and chatter, Falkman and His Apache Band subdued over the
BBC, chunky pints and slender sherry glasses, winter rain at the win­
dows. Time for closeting, gas logs, shawls against the cold night, snug
with your young lady or old dutch or, at here at Snoxall's, in good com­
pany. Here's a shelter-perhaps a real node of tranquillity among sev­
eral scattered throughout this long wartime, where they're gathering for
purposes not entirely in the martial interest.

Pirate Prentice feels something of this, obliquely, by way of class ner­
vousness really: he bears his grin among these people here like a pha­lanx. He learned it at the films-it is the exact mischievous Irish grin
your Dennis Morgan chap goes about cocking down at the black smoke
vomiting from each and every little bucktooth yellow rat he shoots
down.

It's as useful to him as he is to the Firm-who, it is well known, will
use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get

sake, ne
"Hitle
"Hitle

ber. ..
Aher I

rate tape

Ifortablederstand
rattling I
ioll� �ool

Pirate
Their ro
bookish
Science,
ma�be
than a s�

"It'sl

mind, n
relic of a
we are

Event�r
with �o
ing in t)
Scrubs

the-spin
where-H
living - �
rot

...

"Care
science

"Ass.
doorr It



� a vocal what They want. They may not've been that sure of Pirate's
usefulness

sn.apes \ at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, in-
deed.

"Major-General, you can't actually give your support to this."
"We're watching him around the dock. He certainly isn't leaving the

premises physically."
"Then he has a confederate. Somehow-hypnosis, drugs, I don't

know-they're getting to his man and tranquilizing him. For
God's

sake, next you'll be consulting horoscopes."
. "Hitler does."

"Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees, rernem­
�anoial. ber....

"

\ �In�httu After that first surge of interest, the number of clients assigned
to Pi­

rate tapered off some. At the moment he carries what he
feels is a com­

fortable case load. But it's not what he really wants. They will not un­

derstand, the gently bred maniacs of S.O.E. ah very good, Captain
rattling sitreps, shuffling boots, echoes off of

Government eyeglasses
jolly good and why not do it actually for us sometime

at the Club. . . .

Pirate wants Their trust, the good-whisky-and-cured-Latakia scent of
Their rough love. He wants understanding from his own lot,

not these

bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall's, so dedicated
to

Science, so awfully tolerant that this (he regrets it with
all his heart)

may be the only place in the reach of war's empire
that he does feel less

than a stranger. . . .
"It's not at all clear," Roger Mexico's been saying, "what they

have in

mind, not at all, the Witchcraft Act's more than
200 years old, it's a

relic of an entirely different age, another way of thinking. Suddenly
here

we are 1944 being hit with convictions right and
left. Our Mr.

Eventyr," motioning at the medium who's
across the room chatting

with young Gavin Trefoil, "could
be fallen upon at any moment-pour­

ing in the windows, hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away
to the

Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause­
the _ spirits - of - deceased

- persons
- to - be - present - in - fact

- at - the - place­
where_he_then_was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with­
living _ persons - then

- and - there - present my God what imbecile
Fascist

rot ...
"

"Careful, Mexico, you're losing the old objectivity again-a
man of

science shouldn't want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific,
is it."

"Ass. You're on their side. Couldn't you feel it tonight, coming
in the

door? It's a great swamp of paranoia."

wdlofclallu
here liKe a 1�

el'OU JriID;
e black Sill
rat he 511�

known, III

»nen, to gr
33



----

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/

••
'

•

"That's my talent, all right," Pirate as he speaks knowing it's too
abrupt, tries to file off the flash with: "I don't know that I'm really up to
the multiple sort of thing. . . ."

"Ah. Prentice." Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.
"You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it

out on his EEG."

"Oh, if I'm in town," vaguely. There's a security problem here. Loose
talk sinks ships and he can't be sure, even about Mexico. There are too
many circles to the current operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists
growing narrower as we move ring by ring toward the bull's eye, In­
structions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap, idle memo,
typewriter ribbon.

His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm's
latest mania, known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way-ana­
lyzing what foreign-morale data may come in, for instance-but some­
place out at the fringes of the enterprise, as indeed Pirate finds himself
here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his own roommate
Teddy Bloat.

He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then
transfers it, via Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down
to "The White Visitation," which houses a catchall agency known as
PISCES-Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender.
Whose surrender is not made clear.

Pirate wonders if Mexico isn't into yet another of the thousand dodgy
intra-Allied surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London
since the Americans, and a dozen governments in exile, moved in. In
which the German curiously fades into irrelevance. Everyone watching
over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lub­
lin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS
Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping
through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders,
summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in ...
some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb
craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically
drunk or opiated for getting through the day's reverses, most somehow
losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in
the game's unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for
total attention . . . and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in
mind if it isn't that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that
poorest of exiles. . . .

Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzan-

)ia)m gro
addiction.
being used

What c

wa�,)ecu
eryofOp
face tonig
of the roo

Knowing �

up �oung I
ever phot

There's

atel�, the
)eeing aur
mous ..

worn in a

m�ed AA

cups. He I

Simple lo�
he'll alwa

Know, "fol
In 1936

colder tim

speed� sta
an expert I
Pirate, the
�de in ci1

He'd gl
drinbng c
of crude 0
-98% ve
preservini
the Engli�
(masturba
all ilie tim
that life \1

Incredi



g it's I! tine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians.
ea\\yu�1 "The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, har-

�
bors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pi-

erance,.\ rate's business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthu­
oastchetl siasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an

addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is
In here,� being used for something not quite decent .

. Thereartl What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about it he could find a
\tribulion� way, security or not. His reluctance is not Pirate's own over the machin­
hull' e:t, ery of Operation Black Wing. It looks more like shame. Wasn't Mexico's
p. idlemt: face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners

of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex ... hmm.
rt tnef� Knowing Bloat, perhaps that's what it is, young lady gamming well-set­

cal\\'a�'-� up young man, several poses-more wholesome than anything this war's
ce-Dutw� ever photographed ... life, at least....
enndlrum There's Mexico's girl, just entering the room. He spots her immedi-

ately, the clarity around her, the absence of smoke and noise ... is
he

seeing auras now? She catches sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enor­
mous . . . dark-lashed, no make-up or none Pirate can see, her hair
worn in a roll down to the shoulders-what the hell's she doing in a
mixed AA battery? She ought to be in a NAAFI canteen, filling coffee

cups. He is suddenly, dodderer and ass, taken by an ache
in his skin, a

simple love for them both that asks nothing but their safety,
and that

he'll always manage to describe as something else-"concern," you
know, "fondness....

"

In 1936, Pirate ("a T. S. Eliot April" she called it, though it was a
colder time of year) was in love with an executive's wife. She was a thin,

speedy stalk of a girl named Scorpia Mossmoon. Her husband
Clive was

an expert in plastics, working out of Cambridge for Imperial
Chemicals.

Pirate, the career soldier, was having a year or two's relapse or fling out-
side in civilian life.

He'd got the feeling, stationed east of Suez, places
like Bahrein,

drinking beer watered with his own falling sweat in the perpetual
stink

of crude oil across from Muharraq, restricted to quarters after sundown

-98% venereal rate anyway-one sunburned, scroungy
unit of force

preserving the Sheik and the oil money against any
threat from east of

the English Channel, horny, mad with the itching of lice
and heat rash

(masturbating under these conditions is exquisite torture),
bitter-drunk

all the time-even so there had leaked through to Pirate a dim suspicion
that life was passing him by.

Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical fan-

\rerein,

lrfaceofDot
mecnronid
110 t some�
1St, seiz�

demands I

rirate has I
Ir-glass, Wi

Ich Eyzan
35



---

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tasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld he'd felt so
shut away from. They got together while Clive was away on a trouble­
shooting mission for ICI in, of all places, Bahrein. The symmetry of this
helped Pirate relax about it some. They would attend parties as
strangers, though she never learned to arm herself against unexpected
sight of him across a room (trying to belong, as if he were not someone's
employee). She found him touching in his ignorance of everything-par­
tying, love, money-felt worldly and desperately caring for this moment
of boyhood among his ways imperialized and set (he was 33), his pre­
Austerity, in which Scorpia figured as his Last Fling-though herself too
young to know that, to know, like Pirate, what the lyrics to "Dancing in
the Dark" are really about. . . .

He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But there are times
when it's agony not to go to her feet, knowing she won't leave Clive,
crying you're my last chance ... if it can't be you then there's no more
time. . . . Doesn't he wish, against all hope, that he could let the poor,
Western-man's timetable go ... but how does a man ... where does
he even begin, at age 33. . . . "But that's just it," she'd have laughed,
not so much annoyed (she would have laughed) as tickled by the un­
reality of the problem-herself too lost at the manic edge of him, always
at engage, so taking, 'cleaving her (for more than when jerking off into
an Army flannel in the Persian Gulf was some collar of love's nettles
now at him, at his cock), too unappeasable for her not to give in to the
insanity of, but too insane really even to think of as any betrayal of
Clive ....

Convenient as hell for her, anyway. Roger Mexico is now going
through much the same thing with Jessica, the Other Chap in this case
being known as Beaver. Pirate has looked on but never talked about it
to Mexico. Yes he is waiting, to see if it will end for Roger the same way,
part of him, never so cheery as at the spectacle of another's misfortune,
rooting for Beaver and all that he, like Clive, stands for, to win out. But
another part-an alternate self?-one that he mustn't be quick to call
"decent"-does seem to want for Roger what Pirate himself lost. . ..

"You are a pirate," she'd whispered the last day-neither of them
knew it was the last day-"you've come and taken me off on your pirate
ship. A girl of good family and the usual repressions. You've raped me.And I'm the Red Bitch of the High Seas....

"

A lovely game. Pirate
wished she'd thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last)
day's light away down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love
with it to uncouple, they noticed how the borrowed room rocked
gently, the ceiling obligingly came down a foot, lamps swayed from

36

weir fit

over th

But 0

were on

and the·
willsettl
Their lo�
round, fa
tables, C

Helef
Roper's I
nesburg,
little fro

hon, gob
tos, �co

Theire I
Dracula­
lets still

Therwa
ward ton

high-clas
when the

gooo?
Rerla

ness,

anolthe rainHe's an
"We

man 00
What a
difficult

They'
properl
ingmat



their fittings, some fraction of the Thameside traffic provided salty cries
over the water, and nautical bells. . . .

But back over their lowering sky-sea behind, Government hounds
were on the track-drawing closer, the cutters are coming, the cutters
and the sleek hermaphrodites of the law, agents who, being old hands,
will settle for her safe return, won't insist on his execution or capture.
Their logic is sound: give him a bad enough wound and he'll come
round, round to the ways of this hard-boiled old egg of world and time­

tables, cycling night to compromise night. . . .
He left her at Waterloo Station. A gala crowd was there, to see Fred

Roper's Company of Wonder Midgets off to an imperial fair
in Johan­

nesburg, South Africa. Midgets in their dark winter clothes, exquisite
little frocks and nip-waisted overcoats, were running all over the sta­

tion, gobbling their bonvoyage chocolates and lining up for news pho­
tos. Scorpia's talc-white face, through the last window, across

the last

gate, was a blow to his heart. A flurry of giggles and
best wishes arose

from the Wonder Midgets and their admirers. Well, thought Pirate,

guess I'll go back in the Army....

D D D D D D D

They're bound eastward now, Roger peering over
the wheel, hunched

Dracula-style inside his Burberry, Jessica with bright
millions of drop­

lets still clinging in soft net to her shoulders and sleeves
of drab wool.

co il noll' 1 They want to be together, in bed, at rest, in love,
and instead it's east­

Chap in t� ward tonight and south of the
Thames to rendezvous with a certain

rtalKedaoo high-class vivisectionist before the clock of St.
Felix chimes one. And

l'r�elame when the mice run down, who knows tonight but
what they've run for

er'-misfort good?
Her face against the breath-fogged window has

become another dim­

ness, another light-trick of the winter. Beyond her, the white
fracture of

the rain passes. "Why does he go out and pinch all his dogs
in person?

He's an administrator, isn't he? Wouldn't he hire a boy or something?"
"We call them 'staff,'

"

Roger replies, "and I don't know why Points­

man does anything he does, he's a Pavlovian, love. He's
a Royal Fellow.

What am I supposed to know about any of those people? They're
as

difficult as the lot back in Snoxall's."

They're both of them peevish tonight, whippy
as sheets of glass im­

properly annealed, ready to go smash at any
indefinite touch in a whin­

ing matrix of stresses-

37



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I

"Hu

"Poor Roger, poor lamb, he's having an awful war."
"All right," his head shaking, a fuming b or p that refuses to explode,

"ahh, you're so clever aren't you," raving Roger, hands off the wheel to
help the words out, windscreen wipers clicking right along, "you've
been able to shoot back now and then at the odd flying buzz bomb, you
and the boy friend dear old Nutria-"

"Beaver.
"

"Quite right, and all that magnificent esprit you lot are so justly fa­
mous for, but you haven't brought down many rockets lately have you,
haha!" gurning his most spiteful pursed smile up against wrinkled nose
and eyes, "any more than I, any more than Pointsman, well who's that
make purer than whom these days, eh mylove?" bouncing up and down
in the leather seat.

By now her hand's reaching out, about to touch his shoulder. She
rests her cheek on her own arm, hair spilling, drowsy, watching him.
Can't get a decent argument going with her. How he's tried. She uses
her silences like stroking hands to divert him and hush their corners of
rooms, bedcovers, tabletops-accidental spaces.... Even at the cin­
ema watching that awful Going My Way, the day they met, he saw
every white straying of her ungauntleted hands, could feel in his skin
each saccade of her olive, her amber, her coffee-colored eyes. He's
wasted gallons of paint thinner striking his faithful Zippo, its charred
wick, virility giving way to thrift, rationed down to a little stub, the blue
flame sparking about the edges in the dark, the many kinds of dark, just
to see what's happening with her face. Each new flame, a new face.

And therc've been the moments, more of them lately too-times
when face-to-face there has been no way to tell which of them is which.
Both at the same time feeling the same eerie confusion . . . something
like looking in a mirror by surprise but ... more than that, the feeling
of actually being joined . . . when after-who knows? two minutes, a
week? they realize, separate again, what's been going on, that Roger
and [essica were merged into a joint creature unaware of itself.... In a
life he has cursed, again and again, for its need to believe so much in the
trans-observable, here is the first, the very first real magic: data he can't
argue away.

It was what Hollywood likes to call a "cute meet," out in the neat
r Sth-century heart of downtown Tunbridge Wells, Roger motoring inthe vintage Jaguar up to London, Jessica at the roadside struggling pret­
tily with a busted bicycle, murky wool ATS skirt hiked up on a handle
bar, most nonregulation black slip and clear pearl thighs above the
khaki stockings, well-

38

"HI
Wind]

She
bit roo

into p
"We

his apR
''1'

ilie wa
"Bu
"On
Sha

out lik

"MYJ
the do

"Th'
runnin

"Co
where

speaka
At

roll,Fq
send h

swoopl
other �
under

He �
faster

agains,
the cal
someh

dering
''I'm

rrrn,s
And

the v
mica-



to explo
e wbet:

ng, '\Ol
2 bo�n,

"Here love," brakes on in a high squeak, "it's not backstage at the old
Windmill or something, you know."

She knew. "Hmm," a curl dropping down to tickle her nose and put a
bit more than the usual acid in her reply, "are they letting little boys
into places like that, I didn't know."

"Well nobody's," having learned by now to live with remarks about
his appearance, "called up the Girl Guides yet either, have they."

"I'm twenty."
"Hurrah, that qualifies you for a ride, in this Jaguar here you see, all

the way to London."
"But I'm going the other way. Nearly to Battle."
"Oh, round trip of course."
Shaking hair back out of her face, "Does your mother know you're

out like this."

"My mother is the war," declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open
the door.

"That's a queer thing to say," one muddy little shoe pondering on the
running board.

"Come along, love, you're holding up the mission, leave the machine
where it is, mind your skirt getting in, I wouldn't want to commit an un­

speakable act out here in the streets of Tunbridge Wells-"
At which moment the rocket falls. Cute, cute. A thud, a hollow drum­

roll. Far enough toward the city to be safe, but close and loud enough to
send her the hundred miles between herself and the stranger: long­
swooping, balletic, her marvelous round bottom turning to settle

in the

other seat, hair in a moment's fan, hand sweeping Army-colored skirt
under graceful as a wing, all with the blast still reverberating.

He thinks he can see a solemn gnarled something, deeper or changing
faster than clouds, rising to the north. Will she snuggle now cutely
against him, ask him to protect her? He didn't even believe

she'd get in

the car, rocket or no rocket, accordingly now puts Pointsman's Jaguar
somehow into reverse instead of low, yes, backs over the bicycle, ren­

dering it in a great crunch useless for anything but scrap.
"I'rn in your power," she cries. "Utterly."
"Hmm," Roger at .length finding his gear, dancing among the pedals

rrrn, snarl, off to London. But Jessica's not in his power.
And the war, well, she is Roger's mother, she's leached at all the soft,

the vulnerable inclusions of hope and praise scattered, beneath the

mica-dazzle, through Roger's mineral, grave-marker self, washed it all

moaning away on her gray tide. Six years now, always just
in sight, just

where he can see her. He's forgotten his first corpse, or when he first

reSOjUlij
te\�' hal'il
I\rinll��

�e� Who'l:
IJ u�anoG

anewlaa
ell too-t
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on. iliat �c

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o mucni�:

" data nell

39



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saw someone living die. That's how long it's been going on. Most of his
life, it seems. The city he visits nowadays is Death's antechamber:
where all the paperwork's done, the contracts signed, the days num­
bered. Nothing of the grand, garden, adventurous capital his childhood
knew. He's become the Dour Young Man of "The White Visitation,"
the spider hitching together his web of numbers. It's an open secret that
he doesn't get on with the rest of his section. How can he? They're all
wild talents-clairvoyants and mad magicians, telekinetics, astral travel­
ers, gatherers of light. Roger's only a statistician. Never had a prophetic
dream, never sent or got a telepathic message, never touched the Other
World directly. If anything's there it will show in the experimental data
won't it, in the numbers ... but that's as close or clear as he'll ever get.
Any wonder he's a bit short with Psi Section, all the definitely 3-sigma
lot up and down his basement corridor? Jesus Christ, wouldn't you be?

That one clear need of theirs, so patent, exasperates him. . . . His
need too, all right. But how are you ever going to put anything "psychi­
cal" on a scientific basis with your mortality always goading, just outside
the chi-square calculations, in between the flips of the Zener cards and
the silences among the medium's thick, straining utterances? In his mel­
lower moments he thinks that continuing to try makes him brave. But
most of the time he's cursing himself for not working in fire control, or
graphing Standardized Kill Rates Per Ton for the bomber groups ...
anything but this thankless meddling into the affairs of invulnerable
Death....

They have drawn near a glow over the rooftops. Fire Service vehicles
come roaring by them, heading the same direction. It is an oppressive
region of brick streets and silent walls.

Roger brakes for a crowd of sappers, firefighters, neighbors in dark
coats over white nightclothes, old ladies who have a special place in
their night-thoughts for the Fire Service no please you're not going to
use that great Hose on me . . . oh no . . . aren't you even going to take
off those horrid rubber boots ... yesyes that's-

Soldiers stand every few yards, a loose cordon, unmoving, a bit super­
natural. The Battle of Britain was hardly so formal. But these new robot
bombs bring with them chances for public terror no one has sounded.
Jessica notes a coal-black Packard up a side street, filled with dark­
suited civilians. Their white collars rigid in the shadows.

"Who're they?"
He shrugs: "they" is good enough. "Not a friendly lot."
"Look who's talking." But their smile is old, habitual. There was a

time when his job had her a bit mental: lovely little scrapbooks on the

flyiD'
out 5

He
into

lent

heav
sendi
nrele

YorkSIOn
of the
morni
beam
one H

of ru
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soone

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Tn

ballol
lated

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sica

knic I
to ne



st ofhil
'bamber-

re was a

5 on the

flying bombs, how sweet. . . . And his irritated sigh: Jess don't make me
out some cold fanatical man of science. . . .

Heat beats at their faces, eye-searing yellow when the streams shoot
into the fire. A ladder hooked to the edge of the roof sways in the vio­
lent drafts. Up top, against the sky, figures in slickers brace, wave arms,
move together to pass orders. Half a block down, flare lamps illuminate
the rescue work in the charry wet wreckage. From trailer pumps and

heavy units, canvas hoses run fat with pressure, hastily
threaded unions

sending out stars of cold spray, bitter cold, that flash yellow
when the

fire leaps. Somewhere over a radio comes a woman's voice, a quiet
Yorkshire girl, dispatching other units to other parts of the city.

Once Roger and Jessica might have stopped. But they're both
alumni

of the Battle of Britain, both have been drafted into the early black

mornings and the crying for mercy, the dumb
inertia of cobbles and

beams, the profound shortage of mercy in those days. . . . By the
time

one has pulled one's nth victim or part of a victim free of
one's nth pile

of rubble, he told her once, angry, weary, it has ceased to be
that per­

sonal ... the value of n may be different for each of us,
but I'm sorry:

sooner or later . . .

And past the exhaustion with it there is
also this. If they have not

quite seceded from war's state, at least they've
found the beginnings of

gentle withdrawal . . . there's never been
the space or time to talk

about it, and perhaps no need-but both know, clearly, it's
better to­

gether, snuggled in, than back out in the paper, fires,
khaki, steel of the

Home Front. That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction

and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart,
to subvert love in

favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

They have found a house in the stay-away zone,
under the barrage

balloons south of London. The town, evacuated in '40, is still "regu­
lated"-still on the Ministry's list. Roger and Jessica occupy the place

il­

legally, in a defiance they can never
measure unless they're caught. Jes­

sica has brought an old doll, seashells, her
aunt's grip filled with lace

knickers and silk stockings. Roger's managed to scare up a few
chickens

to nest in the empty garage. Whenever they meet here,
one always re­

members to bring a fresh flower or two. The nights
are filled with explo­

sion and motor transport, and wind that brings them up over
the downs

a last smack of the sea. Day begins with a hot cup and a cigarette
over a

little table with a weak leg that Roger has repaired, provisionally,
with

brown twine. There's never much talk but
touches and looks, smiles to­

gether, curses for parting. It is marginal, hungry,
chilly-most times

they're too paranoid to risk a
fire-but it's something they want to keep,

41



---

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so much that to keep it they will take on more than propaganda has
ever asked them for. They are in love. Fuck the war.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

Tonight's quarry, whose name will be Vladimir (or Ilya, Sergei, Nikolai,
depending on the doctor's whim), slinks carefully toward the cellar en­
trance. This jagged opening ought to lead to something deep and safe.
He has the memory, or reflex, of escaping into similar darkness from an
Irish setter who smells of coal smoke and will attack on sight . . . once
from a pack of children, recently from a sudden blast of noiselight, a fall
of masonry that caught him on the left hindquarter (still raw, still needs
licking). But tonight's threat is something new: not so violent, instead a
systematic stealth he isn't used to. Life out here is more direct.

It's raining. The wind hardly flickers. It brings a scent he finds
strange, never having been near a laboratory in his life.

The smell is ether, it emanates from Mr. Edward W. A. Pointsman,
F.R.C.S. As the dog vanishes around the broken remnant of a wall, just
as the tip of his tail flicks away, the doctor steps into the white waiting
throat of a toilet bowl he has not, so intent on his prey, seen. He bends
over, awkwardly, tugging loose the bowl from its surrounding debris,
muttering oaths against all the careless, meaning not himself, particu­
larly, but the owners of this ruined flat (if they weren't killed in the
blast) or whoever failed to salvage this bowl, which seems, actually, to
be wedged on rather tight. . . .

Mr. Pointsman drags his leg over to a shattered staircase, swings it
quietly, so as not to alarm the dog, against the lower half of a fumed-oak
newel post. The bowl only clanks back, the wood shudders. Mocking
him-all right. He sits on stairsteps ascending to open sky and attempts
to pull the damned thing loose of his foot. It will not come. He hears the
invisible dog, toenails softly clicking, gain the sanctuary of the cellar.
He can't reach inside the toilet bowl even to untie his fucking
boot....

Settling the window of his Balaclava helmet snug and tickling justunder his nose, resolved not to give way to panic, Mr. Pointsman stands
up, has to wait for blood to drain, resurge, bounce up and down its mil­
lion branches in the drizzly night, percolate to balance-then limping,
clanking, he heads back toward the car to get a hand from young Mex­
ico, who did remember, he hopes, to bring the electric lantern....

Roger and Jessica found him a bit earlier, lurking at the end of a

)treet 0

took do
There is

matted 0

a�ainst t
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street of row houses. The V-bomb whose mutilation he was prowling
took down four dwellings the other day, four exactly, neat as surgery.
There is the soft smell of house-wood down before its time, of ashes

matted down by the rain. Ropes are strung, a sentry lounges silent
against the doorway of an intact house next to where the rubble begins.
If he and the doctor have chatted at all, neither gives a sign now. Jessica
sees two eyes of no particular color glaring out the window of a Bala­
clava helmet, and is reminded of a mediaeval knight wearing a casque.
What creature is he possibly here tonight to fight for his king? The rub­
ble waits him, sloping up to broken rear walls in a clogging, an open­
work of laths pointlessly chevroning-flooring, furniture, glass, chunks
of plaster, long tatters of wallpaper, split and shattered joists: some
woman's long-gathered nest, taken back to separate straws, flung again
to this wind and this darkness. Back in the wreckage a brass bedpost
winks; and twined there someone's brassiere, a white, prewar confec­
tion of lace and satin, simply left tangled. . . . For an instant, in a ver­

tigo she can't control, all the pity laid up in her heart flies to it, as it
would to a small animal stranded and forgotten. Roger has the boot of
the car open. The two men are rummaging, coming up with large can­
vas sack, flask of ether, net, dog whistle. She knows she must not cry:
that the vague eyes in the knitted window won't seek

their Beast any

more earnestly for her tears. But the poor lost flimsy thing . . . waiting
in the night and rain for its owner, for its room to reassemble round
it ...

The night, full of fine rain, smells like a wet dog. Pointsman seems
to've been away for a bit. "I've lost my mind. I ought to be cuddling
someplace with Beaver this very minute, watching him light up his

Pipe, and here instead I'm with this gillie or something, this spiritualist,
statistician, what are you anyway-"

"Cuddling?" Roger has a tendency to scream. "Cuddling?"
"Mexico." It's the doctor, sighing, toilet bowl on his foot and knitted

helmet askew.

"Hello, doesn't that make it difficult for you to walk? should think it

would ... up here, first get it in the door, this way, and, ah, good,"
then closing the door again around Pointsman's ankle, the bowl

now oc­

cupying Roger's seat, Roger half-resting on Jessica's lap, "tug now,
hard

as ever you can."

Thinking young prig and mocking ass the doctor rocks back
on his

free leg, grunting, the bowl wallowing to and fro. Roger holds
the door

and peers attentively into where the foot vanished. "If
we had a bit of

Vaseline, we could-something slippery. Wait! Stay there, Pointsman,

jcJ:ling jUli
nan stanru
rn itsmij·

limpingl
ung Mex·
I. .•.

'nd of a
43



-----

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don't move, we'll have this resolved ....
"

Under the car, impulsive
lad, in search of the crankcase plug by the time Pointsman can say,
"There isn't time Mexico, he'll escape, he'll escape."

"Quite right." Up again fumbling a flashlight from his jacket pocket.
"TIl flush him out, you wait with the net. Sure you can get about all
right? Nasty if you fell or something just as he made his break for the
open."

"For pity's sake," Pointsman thumping after him back into the
wreckage. "Don't frighten him Mexico, this isn't Kenya or something,
we need him as close to normative, you know, as possible."

Normative? Normative?
"Roger," calls Roger, giving him short-Iong-short with the flash.
"Jessica," murmurs Jessica, tiptoeing behind them.
"Here, fellow," coaxes Roger. "Nice bottle of ether here for you,"

opening the flask, waving it in the cellar entrance, then switching on his
beam. Dog looks up out of an old rusted pram, bobbing black shadows,
tongue hanging, utter skepticism on his face. "Why it's Mrs. Nuss­
baum!',' Roger cries, the same way he's heard Fred Allen do, Wednes­
day nights over the BBC.

"You vere ekshpecting maybe Lessie?" replies the dog.
Roger can smell ether fumes quite strongly as he starts his cautious

descent. "Come on mate, it'll be over before you know it. Pointsman
just wants to count the old drops of saliva, that's all. Wants to make a
wee incision in your cheek, nice glass tube, nothing to bother about,
right? Ring a bell now and then. Exciting world of the laboratory, you'll
love it." Ether seems to be getting to him. He tries to stopper the flask:
takes a step, foot plunges into a hole. Lurching sideways, he gropes for
something to steady himself. The stopper falls back out of the flask and
in forever among the debris at the bottom of the smashed house. Over­
head Pointsman cries, "The sponge, Mexico, you forgot the sponge!"down comes a round pale collection of holes, bouncing in and out of the
light of the flash. "Frisky chap," Roger making a two-handed grab for it,
splashing ether liberally about. He locates the sponge at last in his flash­
light beam, the dog looking on from the pram in some confusion.
"Hah!" pouring ether to drench the sponge and go wisping cold off his
hands till the flask's empty. Taking the wet sponge between two fingershe staggers toward the dog, shining the light up from under his chin to
highlight the vampire face he thinks he's making. "Moment-of truth!"
He lunges. The dog leaps off at an angle, streaking past Roger towardthe entrance while Roger keeps going with his sponge, headfirst into the

44

"Hurr

fant's vel
not unatH

"Mexi

"Ri�ht,
woere he

outspread
maKewitl
�aws plan
standing,
watcoin�.

"Here,'
of wall, tE

"Do YOj
"He's�
"For

move upSI
arms that
craw neal
wito quicl
steadrsla

As Rogfj
cuitofhim

-ilieligll
b� pain ar
about to I

"Spon�
has taKen
Pointsma
mentum

Ro�er, sn
spinning
Ro�era g
net now I

tumble,
"Get

unner th
'We'r



hack int�

pram, which collapses under his weight. Dimly he hears the doctor
above whimper, "He's getting away. Mexico, do hurry."

"Hurry." Roger, clutching the sponge, extricates himself from the in­
fant's vehicle, taking it off as if it were a shirt, with what seems to him
not unathletic skill.

"Mexico-c-o," plaintive.
"Right," Roger blundering up the cellar's rubble to the outside again,

where he beholds the doctor closing in on the dog, net held aloft and
outspread. Rain falls persistently over this tableau. Roger circles so as to
make with Pointsman a pincer upon the animal, who now stands with

paws planted and teeth showing near one of the pieces of rear wall still
standing. Jessica waits halfway into it, hands in her pockets, smoking,
watching.

"Here," hollers the sentry, "you. You idiots. Keep away from that bit
of wall, there's nothing to hold it up."

"Do you have any cigarettes?" asks Jessica.
"He's going to bolt," Roger screams.
"For God's sake, Mexico, slowly now." Testing each footstep, they

move upslope over the ruin's delicate balance. It's a system of lever
arms that can plunge them into deadly collapse at any moment. They
draw near their quarry, who scrutinizes now the doctor, now Roger,
with quick shifts of his head. He growls tentatively, tail keeping up a

steady slap against the two sides of the corner they've backed him into.
As Roger, who carries the light, moves rearward, the dog, some cir­

cuit of him, recalls the other light that came from behind in recent days
-the light that followed the great blast so seethed through afterward

by pain and cold. Light from the rear signals death I men with nets
about to leap can be avoided-

"Sponge," screams the doctor. Roger flings himself at the dog, who
has taken off in Pointsman's direction and away toward the street whilst

Pointsman, groaning, swings his toiletbowl foot desperately, misses, mo­
mentum carrying him around a full turn, net up like a radar antenna.

Roger, snoot full of ether, can't check his lunge-as the doctor
comes

spinning round again Roger careens on into him, toilet
bowl hitting

Roger a painful thump in the leg. The two men fall over, tangled
in the

net now covering them. Broken beams creak, chunks of rain-wet plaster
tumble. Above them the unsupported wall begins to sway.

"Get out of there," hollers the sentry. But the efforts of the pair
under the net to move away only rock the wall more violently.

"We're for it," the doctor shivers. Roger seeks his eyes to see if he

45



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means it, but the window of the Balaclava helmet now contains only a
white ear and fringe of hair.

"Roll," Roger suggests. They contrive to roll a few yards down to­
ward the street, by which time part of the wall has collapsed, in the
other direction. They manage to get back to Jessica without causing any
more damage.

"He's run down the street," she mentions, helping them out of the
net.

"It's all right," the doctor sighs. "It doesn't make any difference."
"Ah but the evening's young," from Roger.
"No, no. Forget it."
"What will you do for a dog, then."
They are under way again, Roger at the wheel, Jessica between them,

toilet bowl out a half-open door, before the answer. "Perhaps it's a sign.
Perhaps I should be branching out."

Roger gives him a quick look. Silence, Mexico. Try not to think about
what that means. He's not one's superior after all, both report to the old
Brigadier at "The White Visitation" on, so far as he knows, equal foot­
ing. But sometimes-Roger glances again across Jessica's dark wool
bosom at the knitted head, the naked nose and eyes-he thinks the doc­
tor wants more than his good will, his collaboration. But wants him. As
one wants a fine specimen of dog. _ . .

Why's he here, then, assisting at yet another dognapping? What
stranger does he shelter in him so mad-

"Will you be going back down tonight, doctor? The young lady needs
a ride."

"I shan't, I'll be staying in. But you might take the car back. I must
talk with Dr. Spectre."

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 direc­
tion, from what the industrial smoke, street excrement, windowless war­
rens, 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 01
Pavlo

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2.ifiSOru 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 Spectre's week to get dropped in on at all hours. Oth­
ers, in Pointsman's weeks, have come the same way to "The White Vis­

itation" in the night, Roger has heard their earnest, conspirators' whis­
pering in the corridors, the smart rattle of all their shoes, like dancing
pumps on marble, destroying one's repose, refuSing ever to die with dis­
tance, 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 un­
readable 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. Wind­
screen wipers brush the rain in a rhythmic bright warp. It is past two,
and time for home.

emoutru

d&erenl\

D D D D D D D

ouna laQ\'�
� ,

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 usu­

ally 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 any­

thing). Pointsman will sit each time waiting for their talking
to resume,

glad to rest these moments in the half-darkness, the
worn gold-leaf let­

ters shining from the spines of books, the fragrant coffee
mess besieged

by roaches, the winter rain in the downspout just
outside the win-

dow....
"Yau 're not looking any better."

,If bac�, I �

ion.a\,iel'
ailiedrili­

nb ilirou�fl
.

but mortl

or. in Offit

momentl �

e builaer)
haterer &

dowJess\\
and pant
chances!
Hospital
y Djsea�

47



-

--.-._ ·_.u //
'''·�-'-'''''':.'.4r-''.''' ,;,.",", _ •. � -J••....... \# ••• '��.:,.��":::'� _ _. _ •• :;_...;:..�":"?;:" •

"Ah, it's the old bastard again, he's got me down. This fighting, Spec­
tro, 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. . . ."

Pointsrnan'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 pa­
tient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave ... who

days in

I'ri�htn
tlimp

"Bu�
"W

�ometn
but no
was firs

ally. I
cially il
stand, �
cue we

nimtra

"�o,

suppos1
you see
order oJ
corner,

uenly .
�i1en

rocketb

upon t�
orlatej
city ..

••
waru, 1
neath c
when I
Dfsmol
01 arte
Kiss ne
rette p
rOwse

room,



would be loved, but suffers his world's indifference, and, "I think," Pav­
lov 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.'l"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 airright now. Something we're too coarsely put together to sense-but 5lo-throp 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 . . . 1 believe M. K. Petrova
was first to observe it . . . one of the women, quite early in the game re­
ally ... the act merely of bringing the dog into the laboratory-espe­
cially 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 sud­

denly ...
"

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 out­
ward, bricks and mortar showering down, your sudden paralysis as
death comes to wrap and stun I don't know guv I must'ce 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 ciga­
rette 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

�ses-yOij
anoid pa'
..

who
49



"- -�""----_"�---
..

,

T�'!,,!""_""'�==;.'_"."'"'_�.�•••:�"'."" __ , - ••• ,
",

'

".:(.;:i�'...:_.-��-.,...., :2;:// . ','.'

turned to gauze no shadows at all, only unutterable two-o'clock dawn froc
... and. . . mei

. . . this transmarginalleap, this surrender. Where ideas of the oppo- fortH
site have come together, and lost their oppositeness. (And is it really the to she
rocket explosion that Slothrop's keying on, or is it exactly this depolariz- Be
ing, this neurotic "confusion" that fills the wards tonight?) How many slowl
times before it's washed away, these iterations that pour out, reliving paint
the blast, afraid to let go because the letting go is so final how do I know well B
Doctor that I'll ever come back? and the answer trust us, after the in me
rocket, is so hollow, only mummery-trust you?-and both know it. or a
. . . Spectro feels so like a fraud but carries on . .. . only because the One b
pain continues to be real. . . . oisapp

And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new chil-: in� hi!
dren, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between . . . tablet erased, llKe so
new writing about to begin, hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over comin
these poor human palimpsests shivering under their government blan- rour b
kets, drugged, drowning in tears and snot of grief so real, torn from so �oloie
deep that it surprises, seems more than their own. . . . to be

How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab under- oran�e
shorts of his are full to bursting with need humorlessly, worldly to use rours
their innocence, to write on them new words of himself, his own brown can ro
Realpolitik dreams, some psychic prostate ever in aching love promised, less,oe

.

ah hinted but till now . . . how seductively they lie ranked in their iron ni�ht, U
bedsteads, their virginal sheets, the darlings so artlessly erotic. . . . spermy

St. Veronica's Downtown Bus Station, their crossroads (newly arrived coffee
on this fake parquetry, chewing-gum scuffed charcoal black, slicks of in some
nighttime vomit, pale yellow, clear as the fluids of gods, waste newspa- �ueue.
pers or propaganda leaflets no one has read in torn scythe-shaped accioen
pieces, old nose-pickings, black grime that blows weakly in when the YetfG
doors open . . . ). pus-yYou have waited in these places into the early mornings, synced in to never 5
the on-whitening of the interior, you know the Arrivals schedule by Re�isjeheart, by hollow heart. And where these children have run away from, nisBala
and that, in this city, there is no one to meet them. You impress them larup awith your gentleness. You've never quite decided if they can see olansh,
through to your vacuum. They won't yet look in your eyes, their slender A1rea
legs are never still, knitted stockings droop (all elastic has gone to war), olastula
but charmingly: little heels kick restless against the canvas bags, the One
fraying valises under the wood bench. Speakers in the ceiling report de- was, "I
partures and arrivals in English, then in the other, exile languages. To- about.
night's child has had a long trip here, hasn't slept. Her eyes are red, her "You

50



dawn 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 fare­
well 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 present­
ing 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 end­

less, departure? A thousand children are shuffling out these doors to­
night, 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 octo­
pus-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 col­
lar 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."

"You ought to be offering me one or two, then, instead of-are you

e oppo.
ally th1

epo/an:.

rn from�

rab uno1r·

Idl)' to lli1
I\n brOIl]

promileil
n �eiruo�
c.",

r1\'arri\'�
K. llchof

llCed in to

hedule 0)
wa)·from.

press �em
\ can)ee

'iIslenoer
e to war),

ags, the

�port de·
1ges, To·

red, her
51



------:---

�!•• ."..':
�••.•. _ ..•.•.••..•.• •.• �••;'L ....•...............,.. .:' <, ••7....:.::.:.- ._-,-(/ .;.,

i
�

I

I
I
I

I
(tl

serious?-giant octopi." The doctors are watching each other closely.
"I wonder what you'll do."
"So do I."
"Take the octopus." Does he mean "forget Slothrop"? A charged mo­

ment.

But then Pointsman laughs the well-known laugh that's done him
yeoman service in a profession where too often it's hedge or hang. "I'm
always being told to take animals." He means that years ago a col­
league-gone now-told him he'd be more human, warmer, if he kept a
dog of his own, outside the lab. Pointsman tried-God knows he did-it

. was a springer spaniel named Gloucester, pleasant enough animal, he
supposed, but the try lasted less than a month. What finally irritatedhim out of all tolerance was that the dog didn't know how to reverse its
behavior. It could open doors to the rain and the spring insects, but not
close them . . . knock over garbage, vomit on the floor, but not clean it
up-how could anyone live with such a creature?

"Octopi," Spectra wheedles, "are docile under surgery. They can sur­
vive massive removals of brain tissue. Their unconditioned response to
prey is very reliable-show them a crab, WHAM! out wiv the old tenta­
cle, home to poisoning and supper. And, Pointsman, they don't bark."

"Oh, but. No. . . tanks, pumps, filtering, special food . . . that maybe fine up in Cambridge, that lot, but everyone here's so' damned
tightfisted, it's the damned Rundstedt offensive, has to be.... P.W.E.
won't fund anything now unless it pays off tactically, immediately-lastweek you know, if not sooner. No an octopus is much too elaborate, not
even Pudding would buy it, no not even old delusions-of-grandeur him­self."

"No limit to the things you can teach them."
"Spectra, you're not the devil." Looking closer, "Are you? You knowwe're set for sound stimuli, the whole thrust of this Slothrop scheme has

to be auditory, the reversal is auditory. . . . I've seen an octopus brain
or two in my time, mate, and don't think 1 haven't noticed those greatblooming optic lobes. Eh? You're trying to palm off a visual creature on
me. What's there to see when the damned things come down?"

"The glow."
"Eh?"
"A fiery red ball. Falling like a meteor."
"Rot."

"Cwenhidwy saw one the other night, over Deptford."
"What 1 want," Pointsman leaning now into the central radiance of

the lamp, his white face more vulnerable than his voice, whispering

aeroS
I real
Dam

�ometl
�irls,
liteirdj
and do

min� I
inside
in tim

auster

ters so

�he

�Iush g
let bioI
where
under
tensiou

, burro

ti�ht fl
Her

the fir

squint!
hangin
curtair
the sn�
but no
whose
leery 0
ago, al
north I
east to

Co
carner.

JeSSica
it does
about,



done �
hano,''j'.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

dose\)' across the burning spire of a hypodermic set upright on the desk, "what
I really need, is not a dog, not an octopus, but one of your fine Foxes.
Damn it. One, little, Fox!"

argedmr

creahlrem

rn�"

Something's stalking through the city of Smoke-gathering up slender
girls, fair and smooth as dolls, by the handful. Their piteous cries . . .
their dollful and piteous cries ... the face of one is suddenly very close,
and down! over the staring eyes come cream lids with stiff lashes, slam­
ming loudly shut, the long reverberating of lead counterweights tumble
inside her head as jessica's own lids now come flying open. She surfaces
in time to hear the last echoes blowinz away on the heels of the blast,
austere and keen, a winter sound. . . . Roger wakes up briefly too, mut­
ters something like "Fucking madness," and nods back to sleep.

She reaches out, blind little hand grazing the ticking clock, the worn­
plush stomach of her panda Michael, an empty milk bottle holding scar­
let blossoms from a spurge in a garden a mile down the road: reaches to
where her cigarettes ought to be but aren't. Halfway out now from
under the covers, she hangs, between the two worlds, a white, athletic
tension in this cold room. Oh, well . . . she leaves him in their warm

burrow, moves shivering vuhvuhvuh in grainy darkness over winter­

tight floorboards, slick as ice to her bare soles.
Her cigarettes are on the parlor floor, left among pillows in front of

the fire. Roger's clothing is scattered all about. Puffing on a cigarette,
squinting with one eye for the smoke, she tidies up, folding his trousers,
hanging up his shirt. Then wanders to the window, lifts the blackout
curtain, tries to see out through frost gathering on the panes, out into
the snow tracked over by foxes, rabbits, long-lost dogs, and winter birds
but no humans. Empty canals of snow thread away into trees and town
whose name they still don't know. She cups the cigarettes in her palm,
leery of showing a light though blackout was lifted weeks and weeks

ago, already part of another time and world. Late lorry motors
rush

north and south in the night, and airplanes fill the sky then drain away
east to some kind of quiet.

Could they have settled for hotels, AR-E forms, being frisked
for

cameras and binoculars? This house, town, crossed arcs of Roger and

Jessica are so vulnerable, to German weapons and to
British bylaws . . .

it doesn't feel like danger here, but she does wish there were others
about, and that it could really be a village, her village. The searchlights

53

iiance 01

lisperiJl�



-

--_

!_:-: ' ••� :�:-.:.,�,- ....
" .... .: .. :.. �." ",_" .... ,," ", "" .

";, "'::_�:_' -"�F., •• ' �/ .','

could stay, to light the night, and barrage balloons to populate fat and
friendly the daybreak-everything, even the explosions in the distances
might stay as long as they were to no purpose ... as long as no onehad
to die ... couldn't it be that way? only excitement, sound and light, a
storm approaching in the summer (to live in a world where that would
be the day's excitement . . . ), only kind thunder?

Jessica has floated out of herself, up to watch herself watching the
night, to hover in widelegged, shoulderpadded white, satin-polished on
her nightward surfaces. Until something falls here, close enough to mat­
ter, they do have their safety: their thickets of silverblue stalks reaching
after dark to touch or sweep clouds, the green-brown masses in uniform,
at the ends of afternoons, stone, eyes on the distances, bound in convoy
for fronts, for high destinies that have, strangely, so little to do with the
two of them here ... don't you know there's a war on, moron? yes but
-here's Jessica in her sister's hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep
in nothing at all, but where is the war?

Until it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to
get to safety, a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical,
maybe, spooky as an old northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the
great struggle of good and evil the wireless reports everyday. And no
reason not just to, well, to keep on. . . .

Roger has tried to explain to her the V-bomb statistics: the difference
between distribution, in angers-eye view, over the map of England, and
their own chances, as seen from down here. She's almost got it: nearly
understands his Poisson equation, yet can't quite put the two together­
put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure numbers, and
keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out.

"Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can't we do
something, down here? Couldn't there be an equation for us too, some­
thing to help us find a safer place?"

"Why am I surrounded," his usual understanding self today, "by sta­
tistical illiterates? There's no way, love, not as long as the mean density
of strikes is constant. Pointsman doesn't even understand that."

The rockets are distributing about London just as Poisson's equation
in the textbooks predicts. As the data keep coming in, Roger looks more
and more like a prophet. Psi Section people stare after him in the hall­
ways. It's not precognition, he wants to make an announcement in the
cafeteria or something . . . have I ever pretended to be anything I'mnot? all I'm doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you
can look it up in the book and do it yourself.

into

stre

squ
The
sen,

on,

A

knOI
and
whe
and
thin
laid
ilie

bey
in�
But

Bj
man

fort
and
ofz
the
twe

oftl

54



His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window
into another landscape than winter Sussex, written names and spidering
streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter
square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented by red circles.
The Poisson equation will tell, for a number of total hits arbitrarily cho­
sen, how many squares will get none, how many one, two, three, and so
on.

An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles on the ring. Blue light goes rattling, re­
knotting through the seedflow inside the glass. Ancient tatty textbooks
and mathematical papers lie scattered about on desk and floor. Some­

where a snapshot of Jessica peeks from beneath Roger's old Whittaker
and Watson. The graying Pavlovian, on route with his tautened gait,
thin as a needle, in the mornings to his lab, where dogs wait with cheeks
laid open, winter-silver drops welling from each neat raw fistula to fill
the wax cup or graduated tube, pauses by Mexico's open door. The air
beyond is blue from cigarettes smoked and as fag-ends later in the freez­
ing black morning shifts resmoked, a stale and loathsome atmosphere.
But he must go in, must face the habitual morning cup.

Both know how strange their liaison must look. If ever the Antipoints­
man existed, Roger Mexico is the man. Not so much, the doctor admits,
for the psychical research. The young statistician is devoted to number
and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain
of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess
the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in be­
tween. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex
of the brain as a mosaic of tiny onloff elements. Some are always in

bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark,
keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or

sleep. One or zero. "Summation," "transition," "irradiation," "concen­
tration," "reciprocal induction"-all Pavlovian brain-mechanics-as­
sumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the
domain between zero and one-the middle Pointsman has excluded

from his persuasion-the probabilities. A chance of 0.37 that, by the
time he stops his count, a given square on his map will have suffered

only one hit, 0.17 that it will suffer two. . . .
"Can't you ... tell," Pointsman offering Mexico one of his Kyprinos

Orients, which he guards in secret fag fobs sewn inside all his lab coats,
"from your map here, which places would be safest to go into,

safest

from attack?"
"No."

55



-- ---_--

11".••.• -:-.,." .. �:.� � : .• !L ".. . .., "::�".' ,�c - - ,,/ ,.,.-

"But surely-"
"Every square is just as likely to get hit again. The hits aren't clus­

tering. Mean density is constant."
Nothing on the map to the contrary. Only a classical poisson distribu­

tion, quietly neatly sifting among the squares exactly as it should
growing to its predicted shape....

"But squares that have already had several hits, I mean-"
"I'm sorry. That's the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how manyhave fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they

always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not
dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning."

Nice thing to tell a Pavlovian. Is it Mexico's usual priggish insensitiv­
ity, or does he know what he's saying? If there is nothing to link the
rocket strikes-no reflex arc, no Law of Negative Induction ... then
. . . He goes in to Mexico each morning as to painful surgery. Spooked
more and more by the choirboy look, the college pleasantries. But it's a
visit he must make. How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these
symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps un­
aware-perhaps-that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of his­
tory, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico's
whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but
"events," newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end
of history?

"The Romans," Roger and the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit were
drunk together one night, or the vicar was, "the ancient Roman priestslaid a sieve in the road, and then waited to see which stalks of grasswould come up through the holes."

Roger saw the connection immediately. "I wonder," reaching for
pocket after pocket, why are there never any damned-ah here, "if it
would follow a Poisson . . . let's see . . ."

"Mexico." Leaning forward, definitely hostile. "They used the stalksthat grew through the holes to cure the sick. The sieve was a very sa­cred item to them. What will you do with the sieve you've laid overLondon? How will you use the things that grow in your network ofdeath?"
"I don't follow you." It's just an equation....
Roger really wants other people to know what he's talking about. IVa

Jessica understands that. When they don't, his face often grows chalky lViilland clouded, as behind the smudged glass of a railway carriage window i)\e
as vaguely silvered barriers come down, spaces slide in to separate him seedthat much more, thinning further his loneliness. She knew their very for

56

hrst
nev

ten

"]

ilii

mou

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mas

wa

win

or

dan

rea1
nevI

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cou

all,"

can.

IVa



first day, he leaning across to open the Jaguar door and so sure she'd
never get in. She saw his loneliness: in his face, between his red nail-bit­
ten hands....

"Well, it isn't fair."
"It's eminently fair," Roger now cynical, looking very young, she

thinks. "Everyone's equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the
eyes of the rocket."

To which she gives him her Fay Wray look, eyes round as can be, red
mouth about to open in a scream, till he has to laugh. "Oh, stop."

"Sometimes . . ." but what does she want to say? That he must al­
ways be lovable, in need of her and never, as now, the hovering statisti­
cal cherub who's never quite been to hell but speaks as if he's one of the
most fallen. . . .

"Cheap nihilism" is Captain Prentice's name for that. It was one day
by the frozen pond near "The White Visitation," Roger off sucking ici­
cles, lying flat and waving his arms to make angels in the snow, larking.

"Do you mean that he hasn't paid ... ," looking up, up, Pirate's
wind-burned face seeming to end in the sky, her own hair finally in the
way of his gray, reserved eyes. He was Roger's friend, he wasn't playing
or undermining, didn't know the first thing, she guessed, about such
dancing-shoe wars-and anyway didn't have to, because she was al­

ready, terrible flirt ... well, nothing serious, but those eyes she could
never quite see into were so swoony, so utterly terrif, really. . ..

"The more V-2S over there waiting to be fired over here," Captain
Prentice said, "obviously, the better his chances of catching one. Of
course you can't say he's not paying a minimum dues. But aren't we
all."

"Well," Roger nodding when she told him later, eyes out of focus,
considering this, "it's the damned Calvinist insanity again. Payment.
Why must they always put it in terms of exchange? What's Prentice
want, another kind of Beveridge Proposal or something? Assign every­
one. a Bitterness Quotient! lovely-up before the Evaluation Board, so

many points earned for being Jewish, in a concentration camp, missing
limbs or vital organs, losing a wife, a lover, a close friend-"

"I knew you'd be angry," she murmured.
"I'm not angry. No. He's right. It is cheap. All right, but what does he

want then-" stalking now this stuffed, dim little parlor, hung about
with rigid portraits of favorite gun dogs at point in fields that never

ex­

isted save in certain fantasies about death, leas more golden as their lin­
seed oil ages, even more autumnal, necropolitical, than prewar hopes­
for an end to all change, for a long static afternoon and the grouse for-

ren't elm

"

reacnin� �
ah nere, "�

sed iliel!�
1131 3 I'e�l
u'relaidoll
r netll'orl'

king aDom
ows chail;
ge windQII
:wate him

their very'
57



�-------

I�_'./
: .:. .: ..': .. :'L ,... . ., ",'" '

.. �. '�.. . ,,/ ..

ever in blurred takeoff, the sights taking their lead aslant purple hills to
pallid sky, the good dog alerted by the eternal scent, the explosion over
his head always just about to come-these hopes so patently, defense­
lessly there that Roger even at his most cheaply nihilistic couldn't quite
bring himself to take the pictures down, turn them to the wallpaper­
"what do you all expect, from me, working day in day out among raving
lunatics," Jessica sighing oh gosh, curling her pretty legs up into the
chair, "they believe in survival after death, communication mind-to­
mind, prophesying, clairvoyance, teleportation-they believe, Jess! and
-and-" something is blocking his speech. She forgets her annoyance,
comes up out of the fat paisley chair to hold him, and how does she
know, warm-skirted thighs and mons pushing close to heat and rouse his
cock, losing the last of her lipstick across his shirt, muscles, touches,
skins confused, high, blooded-know so exactly what Roger meant to
say?

Mind-to-mind, tonight up late at the window while he sleeps, lightinganother precious cigarette from the coal of the last, filling with a need to
cry because she can see so plainly her limits, knows she can never pro­
tect him as much as she must-from what may come out of the sky,
from what he couldn't confess that day (creakingsnow lanes, arcades of
the ice-bearded and bowing trees ... the wind shook down crystals of
snow: purple and orange creatures blooming on her long lashes), and
from Mr. Pointsman, and from Pointsman's . . . his . . . a bleakness
whenever she meets him. Scientist-neutrality. Hands that-she shivers.
There are chances now for enemy shapes out of the snow and stillness.
She drops the blackout curtain. Hands that could as well torture people
as dogs and never feel their pain . . .

A skulk of foxes, a cowardice of curs are tonight's traffic whispering in
the yards and lanes. A motorcycle out on the trunk road, snarling cocky
as a fighter plane, bypasses the village, heading up to London. The greatballoons drift in the sky, pearl-grown, and the air is so still that this
morning's brief snow still clings to the steel cables, white goes twisting
peppermint-stick down thousands of feet of night. And the people who
might have been asleep in the empty houses here, people blown away,
some already forever ... are they dreaming of cities that shine all over
with lamps at night, of Christmases seen again from the vantage of chil­dren and not of sheep huddled so vulnerable on their bare hillside, so
bleached by the Star's awful radiance? or of songs so funny, so lovely or
true, that they can't be remembered on waking ... dreams of peace­time....

"What was it like? Before the war?" She knows she was alive then, a

child,
ations
bottle

"�

reacht
it de�
wellin
Itring

"D

rle1c
in an

oren,
brow
brilli�

"AI
in� h

"I!

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leet,

58

time,
\ erl�,

them,
"AI

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ment

again
Th:

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Th,



�l1�I,ll�fJ�
\\iilian�'

cannel'1fi:
ulofili1j

child, but it's not what she means. Wireless, staticky Frank Bridge Vari­
ations a hairbrush for the tangled brain over the BBe Home Service,
bottle of Montrachet, a gift from Pirate, cooling at the kitchen window.

"Well, now," in his cracked old curmudgeon's voice, palsied hand
reaching out to squeeze her breast in the nastiest way he knows, "girly,
it depends which war you mean," and here it comes, ugh, ugh, drool
welling at the corner of his lower lip and over and down in a silver
string, he's so clever, he's practiced all these disgusting little-

"Don't be ridic, I'm serious, Roger. I don't remember." Watches dim­

ples come up either side of his mouth as he considers this, smiling at her
in an odd way. It'll be like this when I'm thirty ... flash of several chil­
dren, a garden, a window, voices Mummy, what's ... cucumbers and
brown onions on a chopping board, wild carrot blossoms sprinkling with
brilliant yellow a reach of deep, very green lawn and his voice-

"All I remember is that it was silly. Just overwhelmingly silly. Noth­

ing happened. Oh, Edward VIII abdicated. He fell in love with-"
"I know that, I can read magazines. But what was it like?"

"Just ... just damned silly, that's all. Worrying about things that

don't-Jess, can't you really remember?"
Games, pinafores, girl friends, a black alley kitten with white little

feet, holidays all the family by the sea, brine, frying fish, donkey rides,
peach taffeta, a boy named Robin . . .

"Nothing that's really gone, that I can't ever find again."
"Oh. Whereas my memories-"
"Yes?" They both smile.
"One took lots of aspirin. One was drinking or drunk much of the

time. One was concerned about getting one's lounge suits to fit prop­
erly. One despised the upper classes but tried desperately to behave

like

them....
"

"And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way-" Jessica breaking down
in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank

he knows

she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way
as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the sofa but making

a nice re­

covery, and by now she's ticklish all over, he can grab an ankle,
elbow-

But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond
the village: the entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed-the

case­

ment window blown inward, rebounding with a wood squeak to slam

again as all the house still shudders.
Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring

in pain. The invisible train rushes away close
over the rooftop....

They sit still as the painted dogs now, silent, oddly unable
to touch.

59

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Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and pa­
tient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

(J)
mi�ht 1

1

lible-
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inltanto 0 DOD 0 0

(J,l)
I

for one

The Kenosha Kid
General Delivery
Kenosha, Wisconsin, U.S.A.

Dear Sir:
Did I ever bother you, ever, for anything, in your life?

Yours truly,
Lt. Tyrone Slothrop

TDY Abreaction Ward
St. Veronica's Hospital
Bonechapel Gate, E1
London, England
Winter, 1944

(4) AI
twac

anouli
celebr
ilieKio

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cup�inJ
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JO%So

General Delivery
Kenosha, Wise., U.S.A.

(�) M

Jo�et.1
(0) (]
Fats se
oiailie

in� nOI
�lothro

few days later

Tyrone Slothrop, Esq.
TDY Abreaction Ward
St. Veronica's Hospital
Bonechapel Gate, E 1
London, England
Dear Mr. Slothrop:
You never did.

The Kenosha Kid

(2) Smartass youth: Aw, I did all them old-fashioned dances, I did the
"Charleston," a-and the "Big Apple," too!

Old vete�an hoofer: Bet you never did the "Kenosha," kid!

(2.1) S.Y.: Shucks, I did all them dances, I did the "Castle Walk," and
I did the "Lindy," too!

O.Y.H.: Bet you never did the "Kenosha Kid."

60

�l



(3) Minor employee: Well, he has been avoiding me, and I thought it
might be because of the Slothrop Affair. If he somehow held me respon­
sible-

Superior (haughtily): You! never did the Kenosha Kid think for one
instant that you . . .

(3.1) Superior (incredulously): You? Never! Did the Kenosha Kid think
for one instant that you . . . ?

(4) And at the end of the mighty day in which he gave us in fiery let­
ters across the sky all the words we'd ever need, words we today enjoy,
and fill our dictionaries with, the meek voice of little Tyrone Slothrop,
celebrated ever after in tradition and song, ventured to filter upward to
the Kid's attention: "You never did 'the,' Kenosha Kid!"

These changes on the text "You never did the Kenosha Kid" are oc­

cupying Slothrop's awareness as the doctor leans in out of the white
overhead to wake him and begin the session. The needle slips without

pain into the vein just outboard of the hollow in the crook of his elbow:
10% Sodium Amytal, one cc at a time, as needed.

(5) Maybe you did fool the Philadelphia, rag the Rochester, josh the

Joliet. But you never did the Kenosha kid.

(6) (The day of the Ascent and sacrifice. A nation-wide observance.
Fats searing, blood dripping and burning to a salty brown . . . ) You
did the Charlottesville shoat, check, the Forest Hills foal, check. (Fad­
ing now ... ) The Laredo lamb. Check. Oh-oh. Wait. What's this,
Slothrop? You never did the Kenosha kid. Snap to, Slothrop.

nce), I m�

Got a hardon in my fist,
Don't be pissed,
Re-enlist-

Snap-to, Slothrop!

Jackson, I don't give a fuck,
Just give me my "ruptured duck!"
Snap-to, Slothrop!
Noone here can love or comprehend me,
They just look for someplace else to send .. me . .

.

Tap my head and mike my brain,

kid!

� WalK,"�

61



Stick that needle in my vein,
Slothrop, snap to!

Rhy-thm's got me,
Oh baby dat swing, swing, swing!
Yeah de rhythm got me
Just a-thinkin' that whole-wide-world-can-sing,
Well I never ever heard-it, sound-so-sweet,
Even down around the corner-on, Ba-sin Street,
As now dat de rhythm's got me, chillun let's
Swing, swing, swing,
Come on . . . chillun, let's . . . swing!

reverts
erywhe

t

upst
Kneelin�
chef's s
mints, a

Radcliffj
eres, PI
aiateli
some v�

alon� tl
ni�ht. .
�ockets
starch i

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rememb
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metal v)
streakeo
oack.E1
follow.

Follo
seat. Th
comes

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Harvarc

�la�n�
, �oundel

end to;
time to

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usellie

mclody
man he
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out of I
Kinds 0
mative
Mister

PISCES: We want to talk some more about Boston today, Slothrop.You recall that we were talking last time about the Negroes, in Roxbury.Now we know it's not all that comfortable for you, but do try, won't
you. Now-where are you, Slothrop? Can you see anything?

Slothrop: Well no, not see exactly ...
Roaring in by elevated subway, only in Boston, steel and a carbon

shroud over the ancient bricks-

Black faces, white tablecloth, gleaming very sharp knives lined up bythe saucers ... tobacco and "gage" smoke richly blended, eye-redden­
ing and tart as wine, yowzah gwine smoke a little ob dis hyah sheeit gibde wrinkles in mah brain a process! straighten 'em all raht out, sho nuf!

PISCES: That was "sho nuf,". Slothrop?
Slothrop: Come on you guys ... don't make it too ...
White college boys, hollering requests to the "combo" up on thestand. Eastern prep-school voices, pronouncing asshole with a certain

sphinctering of the lips so it comes out ehisshehwle ... they reel, theyroister. Aspidistras, giant philodendrons, green broad leaves and junglepalms go hanging into the dimness . . . two bartenders, a very fair WestIndian, slight, with a mustache, and his running-mate black as a hand in
an evening glove, are moving endlessly in front of the deep, the oceanicmirror that swallows most of the room into metal shadows . . . the hun­
dred bottles hold their light only briefly before it flows away into themirror ... even when someone bends to light a cigarette, the flamereflects back in there only as dark, sunset orange. Slothrop can't even
see his own white face. A woman turns to look at him from a table. Her
eyes tell him, in the instant, what he is. The mouth harp in his pocket

62



reverts to brass inertia. A weight. A jive accessory. But he packs it ev­
erywhere he goes.

Upstairs in the men's room at the Roseland Ballroom he swoons
kneeling over a toilet bowl, vomiting beer, hamburgers, homefries,
chef's salad with French dressing, half a bottle of Moxie, after-dinner
mints, a Clark bar, a pound of salted peanuts, and the cherry from some
Radcliffe girl's old-fashioned. With no warning, as tears stream out his
eyes, PLOP goes the harp into the, aagghh, the loathsome toilet! Imme­
diate little bubbles slide up its bright flanks, up brown wood surfaces,
some varnished some lip-worn, these fine silver seeds stripping loose

along the harp's descent toward stone-white cervix and into lower
night.... Someday the U.S. Army will provide him with shirts whose

pockets he can button. But in these prewar days he can rely only on the
starch in his snow-white Arrow to hold the pocket stuck together
enough to keep objects from . . . But no, no, fool, the harp has fallen,
remember? the low reeds singing an instant on striking porcelain (it's
raining against a window somewhere, and outside on top of a sheet­
metal vent on the roof: cold Boston rain) then quenched in the water
streaked with the last bile-brown coils of his vomit. There's no calling it
back. Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of song, or he has to
follow.

Follow? Red, the Negro shoeshine boy, waits by his dusty leather
seat. The Negroes all over wasted Roxbury wait. Follow? "Cherokee"
comes wailing up from the dance floor below, over the hi-hat, the string
bass, the thousand sets of feet where moving rose lights suggest not pale
Harvard boys and their dates, but a lotta dolled-up redskins. The song
playing is one more lie about white crimes. But more musicians

have

floundered in the channel to "Cherokee" than have got through from
end to end. All those long, long notes . . . what're they up to, all that
time to do something inside of? is it an Indian spirit plot? Down in New
York, drive fast maybe get there for the last set-on 7th Ave., between

139th and 14oth, tonight, "Yardbird" Parker is finding out how
he can

use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the

melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gun
or something

man he must be out of his mind 3znd notes demisemiquavers say it very

(demisemiquaver) fast in a Munchkin voice if you can dig that coming
out of Dan Wall's Chili House and down the street-shit, out in

all

kinds of streets (his trip, by '39, well begun: down inside his most affir­
mative solos honks already the idle, amused dum-de-dumming of old

Mister fucking Death he self) out over the airwaves,
into the society

63

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;�''''''' _ _ __" � •• �/ •

gigs, someday as far as what seeps out hidden speakers in the city eleva- and is
tors and in all the markets, his bird's singing, to gainsay the Man's lul- folks
labies, to subvert the groggy wash of the endlessly, gutlessly over­
dubbed strings. . . . So that prophecy, even up here on rainy
Massachusetts Avenue, is beginning these days to work itself out in
"Cherokee," the saxes downstairs getting now into some, oh really
weird shit....

If Slothrop follows that harp down the toilet it'll have to be headfirst, water I
which is not so good, cause it leaves his ass up in the air helpless, and tnick
with Negroes around that's just what a fella doesn't want, his face down �tick�1
in some fetid unknown darkness and brown fingers, strong and sure, all continu
at once undoing his belt, unbuttoning his fly, strong hands holding his Kee" s
legs apart-and he feels the cold Lysol air on his thighs as down come can ide
the boxer shorts too, now, with the colorful bass lures and trout flies on Harvar
them. He struggles to work himself farther into the toilet hole as dimly, Ne�ro
up through the smelly water, comes the sound of a whole dark gang of mUleY(
awful Negroes come yelling happily into the white men's room, con- cause �verging on poor wriggling Slothrop, jiving around the way they do sing- tnat wI
ing, "Slip the talcum to me, Malcolm!" And the voice that replies is who �na�ebut that Red, the shoeshine boy who's slicked up Slothrop's black pat- nere'sl
ents a dozen times down on his knees jes poppin' dat rag to beat the olacbl
band ... now Red the very tall, skinny, extravagantly conked redhead lnitsbl
Negro shoeshine boy who's just been "Red" to all the Harvard fellas- it� own
"Say Red, any of those Sheiks in the drawer?" "How 'bout another luck- nie� im
changin' phone number there, Red?"-this Negro whose true name ferenti�
now halfway down the toilet comes at last to Slothrop's hearing-as a motherthick finger with a gob of very slippery jelly or cream comes sliding taoleindown the crack now toward his asshole, chevroning the hairs along like I alan al
topo lines up a river valley-the true name is Malcolm, and all the black Malco
cocks know him, Malcolm, have known him all along-Red Malcolm touthe Unthinkable Nihilist sez, "Good golly he sure is all asshole ain't he?" Cone a
Jeepers Slothrop, what a position for you to be in! Even though he has �Ioiliro
succeeded in getting far enough down now so that only his legs pro- lacK Ktrude and his buttocks heave and wallow just under the level of the toni�h!water like pallid domes of ice. Water splashes, cold as the rain outside, cocld,
up the walls of the white bowl. "Grab him 'fo' he gits away!" and an"Yowzah!" Distant hands clutch after his calves and ankles, snap his about
garters and tug at the argyle sox Mom knitted for him to go to Harvard in�, vicin, but these insulate so well, or he has progressed so far down the toilet odorsby now, that he can hardly feel the hands at all. . . . breaKeThen he has shaken them off, left the last Negro touch back up there rla�ed

64



cityelt
Man')

less\� �.
e on Ii

itseli �

and is free, slick as a fish, with his virgin asshole preserved. Now some
folks might say whew, thank God for that, and others moaning a little,
aw shucks, but Slothrop doesn't say much of anything cause he didn't

feel much of anything. A-and there's still no sign of his lost harp. The
light down here is dark gray and rather faint. For some time he has been
aware of shit, elaborately crusted along the sides of this ceramic (or by
now, iron) tunnel he's in: shit nothing can flush away, mixed with hard­
water minerals into a deliberate brown barnacling of his route, patterns
thick with meaning, Burma-Shave signs of the toilet world, icky and

sticky, cryptic and glyptic, these shapes loom and pass smoothly as he
continues on down the long cloudy waste line, the sounds of "Chero­
kee" still pulsing very dimly above, playing him to the sea. He finds he
can identify certain traces of shit as belonging definitely to this or that
Harvard fellow of his acquaintances. Some of it too of course must be

Negro shit, but that all looks alike. Hey, here's that "Gobbler" Biddle,
must've been the night we all ate chop suey at Fu's Folly in Cambridge
cause there's bean sprouts around here someplace and even a hint of
that wild plum sauce . . . say, certain senses then do seem to grow
sharper . . . wow . . . Fu's Folly, weepers, that was months ago.

A-and

here's Dumpster Villard, he was constipated that night, wasn't
he-it's

black shit mean as resin that will someday clarify forever to dark amber.

In its blunt, reluctant touches along the wall (which speak the reverse of
its own cohesion) he can, uncannily shit-sensitized now, read old ago­
nies inside poor Dumpster, who'd tried suicide last

semester: the dif­

ferential equations that would not weave for him into any elegance,
the

mother with the low-slung hat and silk knees leaning across Slothrop's
table in Sidney's Great Yellow Grille to finish for him his bottle of

Cana­

dian ale, the Radcliffe girls who evaded him, the black professionals
Malcolm touted him on to who dealt him erotic cruelty by the dollar, up
to as much as he could take. Or if Mother's check was late, only afford.

Gone away upstream, bas-relief Dumpster lost in
the gray light as now

Slothrop is going past the sign of Will Stonybloke, of J.
Peter Pitt, of

Jack Kennedy, the ambassador's son-say, where the
heck is that lack

tonight, anyway? If anybody could've saved that harp,
betcha Jack

could. Slothrop admires him from a distance-he's athletic,
and kind,

and one of the most well-liked fellows in Slothrop's class. Sure is daffy
about that history, though. Jack . . . might Jack have kept

it from fall­

ing, violated gravity somehow? Here, in
this passage to the Atlantic,

odors of salt, weed, decay washing to him faintly like the sound
of

breakers, yes it seems Jack might have. For the
sake of tunes to be

played, millions of possible blues lines, notes to
be bent from the official

65

nearin�-,
comelili:
�rs alo�;
a all ili1�
Rea �jilli

ole ain't �

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nis le�q
levelofr



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•

frequencies, bends Slothrop hasn't really the breath to do ... not yet
but someday . . . well at least if (when . . . ) he finds the instrument
it'll be well soaked in, a lot easier to play. A hopeful thought to carry
with you down the toilet.

wee

. �lace
Toilet-

lee or

invisibl
wick �
anofal
11l100t�
Itubbo
01000,
nisow
on an

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some I

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No

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a�ain
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ilirou�
eleven
0150

�eopl
shine

Down the toilet, lookit me,
What a silly thing ta do!
Hope nobody takes a pee,
Yippy dippy dippy doo . .

At which precise point there comes this godawful surge from up the
line, noise growing like a tidal wave, a jam-packed wavefront of shit,
vomit, toilet paper and dingleberries in mind-boggling mosaic, rushingdown on panicky Slothrop like an MTA subway train on its own hapless
victim. Nowhere to run. Paralyzed, he stares back over his shoulder. A
looming wall stringing long tendrils of shitpaper behind, the shockwave
is on him-GAAHHH! he tries a feeble frog kick at the very last mo­
ment but already the cylinder of waste has wiped him out, dark as cold
beef gelatin along his upper backbone, the paper snapping up, wrap­
ping across his lips, his nostrils, everything gone and shit-stinking now as
he has to keep batting micro-turds out of his eyelashes, it's worse than
being torpedoed by J aps! the brown liquid tearing along, carrying him
helpless . . . seems he's been tumbling ass over teakettle-thoughthere's no way to tell in this murky shitstorm, no visual references ...
from time to time he will brush against shrubbery, or perhaps small
feathery trees. It occurs to him he hasn't felt the touch of a hard wall
since he started to tumble, if that indeed is what he's doing.

At some point the brown dusk around him has begun to lighten. Likethe dawn. Bit by bit his vertigo leaves him. The last wisps of shitpaper,halfway back to slurry, go . . . sad, dissolving, away. An eerie light
grows on him, a watery and marbled light he hopes won't last for longbecause of what it seems to promise to show. But "contacts" are livingin these waste regions. People he knows. Inside shells of old, what seem
to be fine-packed masonry ruins-weathered cell after cell, many ofthem roofless. Wood fires burn in black fireplaces, water simmers in
rusty institutional-size lima-bean cans, and the steam goes up the leakychimneys. And they sit about the worn flagstones, transacting some . . .he can't place it exactly ... something vaguely religious.... Bed­
rooms are fully furnished, with lights that turn and glow, velvet hungfrom walls and ceiling. Down to the last ignored blue bead clogged withdust under the Capehart, the last dried spider and complex ruffling of

66

one, I

onev!

electiG
and in
terrib]
iliatll



· noll

nstru�
t to t�

the carpet's nap, the intricacy of these dwellings amazes him. It is a

place of sheltering from disaster. Not necessarily the flushings of the
Toilet-these occur here only as a sort of inferred disturbance, behind
this ancient sky, in its corroded evenness of tone-but something else
has been terribly at this country, something poor soggy Slothrop cannot
see or hear . . . as if there is a Pearl Harbor every morning, smashing
invisibly from the sky. . . . He has toilet paper in his hair and a fuzzy
thick dingleberry lodged up inside his right nostril. Ugh, ugh. Decline
and fall works silently on this landscape. No sun, no moon, only a long
smooth sinewaving of the light. It is a Negro dingleberry, he can tell­
stubborn as a wintertime booger as he probes for it. His fingernails draw
blood. He stands outside all the communal rooms and spaces, outside in

his own high-desert morning, a reddish-brown hawk, two, hanging up
on an air current to watch the horizon. It's cold. The wind blows. He

can feel only his isolation. They want him inside there but he can't join
them. Something prevents him: once inside, it would be like taking
some kind of blood oath. They would never release him. There are no

guarantees he might not be asked to do something
... something

so ...

Now every loose stone, every piece of tinfoil, billet of wood, scrap
of

kindling or cloth is moving up and down: rising ten
feet then dropping

again to hit the pavement with a sharp clap.
The light is thick and

water-green. All down the streets, debris
rises and falls in unison, as if at

the mercy of some deep, regular wave. It's difficult to see any
distance

through the vertical dance. The drumming on the pavement goes
for

eleven beats, skips a twelfth, begins the cycle over . . . it is
the rhythm

of some traditional American tune.... The streets are
all empty of

people. It's either dawn or twilight. Parts of
the debris that are metal

shine with a hard, nearly blue persistence.
ugnten,l
oflni�?
neenr[
lastforlr
"arellii

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wnatl.'t

Now don't you remember Red
Malcolm up there,

That kid with the Red Devil Lye in his hair . . .

Here now is Crutchfield or Crouchfield, the westwardman.
Not "ar­

chetypical" westwardman, but the only. Understand,
there was only

one. There was only one Indian who ever fought him. Only
one fight,

one victory, one loss. And only one president,
and one assassin, and one

election. True. One of each of everything. You had thought of solipsism,
and imagined the structure to be populated-on your level-by only,

terribly, one. No count on any other levels.
But it proves to be not quite

that lonely. Sparse, yes, but a good deal
better than solitary. One of

67



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each of everything's not so bad. Half an Ark's better than none. This
Crutchfield here is browned by sun, wind and dirt-against the deep
brown slats of the barn or stable wall he is wood of a different grain and
finish. He is good-humored, solid-set against the purple mountainslope,
and looking half into the sun. His shadow is carried strained coarsely
back through the network of wood inside the stable-beams,
lodgepoles, stall uprights, trough-trestlework, rafters, wood ceiling-slats
the sun comes through: blinding empyrean even at this failing hour of
the day. There is somebody playing a mouth harp behind an outbuild­
ing-some musical glutton, mouth-sucking giant five-note chords be­
hind the tune of

One little hustler in San Berdoo,
One little chink run away from the railroad
With his ass just as yellow as Fu Manchu!
One with the clap and one with a goiter,
One with the terminal lepro-see,
Cripple on the right foot, cripple on the left foot,
Crippled up both feet 'n' that makes three!
Well one little fairy, even one bull dyke,
One little nigger, one little kike,
One Red Indian with one buffalo,
And a buffalo hunter from New Mexico

And �
ilie te

rnals
there'
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it up
meat

coat:

ofth(

RED RIVER VALLEY

Down this toilet they say you are flushin'­
Won'tchew light up and set fer a spell?
Cause the toilet it ain't going nowhar,
And the shit hereabouts shore is swell.

Oh, it's the Red River all right, if you don't believe it just ask that
"Red," wherever he may be (tell you what Red means, FDR's little ass­
hole buddies, they want to take it all away, women all have hair on their
legs, give it all to them or they'll blow it up round black iron in the mid­
dle of the night bleeding over Polacks in gray caps okies niggers yeh
niggers especially . . .)

Well, back here, Crutchfield's little pard has just come out of the
barn. His little pard of the moment, anyway. Crutchfield has left a
string of broken-hearted little pards across this vast alkali plain. One lit­
tle feeb in South Dakota,

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And on, and on, one of each of everything, he's the White Cocksman of
the terre mauvais, this Crouchfield, doing it with both sexes and all ani­
mals except for rattlesnakes (properly speaking, "rattlesnake," since
there's only one), but lately seems he's been havin' these fantasies about
that rattlesnake, too! Fangs just tickling the foreskin the pale
mouth open wide, and the horrible joy in the crescent eyes His lit-

tle pard of the moment is Whappo, a Norwegian mulatto lad, who has a
fetish for horsy paraphernalia, likes to be quirt-whipped inside the
sweat-and-leather tackrooms of their wandering, which is three weeks
old today, pretty long time for a little pard to've lasted. Whappo is

wearing chaps of imported gazelle hide that Crutchfield bought for
him

in Eagle Pass from a faro dealer with a laudanum habit who was
cross­

ing the great Rio forever, into the blank furnace of
the wild Mexico.

Whappo also sports a bandanna of the regulation magenta
and green

(Crutchfield is supposed to have a closetful of these silken scarves back
home at "Rancho Peligroso" and never rides out into the rock-country
and riverbed trails without a dozen or two stashed in his saddlebags.
This must mean that the one-of-each rule applies only to forms of life,
such as little pards, and not to objects, such as bandannas). And

Whappo tops off with a high shiny opera hat of Japanese
silk. Whappo

is quite the dandy this afternoon in fact, as he comes sauntering
out

from the barn.

"Ah, Crutchfield," flipping a hand, "how nice of you to show up."
"You knew I'd show up, you little rascal," shit that Whappo is such

a

caution. Always baiting his master in hopes of getting a
leather-keen

stripe or two across those dusky
Afro-Scandinavian buttocks, which

combine the callipygian rondure observed among the races of
the Dark

Continent with the taut and noble musculature of sturdy Olaf, our

blond Northern cousin. But this time Crutchfield only turns back to

watching the distant mountains. Whappo sulks.
His top hat reflects the

coming holocaust. What the white man
does not have to utter, however

causally, is anything like "Toro Hojo's gonna
be riding in tonight." Both

pardners know about that. The wind, bringing
them down that raw

Injun smell, ought to be enough for anybody.
Oh God it's gonna be a

shootout and bloody as hell. The wind will be blowing so
hard blood

will glaze on the north sides of the trees. The
redskin'll have a dog with

him, the only Indian dog in these whole ashen plains-the
cur will mix

it up with little Whappo and end hung
on the meathook of an open

meat stall in the dirt plaza back in Los Madres, eyes wide open, mangy
coat still intact, black fleas hopping against the sunlit mortar

and stone

of the church wall across the square, blood darkened
and crusting at the

69

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i

lesion in his neck where Whappo's teeth severed his jugular (and maybe co
some tendons, for the head dangles to one side). The hook enters in the in
back, between two vertebrae. Mexican ladies poke at the dead dog, and
it sways reluctantly in the forenoon market-smell of platanos for frying, rac
sweet baby carrots from the Red River Valley, trampled raw greens of ne
many kinds, cilantro smelling like animal musk, strong white onions, do
pineapples fermenting in the sun, about to blow up, great mottled
shelves of mountain mushroom. Slothrop moves among the bins and
hung cloths, invisible, among horses and dogs, pigs, brown-uniformed I l'militia, Indian women with babies slung in shawls, servants from the
pastel houses farther up the hillside-the plaza is seething with life, and
Slothrop is puzzled. Isn't there supposed to be only one of each?

A. Yes.

Q. Then one Indian girl . . .
A. One pure Indian. One mestiza. One criolla. Then: one Yaqui. One

Navaho. One Apache-
,

Q. Wait a minute, there was only one Indian to begin with. The one'
that Crutchfield killed.

A. Yes.
Look on it as an optimization problem. The country can best support

only one of each.
Q. Then what about all the others? Boston. London. The ones who

live in cities. Are those people real, or what?
A. Some are real, and some aren't.
Q. Well are the real ones necessary? or unnecessary?
A. It depends what you have in mind.
Q. Shit, I don't have anything in mind.
A. We do.
For a moment, ten thousand stiffs humped under. the snow in the Ar­

dennes take on the sunny Disneyfied look of numbered babies under
white wool blankets, waiting to be sent to blessed parents in places like
Newton Upper Falls. It only lasts a moment. Then for another moment
it seems that all the Christmas bells in the creation are about to join in
chorus-that all their random pealing will be, this one time, coordi­
nated, in harmony, present with tidings of explicit comfort, feasible joy.

But segway into the Roxbury hillside. Snow packs into the arches, the
crosshatchings of his black rubber soles. His Ar'tics clink when he
moves his feet. The snow in this slum darkness has the appearance of
soot in a negative . _. . it flows in and out of the night. . . . The brick
surfaces by daylight (he only sees them in very early dawn, aching in-side his overshoes, looking for cabs up and down the Hill) are flaming

70

TH
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corrosion, dense, deep, fallen upon by frosts again and again: historied
in a way he hasn't noticed in Beacon Street....

In the shadows, black and white holding in a panda-pattern across his
face, each of the regions a growth or mass of scar tissue, waits the con­
nection he's traveled all this way to see. The face is as weak as a house­

dog's, and its owner shrugs a lot.
Slothrop: Where is he? Why didn't he show? Who are you?
Voice: The Kid got busted. And you know me, Slothrop. Remember?

I'm Never.

Slothrop (peering): You, Never? (A pause.) Did the Kenosha Kid?

greem
ite oru�
at mo�
e bifll�
'Unl101iJt
tl rrom�
iili hl�,�
eacn�

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

eOflelll!

"Kryptosam" is a proprietary form of stabilized tyrosine, devel­

oped by IG Farben as part of a research contract with OKW.
An activating agent is included which, in the presence of some

component of the seminal fluid to date [1934] unidentified, pro­
motes conversion of the tyrosine into melanin, or skin pigment.
In the absence of seminal fluid, the "Kryptosam" remains invisi­
ble. No other known reagent, among those available to opera­
tives in the field, will alter "Kryptosam" to visible melanin. It is

suggested, in cryptographic applications, that a proper stimulus
be included with the message which will reliably produce tu­
mescence and ejaculation. A thorough knowledge of the ad­
dressee's psychosexual profile would seem of invaluable aid.

-PROF. DR. LASZLO JAMF,
"Kryptosam" (advertising brochure), Agfa, Berlin, 1934

winilid
abie) UD1

place)i
The drawing, on heavy cream paper under the black-letter inscription
GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE, is in pen and ink, very finely textured, some­

what after the style of von Bayros or Beardsley. The woman is a
dead

ringer for Scorpia Mossmoon. The room is
one they talked about but

never saw, a room they would have liked to live in one day,
with a

sunken pool, a silken tent draped from the ceiling-a
De Mille set re­

ally, slender and oiled girls in attendance, a suggestion
of midday light

coming through from overhead, Scorpia sprawled among
fat pillows

wearing exactly the corselette of Belgian lace,
the dark stockings and

shoes he daydreamed about often enough but never-

No, of course he never told her. He never
told anyone. Like everyachingw'

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young man growing up in England, he was conditioned to get a hardon
in the presence of certain fetishes, and then conditioned to feel shame
about his new reflexes. Could there be, somewhere, a dossier, could
They (They?) somehow have managed to monitor everything he saw
and read since puberty . . . how else would They know?

"Hush," she whispers. Her fingers stroke lightly her long olive thighs,
bare breasts swell from the top of her garment. Her face is toward the
ceiling, but her eyes are looking into Pirate's own, long, narrow with
lust, two points of light glittering through the thick lashes ... "I'll
leave him. We'll come here and live. We'll never stop making love. I be­
long to you, I've known that for a long time....

"

Her tongue licks out
over her little sharpened teeth. Her furry quim is at the center of all the
light, and there is a taste in his mouth he would feel again. . . .

Well, Pirate nearly doesn't make it, barely gets his cock out of his
trousers before he's spurting all over the place. Enough sperm saved,
though, to rub over the blank scrap enclosed with the picture. Slowly
then, a revelation through the nacreous film of his seed, in Negro­
brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition whose
keywords he can almost guess. Most of it he does in his head. There is a
time given, a place, a request for help. He burns the message, fallen on
him from higher than Earth's atmosphere, salvaged from Earth's prime
meridian, keeps the picture, hmm, and washes his hands. His prostate is
aching. There is more to this than he can see. He has no recourse, no ap­
peal: he has to go over there and bring the operative out again. The
message is tantamount to an order from the highest levels.

Far away, through the rain, comes the crack-blast of another German
rocket. The third today. They hunt the sky like Wuotan and his mad
army.

Pirate's own robot hands begin to search drawers and folders for nec­
essary vouchers and forms. No sleep tonight. Probably no chance even
to catch a cup or cigarette on route. Why?

D D D D D D D

In Germany, as the end draws upon us, the incessant walls read WAS
TUST DU FUR DIE FRONT, FUR DEN SIEC? WAS HAST DU HEUTE FUR
DEUTSCHLAND CETAN? At "The White Visitation" the walls read ice.
Graffiti of ice the sunless day, glazing the darkening blood brick and
terra cotta as if the house is to be preserved weatherless in some skin of
clear museum plastic, an architectural document, an old-fashioned ap-

72

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paratus whose use is forgotten. Ice of varying thickness, wavy, blurred,
a legend to be deciphered by lords of the winter, Glacists of the region,
and argued over in their journals. Uphill, toward the sea, snow gathers
like light at all windward edges of the ancient Abbey, its roof long ago
taken at the manic whim of Henry VIII, its walls left to stand and miti­
gate with saintless window-hollows the salt wind, blowing as the seasons
replay the grass floor in great cowlicks, green to blonde, to snow. From
the Palladian house down in its resentful and twilit hollow this is the

only view: the Abbey or else gentle, broadly mottled swoops of upland.
View of the sea denied, though certain days and tides you can smell it,
all your vile ancestry. In 1925 Reg Le Froyd, an inmate at "The White
Visitation," escaped-rushed through the upper town to stand teetering
at the edge of the cliff, hair and hospital garment flickering in the wind,
the swaying miles of south coast, pallid chalk, jetties and promenades
fading right and left into brine haze. After him came a Constable Stug­
gles, at the head of a curious crowd. "Don't jump!" cries the constable.

"I never thought of that," Le Froyd continuing to stare out to sea.
"Then what are you doing here. Eh?"
"Wanted to look at the sea," Le Froyd explains. "I've never seen it. I

am, you know, related, by blood, to the sea."
"Oh aye," sly Stuggles edging up on him all the while, "visiting your

relatives are you, how nice."
"I can hear the Lord of the Sea," cries Le Froyd, in wonder.
"Dear me, and what's his name?" Both of them wetfaced, shouting

for the wind.

"Oh, I don't know," yells Le Froyd, "what would be a good name?"
"Bert," suggests the constable, trying to remember if it's right hand

grasps left arm above elbow or left hand grasps . . .

Le Froyd turns, and for the first time sees the man, and the crowd.
His eyes grow round and mild. "Bert is fine," he says, and steps back
into the void.

That's all the townsfolk of Ick Regis had from "The White Visitation"
in the way of relief-from summers of staring at the pink or sun-freck­
led overflow from Brighton, Flotsam and Jetsam casting each day of
wireless history into song, sunsets on the promenade, lens openings for­
ever changing for the sea light, blown now brisk, now sedate about the

sky, aspirins for sleep-only Le Froyd's leap, that Single entertainment,
up till the outbreak of this war.

At the defeat of Poland, ministerial motorcades were suddenly ob­
served at all hours of the night, putting in at "The White Visitation," si­
lent as sloops, exhausts well mufHed-chromeless black machinery that

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shone if there were starlight, and otherwise enjoyed the camouflage of a
face about to be remembered, but through the act of memory fading too
far. ... Then at the fall of Paris, a radio transmitting station was set up
on the cliff, antennas aimed at the Continent, themselves heavily
guarded and their landlines back mysteriously over the downs to the
house patrolled night and day by dogs specially betrayed, belted,
starved into reflex leaps to kill, at any human approach. Had one of the
Very High gone higher-that is, dotty? Was Our Side seeking to demor­
alize the German Beast by broadcasting to him random thoughts of the
mad, naming for him, also in the tradition of Constable Stuggles that fa­
mous day, the deep, the scarcely seen? The answer is yes, all of the
above, and more.

Ask them at "The White Visitation" about the master plan of the
BBC's eloquent Myron Grunton, whose melted-toffee voice has been
finding its way for years out the fraying rust boucle of the wireless
speakers and into English dreams, foggy old heads, children at the edges
of attention. . . . He's had to keep putting his plan off, at first only a
voice alone, lacking the data he really needed, no support, trying to get
at the German soul from whatever came to hand, P /W interrogations,
Foreign Office Handbooks, the brothers Grimm, tourist memories of his
own (young sleepless Dawes-era flashes, vineyards sunlit very green
bearding the south valley-slopes of the Rhine, at night in the smoke and
worsted cabarets of the capital long frilled suspenders like rows of car­
nations, silk stockings highlighted each in one long fine crosshatching of
light . . . ). But at last the Americans came in, and the arrangement
known as SHAEF, and an amazing amount of money.

The scheme is called Operation Black Wing. My what a careful con­
struction, five years in the making. No one could claim it all as his own,
not even Grunton. It was General Eisenhower who laid down the con­
trolling guideline, the "strategy of truth" idea. Something "real," Ike in­
sisted on: a hook on the war's pocked execution-wall to hang the storyfrom. Pirate Prentice of the S.O.E. came back with the first hard intelli­
gence that there were indeed in Germany real Africans, Hereros, ex-co­
lonials from South-West Africa, somehow active in the secret-weapons
program. Myron Grunton, inspired, produced on the air one night com­
pletely ad lib the passage that found its way into the first Black Wing di­
rective: "Germany once treated its Africans like a stern but loving step­father, chastising them when necessary, often with death. Remember?
But that was far away in Siidwest, and since then a generation has gone
by. Now the Herero lives in his stepfather's house. Perhaps you, listen­
ing, have seen him. Now he stays up past the curfews, and watches his

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stepfather while he sleeps, invisible, protected by the night which is his
own colour. What are they all thinking? Where are the Hereros tonight?
What are they doing, this instant, your dark, secret children?" And
Black Wing has even found an American, a Lieutenant Slothrop, willing
to go under light narcosis to help illuminate racial problems in his own
country. An invaluable extra dimension. Toward the end, as more for­

eign morale data began to come back-Yank pollsters with clipboards
and squeaky new shoe-pacs or galoshes visiting snow-softened liberated
ruins to root out the trufHes of truth created, as ancients surmised, dur­

ing storm, in the instant of lightning blast-a contact in American PWD
was able to bootleg copies and make them available to "The White Vis­
itation." No one is sure who suggested the name "Schwarzkomrnando."

Myron Crunton had favored "Wiitende Heer," that company of spirits
who ride the heaths of the sky in furious hunt, with great Wuotan at
their head-but Myron agreed that was more a northern myth. Effec­
tiveness in Bavaria might be less than optimum.

They all talk effectiveness, an American heresy, perhaps overmuch at
"The White Visitation." Loudest of all, usually, is Mr. Pointsman, often

using for ammo statistics provided him by Roger Mexico. By the time of
the Normandy landing, Pointsman's season of despair was well upon
him. He came to understand that the great continental pincers was to

be, after all, a success. That this war, this State he'd come to feel himself

a citizen of, was to be adjourned and reconstituted as a peace-and
that, professionally speaking, he'd hardly got a thing out of it. With

funding available for all manner of radars, magic torpedoes, aircraft
and

missiles, where was Pointsman in the scheme of things? He'd had a mo­
ment's stewardship, that was all: his Abreaction Research Facility
(ARF), early on snaring himself a dozen underlings, dog trainer from the

variety stage, veterinary student or two, even a major prize,
the refugee

Dr. Porkyevitch, who worked with Pavlov himself at the Koltushy
insti­

tute, back before the purge trials. Together the ARF team receive,
number, weigh, classify by Hippocratic temperament, cage, and pres­
ently experiment on as many as a dozen fresh dogs a week.

And there

are one's colleagues, co-owners of The Book, all now-all those left
of

the original seven-working in hospitals handling the battle-fatigued
and shell-shocked back from across the Channel, and the bomb- or

rocket-happy this side. They get to watch more abreactions, during
these days of heavy V-bombardment, than doctors of an

earlier day
were apt to see in several lifetimes, and they are able

to suggest ever

new lines of inquiry. P.W.E. allows a stingy dribble of money, desperate

paper whispering down the corporate lattice, enough
to get by on,

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75



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enough that ARF remains a colony to the metropolitan war, but not
enough for nationhood. . . . Mexico's statisticians chart for it drops of
saliva, body weights, voltages, sound levels, metronome frequencies,
bromide dosages, number of afferent nerves cut, percentages of brain
tissue removed, dates and hours of numbing, deafening, blinding, cas­
tration. Support even comes from Psi Section, a colony degage and doc­
ile, with no secular aspirations at all.

Old Brigadier Pudding can live with this spiritualist gang well
enough, he's tendencies himself in that direction. But Ned Pointsman,
with his constant scheming after more money-Pudding can only stare
back at the man, try to be civil. Not as tall as his father, certainly not as
wholesome looking. Father was M.O. in Thunder Prodd's regiment,
caught a bit of shrapnel in the thigh at Polygon Wood, lay silent for
seven hours before they, without a word before, in that mud, that terri­
ble smell, in, yes Polygon Wood ... or was that-who was the ginger­
haired chap who slept with his hat on? ahhh, come back. Now Polygon
Wood ... but it's fluttering away. Fallen trees, dead, smooth gray,
swirlinggrainoftreelikefrozensmoke . . . ginger . . . thunder . . . no
use, no bleeding use, it's gone, another gone, another, oh dear ...

The old Brigadier's age is uncertain, though he must be pushing 80-
reactivated in 1940, set down in a new space not only of battlefield­
where the front each day or hour changes like a noose, like the gold-lit
borders of consciousness (perhaps, though it oughtn't to get too sinister
here, exactly like them ... better, then, "like a noose")-but also of the
War-state itself, its very structure. Pudding finds himself wondering, at
times aloud and in the presence of subordinates, what enemy disliked
him enough to assign him to Political Warfare. One is supposed to be
operating in concert-yet too often in amazing dissonance-with other
named areas of the War, colonies of that Mother City mapped wherever
the enterprise is systematic death: P.W.E. laps over onto the Ministry of
Information, the BBC European Service, the Special Operations Execu­
tive, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and the F.O. Political Intelli­
gence Department at Fitzmaurice House. Among others. When the
Americans came in, their OSS, OWl, and Army Psychological Warfare
Department had also to be coordinated with. Presently there arose the
joint, SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), reporting direct
to Eisenhower, and to hold it all together a London Propaganda Coordi­
nating Council, which has no real power at all.

Who can find his way about this lush maze of initials, arrows solid
and dotted, boxes big and small, names printed and memorized? Not

�ent,

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Ernest Pudding-that's for the New Chaps with their little green anten­
nas out for the usable emanations of power, versed in American politics
(knowing the difference between the New Dealers of OWl and the east­
ern and moneyed Republicans behind OSS), keeping brain-dossiers on
latencies, weaknesses, tea-taking habits, erogenous zones of all, all who
might someday be useful.

Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Com­
mand, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being.
The newer geometries confuse him. His greatest triumph on the bat­
tlefield came in 1917, in the gassy, Armageddonite filth of the Ypres sa­
lient, where he conquered a bight of no man's land some 40 yards at its
deepest, with a wastage of only 70% of his unit. He was pensioned off
around the beginning of the Great Depression-went to sit in the study
of an empty house in Devon, surrounded by photos of old comrades,
none of whose gazes quite met one's own, there to go at a spot of com­
binatorial analysis, that favorite pastime of retired Army officers, with a

rattling intense devotion.
It occurred to him to focus his hobby on the European balance of

power, because of whose long pathology he had once labored, deeply,
all hope of waking lost, in the nightmare of Flanders. He started in on a
mammoth work entitled Things That Can Happen in European Politics.

Begin, of course, with England. "First," he wrote, "Bereshith, as it
were: Ramsay MacDonald can die." By the time he went through re­

sulting party alignments and possible permutations of cabinet posts,
Ramsay MacDonald had died. "Never make it," he found

himself mut­

tering at the beginning of each day's work-"it's changing out from
under me. Oh, dodgy-very dodgy."

When it had changed as far as German bombs falling on England,
Brigadier Pudding gave up his obsession and again volunteered

his serv­

ices to his country. Had he known at the time it would
mean "The

White Visitation" . . . not that he'd expected a combat assignment you
know, but wasn't there something mentioned about intelligence work?
Instead he found a disused hospital for the mad, a few token lunatics, an
enormous pack of stolen dogs, cliques of spiritualists, vaudeville enter­
tainers, wireless technicians, Coueists, Ouspenskians, Skinnerites, lobot­

omy enthusiasts, Dale Carnegie zealots, all exiled by
the outbreak of

war from pet schemes and manias damned, had the peace prolonged
it­

self, to differing degrees of failure-but their hopes now focusing
on

Brigadier Pudding and possibilities for funding: more hope than Prewar,
that underdeveloped province, ever offered. Pudding could only

re-roMW,

)rizeo� \
77



spond by adopting rather an Old Testament style with everyone, includ­
ing the dogs, and remaining secretly baffled and hurt by what he imag­ined as treachery high inside Staff.

Snowlight comes in through tall, many-paned windows, a dark day, a
light burning only here and there among the brown offices. Subalterns
encrypt, blindfolded subjects call Zener-deck guesses to hidden micro­
phones: "Waves ... Waves ... Cross ... Star ... " While some­
one from Psi Section records them from a speaker down in the cold
basement. Secretaries in woolen shawls and rubber galoshes shiver with
the winter cold being inhaled through the madhouse's many crevices,
their typewriter keys chattery as their pearlies. Maud Chilkes, who
looks from the rear rather like Cecil Beaton's photograph of Margot As­
quith, sits dreaming of a bun and a cup of tea.

In the ARF wing, the stolen dogs sleep, scratch, recall shadowy smellsof humans who may have loved them, listen undrooling to Ned Points­
man's oscillators and metronomes. The drawn shades allow only mild
passages of light from outdoors. Technicians are moving behind the
thick observation window, but their robes, greenish and submarine
through the glass, Hutter more slowly, less brightly.... A numbness
has taken over, or a felt darkening. The metronome at 80 per secondbreaks out in wooden echoes, and Dog Vanya, bound atop the test
stand, begins to salivate. All other sounds are damped severely: thebeams underpinning the lab smothered in sand-filled rooms, sandbags,
straw, uniforms of dead men occupying the spaces between the win­
dowless walls . . . where the country bedlamites sat around, scowling,sniffing nitrous oxide, giggling, weeping at an E-major chord modulatingto a G-sharp minor, now are cubical deserts, sand-rooms, keeping themetronome sovereign here in the lab, behind the iron doors, closed her­
metically.

The duct of Dog Vanya's submaxillary gland was long ago carried outthe bottom of his chin through an incision and sutured in place, leadingsaliva outside to the collecting funnel, fixed there with the traditional
orange Pavlovian Cement of rosin, iron oxide and beeswax. Vacuum
brings the secretion along through shining tubework to displace a col­
umn of light red oil, moving to the right along a scale marked off in
"drops"-an arbitrary unit, probably not the same as the actually fallendrops of 1905, of St. Petersburg. But the number of drops, for this laband Dog Vanya and the metronome at 80, is each time predictable.Now that he has moved into "equivalent" phase, the first of the
transmarginal phases, a membrane, hardly noticeable, stretches be­
tween Dog Vanya and the outside. Inside and outside remain just as

78

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ce



they were, but the interface-the cortex of Dog Vanya's brain-is
changing, in any number of ways, and that is the really peculiar thing
about these transmarginal events. It no longer matters now how loudly
the metronome ticks. A stronger stimulus no longer gets a stronger re­
sponse. The same number of drops flow or fall. The man comes and re­
moves the metronome to the farthest corner of this muffled room. It is

placed inside a box, beneath a pillow with the machine-sewn legend
Memories of Brighton, but the drops do not fall off . . . then played into
a microphone and amplifier so that each tick fills the room up like a
shout, but the drops do not increase. Every time, the clear saliva pushes
the red line over only to the same mark, the same number of
drops....

Webley Silvernail and Rollo Groast go sneaky-Peteing away down the
corridors, nipping into people's offices to see if there are any smokable
fag-ends to be looted. Most offices right now are empty: all personnel
with the patience or masochism for it are going through a bit of ritual
with the doddering Brigadier.

"That old-ma� has, no-shame," Ceza Rozsavolgyi, another refugee
(and violently anti-Soviet, which creates a certain strain with ARF)
flicking his hands up Brigadier Puddingward in gay despair, the lilting
Hungarian gypsy-whisper bashing like tambourines all around the room,
provoking, in one way or another, everyone here except for the aged
Brigadier himself, who just goes rambling on from the pulpit of what
was a private chapel once, back there on the maniac side of the t.Sth

century, and is now a launching platform for "The Weekly Briefings," a
most amazing volley of senile observations, office paranoia, gossip about
the War which might or might not include violations of security, remi­
niscences of Flanders . . . the coal boxes in the sky coming straight
down on you with a roar . . . the drumfire so milky and luminous on his

birthday night ... the wet surfaces in the shell craters for miles giving
back one bleak autumn sky . . . what Haig, in the richness of his wit,
once said at mess about Lieutenant Sassoon's refusal to fight . . . the

gunners in springtime, in their flowing green robes . . . roadsides
of

poor rotting horses just before apricot sunrise . . . the twelve spokes
of

a stranded artillery piece-a mud clock, a mud zodiac, clogged and
crusted as it stood in the sun its many shades of brown. The mud of

Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures
of

human shit, piled, duckboarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues
of

shit in all directions, not even the poor blackened stump of a tree-and

the old blithering gab-artist tries to shake the cherrywood pulpit here,
as if that had been the worst part of the whole Passchendaele horror,

ocarn�
lace,l�:
e traill�!.
ax, Varu.

79



that absence of vertical interest. . . . On he goes, gabbing, gabbing, rec­
ipes for preparing beets in a hundred tasty ways, or such cucurbitaceous
improbabilities as Ernest Pudding's Gourd Surprise-yes, there is some­
thing sadistic about recipes with "Surprise" in the title, chap who's hun-
gry wants to just eat you know, not be Surprised really, just wants to w�bite into the (sigh) the old potato, and be reasonably sure there's noth- ve.
ing inside but potato you see, certainly not some clever nutmeg "Sur- . II
prise!", some mashed pulp all magenta with pomegranates or something no
. . . well but this is just the doubtful sort of joke that Brigadier Pud- �n(
ding loves to play: how he's chuckled, as unsuspecting dinner-guests goknifing into his notorious Toad-in-the-Hole, through the honest York- �cl
shire batter into-ugh! what is it? a beet rissole? a stuffed beet rissole? lo�
or perhaps today some lovely pureed samphire, reeking of the sea ca
(which he obtains once a week from the same fat fishmonger's son �nwheeling his bicycle, puffing, up the chalkwhite cliff)-none of these �1
odd, odd vegetable rissoles do resemble any ordinary "Toad," but rather
the depraved, half-sentient creatures that Young Chaps from Kings 1Road have Affairs With in limericks-Pudding has thousands of these liE
recipes and no shame about sharing any of them with the lot at PISCES, nOjalong with, later in the weekly soliloquy, a line or two, eight bars, from uel"Would You Rather Be a Colonel with an Eagle on Your Shoulder, or a re�Private with a Chicken on Your Knee?" then perhaps a lengthy recita-tion of all his funding difficulties, all, dating back to long before the fie:
emergence of even the Electra House group . . . letter-feuds he has In
carried on in the Times with critics of Haig. . . . �ee

And they all sit there, in front of the very high, blacked, lead-crossed
windows, allowing him his folly, the dog people skulking over in one
corner, passing notes and leaning to whisper (they plot, they plot, sleep-ing or afoot they never let up), the Psi Section lot clear over the other

Iside of the room-as if we have a parliament of some kind here . . . ev- �coeryone for years has occupied his own unique pew-seat and angle in to �ethe ravings of reddish and liver-spotted Brigadier Pudding-with theother persuasions-in-exile spread between these two wings: the balance �loof power, if any power existed at "The White Visitation." forDr. Hozsavolgyi feels that there well might, if the fellows "play their I��cards right." The only issue now is survival-on through the awful in- un!terface of V-E Day, on into the bright new Postwar with senses and jecmemories intact. PISCES must not be allowed to go down under the 1 in�hammer with the rest of the bawling herd. There must arise, and ell/'damned soon, able to draw them into a phalanx, a concentrated point of orolight, some leader or program powerful enough to last them across who
�e�

80



knows how many years of Postwar. Dr. Rozsavolgyi tends to favor a
powerful program over a powerful leader. Maybe because this is 1945·
It was widely believed in those days that behind the War-all the
death, savagery, and destruction-lay the FUhrer-principle. But if per­
sonalities could be replaced by abstractions of power, if techniques de­
veloped by the corporations could be brought to bear, might not nations
live rationally? One of the dearest Postwar hopes: that there should be
no room for a terrible disease like charisma ... that its rationalization

should proceed while we had the time and resources. . . .
Isn't that what's really at stake for Dr. Bozsavolgyi here in this latest

scheme, centered on the figure of Lieutenant Slothrop? All the psycho­
logical tests in the subject's dossier, clear back to his college days, indi­
cate a diseased personality. "Rosie" slaps the file with his hand for em­

phasis. The staff table shudders. "For exam-pIe: his Minneso-ta,
Mul-tipha-sic Personality Inventory is tremen-dously lopsi-ded, always
in fa-vor of, the psycho-pathic, and, the unwhole-some."

But the Reverend Dr. Paul de la Nuit is not fond of the MMPI.

"Rosie, are there scales for measuring interpersonal traits?" Hawk's
nose probing, probing, eyes lowered in politic meekness, "Human val­
ues? Trust, honesty, love? Is there-forgive me the special pleading-a
religious scale, by any chance?"

No way, padre: the MMPI was developed about 1943. In the very
heart of the War. Allport and Vernon's Study of Values, the Bernreuter

Inventory as revised by Flanagan in '35-tests from before the War­
seem to Paul de la Nuit more humane. All the MMPI appears to test for

is whether a man will be a good or bad soldier.
"Soldiers are much in demand these days, Reverend Doctor," mur-

murs Mr. Pointsman.

"I only hope that we won't put too much emphasis on his
MMPI

scores. It seems to me very narrow. It omits large areas of the human

personality."
"Precise-ly why," leaps Rozsavolgyi, "we are now proposing, to give,

Sloth-rop a complete-Iy dif-ferent sort, of test. We are now design-ing
for him, a so-called, 'projec-tive' test. The most famil-iar exam-pIe of the

type, is the Rorschach ink-blot. The ba-sic theory, is,
that when given an

unstruc-tured stimulus, some shape-less blob of exper-ience, the sub­

ject, will seek to impose, struc-ture on it. How,
he goes a-bout struc-tur­

ing this blob, will reflect his needs, his hopes-will provide,
us with

clues, to his dreams, fan-tasies, the deepest re-gions of his mind." Eye­
brows going a mile a minute, extraordinarily fluid

and graceful hand

gestures, resembling-most likely it is deliberate,
and who can blame

81

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Rosie for trying to cash in-those of his most famous compatriot, thoughtherc're the inevitable bad side-effects: staff who swear they've seen
him crawling headfirst down the north facade of "The "White Visita­
tion," for example. "So we are re-ally, quite, in agree-ment, Reverend
Doctor. A test, like the MMPI, is, in this respect, not adequate. It is, a
struc-tured stimulus. The sub-ject can fal-sify, consciously, or repress,
un-consciously. But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do,
con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from fin-ding what we wish, to
know. We, are in control. He, cannot help, himself."

"Must say it doesn't sound like your cup of tea, Pointsman," smiles
Dr. Aaron Throwster. "Your stimuli are more the structured sort, aren't
they?"

"Let's say I find a certain shameful fascination."
"Let's not. Don't tell me you're going to keep your fine Pavlovian

hand completely out of this."
"Well, not completely, Throwster, no. Since you've brought it up.We also happen to have in mind a very structured stimulus. Same one,

in fact, that got us interested to begin with. We want to expose Slothropto the German rocket. . . ."
Overhead, on the molded plaster ceiling, Methodist versions of

Christ's kingdom swarm: lions cuddle with lambs, fruit spills lushly andwithout pause into the arms and about the feet of gentlemen and ladies,
swains and milkmaids. No one's expression is quite right. The wee crea­
tures leer, the fiercer beasts have a drugged or sedated look, and none of
the humans have any eye-contact at all. The ceilings of "The White Vis­
itation" aren't the only erratic thing about the place, either. It is a
classic "folly," all right. The buttery was designed as an Arabian harem
in miniature, for reasons we can only guess at today, full of silks, fret­
work and peepholes. One of the libraries served, for a time, as a wallow,
the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud up to the thresholdsfor giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to frolic, oink, and cool their sum­
mers in, to stare at the shelves of buckram books and wonder if they'dbe good eating. -whig eccentricity is carried in this house to most un­
healthy extremes. The rooms are triangular, spherical, walled up into
mazes. Portraits, studies in genetic curiosity, gape and smirk at you from
every vantage. The W.C.s contain frescoes of Clive and his elephants
stomping the French at Plassy, fountains that depict Salome with the
head of John (water gushing out ears, nose, and mouth), floor mosaics in
which are tessellated together different versions of Homo Monstrosus,
an interesting preoccupation of the time-cyclops, humanoid giraffe,centaur repeated in all directions. Everywhere are archways, grottoes,

82

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plaster floral arrangements, walls hung in threadbare velvet or brocade.
Balconies give out at unlikely places, overhung with gargoyles whose

fangs have fetched not a few newcomers nasty cuts on the head. Even
in the worst rains, the monsters only just manage to drool-the rain­

pipes feeding them are centuries out of repair, running
crazed over

slates and beneath eaves, past cracked pilasters, dangling Cupids, terra­
cotta facing on every floor, along with belvederes, rusticated joints,
pseudo-Italian columns, looming minarets, leaning crooked chimneys­
from a distance no two observers, no matter how close they stand, see

quite the same building in that orgy of self-expression, added
to by each

succeeding owner, until the present War's requisitioning. Topiary
trees

line the drive for a distance before giving way to larch and elm: ducks,

bottles, snails, angels, and steeplechase riders they dwindle down the
metaled road into their fallow silence, into the shadows under the tun­

nel of sighing trees. The sentry, a dark figure in white webbing,
stands

port-arms in your masked headlamps, and you must
halt for him. The

dogs, engineered and lethal, are watching you
from the woods. Pres­

ently, as evening comes on, a few bitter Hakes of
snow begin to fall.

avlmu

D D D D D D D

Better behave yourself or we'll send you back to Dr. Jamf!

When Jamf conditioned him, he threw away the
stimulus.

Looks like Dr. Jamfs been by to see your little thing
today, hasn't he?

-Neil Nosepicket's Book of 50,000 Insults,
§6.72, "Awful Offspring,"
The Nayland Smith Press,

Cambridge (Mass.), 1933

PUDDING: But isn't this­

POINTSMAN: Sir?
PUDDING: Isn't it all rather shabby, Pointsman? Meddling with an­

other man's mind this way?
POINTSMAN: Brigadier, we're only following in a long

line of experi­
ment and questioning. Harvard University, the

U.S. Army? Hardly

sai�a shabby institutions.
strOM PUDDING: We can't, Pointsman,

it's beastly.

�r�f POINTSMAN: But the
Americans have already been at him! don't you

ottoei see? It's not as if we're corrupting
a virgin or something-



--�---
--' .

//'j-�"""'!. . .. 0 •• _:........ • •••• • •••••• "::l

PUDDING: Do we have to do it because the Americans do it? Must we
allow them to corrupt us?

Back around 1920, Dr. Laszlo J amf opined that if Watson and Raynercould successfully condition their "Infant Albert" into a reflex horror of
everything furry, even of his own Mother in a fur boa, then Jamf couldcertainly do the same thing for his Infant Tyrone, and the baby's sexualreflex. Jamf was at Harvard that year, visiting from Darmstadt. It was in
the early part of his career, before he phased into organic chemistry (tobe as fateful a change of field as Kekule's own famous switch into chem­
istry from architecture, a century before). For the experiment he had aslender grant from the National Research Council (under a continuingNRC program of psychological study which had begun during theWorld War, when methods were needed for selecting officers and classi­
fying draftees). Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his tar­
get reflex, chose an infant hardon. Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did,would have meant surgery. Measuring "fear," the reflex Watson chose,would have brought in too much subjectivity (what's fear? How much is"a lot"? Who decides, when it's on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn'ttime to go through the long slow process of referring it up to the FearBoard?). Instrumentation just wasn't available in those days. The besthe might've done was the Larson-Keeler three-variable "lie detector,"but at the time it was still only experimental.

But a hardon, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The jobof observing it can even be done by a student.
Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cottonswab.
Unconditioned response = hardon.
Conditioned stimulus = x.
Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is nolonger necessary, all you need is that x.
Uh, x? well, what's x? Why, it's the famous "Mystery Stimulus" that'sfascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is.The average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches peryear on the subject, which ironically is the exact mean length J amf re­ported for Infant T.' s erection.
Now ordinarily, according to tradition in these matters, the littlesucker would have been de-conditioned. Jamf would have, in Pavlovian

terms, "extinguished" the hardon reflex he'd built up, before he let thebaby go. Most likely he did. But as Ivan Petrovich himself said, "Notonly must we speak of partial or of complete extinction of a conditionedreflex, but we must also realize that extinction can proceed beyond the

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point of reducing a reflex to zero. We cannot therefore judge the degree
of extinction only by the magnitude of the reflex or its absence, since
there can still be a silent extinction beyond the zero." Italics are Mr.
Pointsman's.

Can a conditioned reflex survive in a man, dormant, over 20 or 30

years? Did Dr. Jamf extinguish only to zero-wait till the infant showed
zero hardons in the presence of stimulus x, and then stop? Did he for­
get-or ignore-the "silent extinction beyond the zero"? If he ignored
it, why? Did the National Research Council have anything to say about
that?

When Slothrop was discovered, late in 1944, by "The White Visita­
tion"-though many there have always known him as the famous Infant
Tyrone-like the New World, different people thought they'd discov­
ered different things.

Roger Mexico thinks it's a statistical oddity. But he feels the founda­
tions of that discipline trembling a bit now, deeper than oddity ought to
drive. Odd, odd, odd-think of the word: such white finality in its clos­

ing clap of tongue. It implies moving past the tongue-stop-bey�md the
zero-and into the other realm. Of course you don't move past. But you
do realize, intellectually, that's how you ought to be moving.

Rollo Groast thinks it's precognition. "Slothrop is able to predict
when a rocket will fall at a particular place. His survival to date is evi­
dence he's acted on advance information, and avoided the area at the

time the rocket was supposed to fall." Dr. Groast is not sure how, or
even if, sex comes into it.

But Edwin Treacle, that most Freudian of psychical researchers,
thinks Slothrop's gift is psychokinesis. Slothrop is, with the force of his
mind, causing the rockets to drop where they do. He may not be physi­
cally highballing them about the sky: but maybe he is fooling with the
electrical signals inside the rocket's guidance system. However he's

doing it, sex does come into Dr. Treacle's theory. "He subconsciously
needs to abolish all trace of the sexual Other, whom he symbolizes on
his map, most significantly, as a star, that anal-sadistic emblem of class­
room success which so permeates elementary education in Amer-

ica. . . ."
It's the map that spooks them all, the map Slothrop's been keeping on

his girls. The stars fall in a Poisson distribution, just like the
rocket

strikes on Roger Mexico's map of the Robot Blitz.
But, well, it's a bit more than the distribution. The two patterns also

happen to be identical. They match up square for square.
The slides

that Teddy Bloat's been taking of Slothrop's map have been projected
85

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onto Roger's, and the two images, girl-stars and rocket-strike circles,
demonstrated to coincide.

Helpfully, Slothrop has dated most of his stars. A star always comes
before its corresponding rocket strike. The strike can come as quickly as
two days, or as slowly as ten. The mean lag is about 4 Yz days.

Suppose, Pointsman argues, that Strobe's stimulus x was some loud
noise, as it was in the Watson-Rayner experiment. Suppose that, in Slo­
throp's case, the hardon reflex wasn't completely extinguished. In that
case he ought to be getting one on at any loud noise that's preceded bythe same kind of ominous buildup he would've found in Jamf's lab-as
dogs to this day find in Pointsman's own lab. That points to the V-1: anydoodle close enough to make him jump ought to be giving him an erec­
tion: the sound of the motor razzing louder and louder, then the cutoff
and silence, suspense building up-then the explosion. Boing, a hardon.
But oh, no. Slothrop instead only gets erections when this sequence
happens in reverse. Explosion first, then the sound of approach: the V-2.

But the stimulus, somehow, must be the rocket, some precursor
wraith, some rocket's double present for Slothrop in the percentage ofsmiles on a bus, menstrual cycles being operated upon in some mysteri­
ous way-what does make the little doxies do it for free? Are there
fluctuations in the sexual market, in pornography or prostitutes, perhaps
tying in to prices on the Stock Exchange itself, that we clean-living lot
know nothing about? Does news from the front affect the itch between
their pretty thighs, does desire grow directly or inversely as the real
chance of sudden death-damn it, what cue, right in front of our eyes,that we haven't the subtlety of heart to see? . . .

But if it's in the air, right here, right now, then the rockets follow
from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions. When we find it, we'll have
shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul. There
will be precious little room for any hope at all. You can see how impor­
tant a discovery like that would be.

They walk down past the snow-drifted kennel runs, Pointsman in
Glastonburys and fawn-colored British warm, Mexico wearing a scarf
Jessica's lately knitted him whipping landward a scarlet dragon's
tongue-this day the coldest so far of the winter, 39 degrees of frost.Down to the cliffs, faces freezing, down to the deserted beach. Waves
run up, slide away to leave great crescents of ice fine as skin and daz­
zling in the weak sunlight. The boots of the two men crunch through tosand or shingle. The very bottom of the year. They can hear the guns inFlanders today, all the way across the Channel on the wind. The Ab­
bey's ruin stands gray and crystal up on the cliff.

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circl� Last night, in the house at the edge of the stay-away town, Jessica,
snuggling, afloat, just before sleep was to take them, whispered, "Roger
... what about the girls?" That was all she said. But it brought Roger
wide awake. And bone-tired as he was, he lay staring for another hour,
wondering about the girls.

Now, knowing he ought to let it go, "Pointsrnan, what if Edwin Trea­
cle is right? That it's PK. What if Slothrop's-not even consciously­
making them fall where they do?"

"Well. You lot'd have something then, wouldn't you."
"But . . . why should he. If they are falling wherever he's been-"

"Perhaps he hates women."
"I'm serious."

"Mexico. Are you actually worried?"
"I don't know. Perhaps I wondered if it might tie in, in any way, with

your ultraparadoxical phase. Perhaps ... I want to know what you're
really looking for."

Above them now throb a flight of B-17s, bound somewhere uncom­
mon today, well out of the usual corridors of flight. Behind these For­
tresses the undersides of the cold clouds are blue, and their smooth bil­

lows are veined in blue-elsewhere touched with grayed-out pink or

purple.... Wings and stabilizers are shadowed
underneath in dark

gray. The shadows softly feather lighter up around
curves of fuselage or

nacelle. Spinners emerge from hooded dark inside the cowlings, spin­

ning props invisible, the light of the sky catching all
vulnerable surfaces

a uniform bleak gray. The planes drone along, stately, up in the
zero

sky, shedding frost as it builds, sowing the sky behind
in white ice-fur­

rows, their own color matching certain degrees of cloud, all the tiny
windows and openings in soft blackness, the perspex nose shining

back

forever warped and streaming cloud and sun. Inside it is
black obsidian.

Pointsman has been talking about paranoia and the "idea of the oppo­
site." He has scribbled in The Book exclamation points and how trues

all about the margins of Pavlov's open letter to Janet concerning
the

sentiments d'emprise, and of Chapter LV, "An Attempt at a Physiologi­
cal Interpretation of Obsessions and of Paranoia"

-he can't help this bit

of rudeness, although the agreement among the seven
owners was not

to mark up The Book-it was too
valuable for that sort of thing, they'd

had to put in a guinea apiece. It was sold
him on the sly, in the dark,

during a Luftwaffe raid (most existing copies
had been destroyed in

their warehouse early in the Battle of Britain). Pointsman
never even

saw the seller's face, the man vanishing into the hoarse auditory dawn of

the all-clear, leaving the doctor and The Book, the dumb
sheaf already

87



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heating up, moistening in his tight hand . . . yes it might have been a
rare work of erotica, certainly that coarse hand-set look to the type ...
the crudities in phrasing, as if Dr. Horsley Gantt's odd translation were
in cipher: the plaintext listing shameful delights, criminal transports.
. . . And how much of the pretty victim straining against her bonds
does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that visits his test stands ... and
aren't scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip andcane?

Surely the volume preceding The Book-the first Forty-one Lectures
-came to him at age 28 like a mandate from the submontane Venus he
could not resist: to abandon Harley Street for a journey more and more
deviant, deliciously on, into a labyrinth of conditioned-reflex work in
which only now, thirteen years along the clew, he's beginning to circle
back, trip across old evidence of having come that path before, here and
there to confront consequences of his younger, total embrace. . . . But
she did warn him-did she not? was he ever listening?-of the deferred
payment, in its full amount. Venus and Ariadne! She seemed worth any
price, the labyrinth looking, in those days, too intricate for them-the
twilit pimps who made the arrangement between a version of himself, a
crypto- Pointsman, and his fate . . . too varied, he thought then, ever tofind him in. But he knows now. Too far in, preferring not to face it just
yet, he knows that they only wait, stone and sure-these agents of the
Syndicate she must also pay-wait in the central chamber, as he draws
closer. . . . They own everything: Ariadne, the Minotaur, even, Points­
man fears, himself. He gets flashes of them these days, naked, athletes
poised and breathing about the chamber, terrible penises up mineral astheir eyes, which glisten with frost or flakes of mica, but not with lust,
or for him. It's only a job they have. . . .

"Pierre Janet-sometimes the man talked like an Oriental mystic. Hehad no real grasp of the opposites. 'The act of injuring and the act of
being injured are joined in the behavior of the whole injury.' Speakerand spoken-of, master and slave, virgin and seducer, each pair mostconveniently coupled and inseparable- The last refuge of the incorrigi­bly lazy, Mexico, is just this sort of yang-yin rubbish. One avoids all
manner of unpleasant lab work that way, but what has one said?"

"I don't want to get into a religious argument with you," absence ofsleep has Mexico more cranky today than usual, "but I wonder if youpeople aren't a bit too-well, strong, on the virtues of analysis. I mean,
once you've taken it all apart, fine, I'll be first to applaud your industry.But other than a lot of bits and pieces lying about, what have you said?"It isn't the sort of argument Pointsman relishes either. But he glances

88

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sharply at this young anarchist in his red scarf. "Pavlov believed that
the ideal, the end we all struggle toward in science, is the true mechani­
cal explanation. He was realistic enough not to expect it in his lifetime.
Or in several lifetimes more. But his hope was for a long chain of better
and better approximations. His faith ultimately lay in a pure physiologi­
cal basis for the life of the psyche. No effect without cause, and a clear
train of linkages."

"It's not my forte, of course," Mexico honestly wishing not to offend
the man, but really, "but there's a feeling about that cause-and-effect

may have been taken as far as it will go. That
for science to carryon at

all, it must look for a less narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions.
The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to

junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle."
"No-not 'strike off.' Regress. You're 30 years old, man. There are no

'other angles.' There is only forward-into it-or backward."
Mexico watches the wind tugging at the skirts of Pointsman's coat. A

gull goes screaming away sidewise along the frozen berm.
The chalk

cliffs rear up above, cold and serene as death. Early barbarians of Eu­

rope who ventured close enough to this coast saw these
white barriers

through the mist, and knew then where their dead had been taken
to.

Pointsman has turned now, and . . . oh, God. He is smiling. There is

something so ancient in its assumption of brotherhood that-not now,
but a few months from now, with spring prevailing and the War in Eu­

rope ended-Roger will remember the smile-it
will haunt him-as the

most evil look he has ever had from a human face.

They've paused in their walking. Roger stares back at the man.
The

Antimexico. "Ideas of the opposite" themselves, but on what cortex,
what winter hemisphere? What ruinous mosaic, facing outward into the
Waste . . . outward from the sheltering city . . . readable only to
those who journey outside ... eyes in the distance

... barbarians

... riders....
"We both have Slothrop," is what Pointsman has just said.
"Pointsman-what are you expecting out of this? Besides glory, I

mean."
"No more than Pavlov. A physiological basis for what seems very odd

behavior. I don't care which of your P.R.S. categories it may fit into­

oddly enough none of you's even suggested telepathy: perhaps
he's

tuned in to someone over there, someone who knows the German firing
schedule ahead of time. Eh? And I don't care if it's some terrible

Freud­

ian revenge against his mother for trying to castrate
him or something. I

am not grandiose, Mexico. I am modest, methodical-"

89



"Humble."
"I have set myself limitations in this. 1 have only the reversal of

rocket sounds to go on . . . his clinical history of sexual conditioning,perhaps to auditory stimuli, and what appears to be a reversal of cause­
and-effect. I'm not as ready as you to junk cause-and-effect, but if it
does need modifying-so be it."

"But what are you after?"
"You've seen his MMPI. His F Scale? Falsifications, distorted thought

processes. . . . The scores show it clearly: he's psychopathically de­viant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac-well, Pavlov believed that obses­
sions and paranoid delusions were a result of certain-call them cells,
neurons, on the mosaic of the brain, being excited to the level where,
through reciprocal induction, all the area around becomes inhibited.
One bright, burning point, surrounded by darkness. Darkness it has, in a
way, called up. Cut off, this bright point, perhaps to the end of the pa­tient's life, from all other ideas, sensations, self-criticisms that mighttemper its flame, restore it to normalcy. He called it a 'point of patho­logical inertia.' We're working right now with a dog ... he's been
through the 'equivalent' phase, where any stimulus, strong or weak,calls up exactly the same number of saliva drops . . . and on throughthe 'paradoxical' phase-strong stimuli getting weak responses and vice
versa. Yesterday we got him to go ultraparadoxical. Beyond. When weturn on the metronome that used to stand for food-that once made
Dog Vanya drool like a fountain-now he turns away. When we shut offthe metronome, oh then he'll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it-seek,in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there. Pavlov thought that allthe diseases of the mind could be explained, eventually, by the ultrapar­adoxical phase, the pathologically inert points on the cortex, the confu­
sion of ideas of the opposite. He died at the very threshold of puttingthese things on an experimental basis. But 1 live. 1 have the funding, andthe time, and the will. Slothrop is a strong imperturbable. It won't be
easy to send him into any of the three phases. We may finally have tostarve, terrorize, 1 don't know ... it needn't come to that. But 1 will
find his spots of inertia, 1 will find what they are if 1 have to open up hisdamned skull, and how they are isolated, and perhaps solve the mysteryof why the rockets are falling as they do-though 1 admit that was moreof a sop to get your support."

"Why?" A bit uneasy, there, Mexico? "Why do you need me?""I don't know. But 1 do."
"You're obsessed."
"Mexico." Standing very still, seaward half of his face seeming to

go



have aged fifty years in the instant, watching the tide three full times
leave behind its sterile film of ice. "Help me."

I can't help anyone, Roger thinks. Why is he so tempted? It's danger­
ous and perverse. He does want to help, he feels the same unnatural
fear of Slothrop that Jessica does. What about the girls? It may be his
loneliness in Psi Section, in a persuasion he can't in his heart share, nor

quite abandon . . . their faith, even smileless Gloaming's,
that there

must be more, beyond the senses, beyond death, beyond the Probabili­

ties that are all Roger has to believe in.... Oh Jessie, his face against
her bare, sleeping, intricately boned and tendoned back, I'm out of my
depth in this. . . .

Halfway between the water and the coarse sea-grass, a long
stretch of

pipe and barbed wire rings in the wind.
The black latticework is

propped up by longer slanting braces, lances pointing
out to sea. An

abandoned and mathematical look: stripped to the force-vectors hold­

ing it where it is, doubled up in places one
row behind another, moving

as Pointsman and Mexico begin to move again, backward in thick

moire, repeated uprights in parallax against repeated diagonals,
and the

snarls of wire below interfering more at random. Far away, where it

curves into the haze, the openwork wall goes gray. After last night's
snowfall, each line of the black scrawl was etched

in white. But today
wind and sand have blown the dark iron bare again, salted, revealing, in

places, brief streaks of rust . . . in others, ice
and sunlight turn the con­

struction to electric-white lines of energy.
Farther up, past buried land mines

and antitank posts of corroding

concrete, up in a pillbox covered with netting and sod, halfway up
the

cliff, young Dr. Bleagh and his nurse Ivy are relaxing
after a difficult lo­

botomy. His scrubbed and routinized fingers
dart in beneath her sus­

pender straps, pull outward, release in a sudden great
smack and ho-ho­

ho from Bleagh as she jumps and laughs too, trying
not too hard to

squirm away. They lie on a bed of faded old
nautical charts, mainte­

nance manuals, burst sandbags and spilled sand, burned
matchsticks

and unraveled cork-tips from cigarettes long decomposed
that com­

forted through the nights of '41 and the sudden
rush of heart at any

glimpse of a light at sea. "You're mad," she whispers.
''I'm randy," he

smiles, and snaps her garter again, boy-and-slingshot.
In the uplands a line of cylindrical blocks to cripple

the silent King

Tigers that now will never roll the land
chains away like so many

white

muffins across the dun pasture, among the low patches of snow
and the

pale lime outcrops. Out on a little pond
the black man is down from

London, ice-skating, improbable as a Zouave, riding
his blades tall, dig-

91



nified, as if born to them and ice not desert. Small townschildren scatter
before him, close enough to have their cheeks stung by curved wakes of
powdered ice whenever he turns. Until he smile they dare not speak,only follow, tag, flirt, wanting the smile, fearing it, wanting it.... Hehas a magic face, a face they know. From the shore, Myron Gruntonand Edwin Treacle, both chain-smoking, brooding over OperationBlack Wing and the credibility of the Schwarzkommando, watch their
magic Negro, their prototype, neither caring to risk the ice, loping Fen
or any style, in front of these children.

The winter's in suspense-all the sky a bleak, luminous gel. Down onthe beach, Pointsman fishes a roll of toilet paper, each sheet stenciled
PROPERTY OF H.M. GOVERNMENT, from a pocket to blow his nose. Rogernow and then pushes hair back under his cap. Neither speaks. So, thetwo of them: trudging, hands in and out of pockets, their figures dwin­dling, fawn and gray and a lick of scarlet, very sharp-edged, their foot­
prints behind them a long freezing progress of exhausted stars, the over­
cast reflecting from the glazed beach nearly white. . . . We have lost
them. Noone listened to those early conversations-not even an idle
snapshot survives. They walked till that winter hid them and it seemed
the cruel Channel itself would freeze over, and no one, none of us,could ever completely find them again. Their footprints filled with ice,and a little later were taken out to sea.

o 0 0 0 DOD

In silence, hidden from her, the camera follows as she moves deliber­
ately nowhere longlegged about the rooms, an adolescent wideness and
hunching to the shoulders, her hair not bluntly Dutch at all, but secured
in a modish upsweep with an old, tarnished silver crown, yesterday'snew perm leaving her very blonde hair frozen on top in a hundred vorti­
ces, shining through the dark filigree. Widest lens-opening this after­
noon, extra tungsten light laid on, this rainiest day in recent memory,rocket explosions far away to south and east now and then visiting themaisonette, rattling not the streaming windows but only the doors, inslow three- and fourfold shudderings, like poor spirits, desperate for
company, asking to be let in, only a moment, a touch . . .

She's alone in the house, except for the secret cameraman and Osbie
Feel, who's out in the kitchen, doing something mysterious with a har­vest of mushrooms from up on the roof. They have shiny red-orange
cups with raised patches of whitish-gray veil. Now and then the geome-

92



try of her restlessness brings her to glance in a doorway at his boyish
fussing with the Amanita muscaria (for it is this peculiar relative of the

poisonous Destroying Angel that claims Osbie's attention, or what

passes with him for attention)-flash him a smile
she means to be

friendly but which to Osbie seems terribly worldly, sophisticated,
wicked. She being the first Dutch girl he's ever spoken to, he's surprised
at finding high heels instead of wooden shoes, struck in fact a bit witless

by her so groomed and (he imagines) Continental style, the
intellect be­

hind the fair-lashed eyes or dark glasses she affects out on the street, be­
hind the traces of baby fat, the dimples countersunk each side of her
mouth. (In close-up her skin, though nearly perfect, is seen to be lightly
powdered and rouged, the eyelashes a touch darkened, brows reshaped
a matter of two or three empty follicles. . . .)

What can young Osbie possibly have in mind? He is carefully scrap­
ing out the inside of each persimmon-colored

mushroom cup and shred­

ding the rest. Dispossessed elves run around up on the roof, gibbering.
He now has a growing heap of orange-gray fungus, which he proceeds
to add in fistfuls to a pot of steaming water. A previous batch also

sim­

mers atop the stove, reduced to a thick gruel covered
with yellow scum,

which Osbie now removes and purees further in Pirate's blending ma­

chine. Then he spreads the fungOid mush over a tin cookie sheet.
He

opens the oven, removes with
asbestos potholders another sheet cov­

ered with dark caked dust, and replaces it with the one he has just pre­

pared. With a mortar and pestle he pulverizes the
substance and dumps

it into an old Huntley & Palmers biscuit tin, reserving only enough
to

roll deftly up in a Rizla liquorice cigarette paper, light,
and inhale the

smoke of.
But she happens to've glanced in just at the instant Osbie opened

the

echoing oven. The camera records no change in her face,
but why does

she stand now so immobile at the door? as if the frame
were to be

stopped and prolonged into just such a lengthwise
moment of gold fresh

and tarnished, innocence microscopically masked, her elbow slightly
bent, hand resting against the wall, fingers fanned on

the pale orange

paper as if she touches her own skin, a pensive
touch. . . . Outside, the

long rain in silicon and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly
corro­

sive against the mediaeval windows, curtaining
like smoke the river's far

shore. This city, in all its bomb-pierced miles: this inexhaustibly
knotted

victim . . . skin of glistening roofslates, sooted brick flooded high
about

each window dark or lit, each of a million openings vulnerable
to the

gloom of this winter day. The rain washes, drenches,
fills the gutters

singing, the city receives it, lifting, in a perpetual shrug
....

With a

D�il

93



squeak and metal slam the oven is closed again, but for Katje it will
never close. She has posed before the mirrors too often today, knows her
hair and make-up are perfect, admires the frock they have brought her
from Harvey Nicholls, a sheer crepe that flows in from padded shoul­
ders down to a deep point between her breasts, a rich cocoa shade
known as "nigger" in this country, yards and yards of this delicious silk
spun and thrown, tied loosely at the waist, soft pleats falling to her
knees. The cameraman is pleased at the unexpected effect of so much
flowing crepe, particularly when Katje passes before a window and the
rainlight coming through changes it for a few brief unshutterings to
murky glass, charcoal-saturated, antique and weather-worn, frock, face,
hair, hands, slender calves all gone to glass and glazing, for the celluloid
instant poised-the translucent guardian of a rainfall shaken through all
day by rocket blasts near and far, downward, dark and ruinous behind
her the ground which, for the frames' passage, defines her.

At the images she sees in the mirror Katje also feels a cameraman's
pleasure, but knows what he cannot: that inside herself, enclosed in the
soignee surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and
ashes, she belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven
... to Der Kinderofen ... remembering now his teeth, long, terrible,
veined with bright brown rot as he speaks these words, the yellow teeth
of Captain Blicero, the network of stained cracks, and back in his night­
breath, in the dark oven of himself, always the coiled whispers of decay.
. . . She recalls his teeth before any other feature, teeth were to benefit
most directly from the Oven: from what is planned for her, and for
Gottfried. He never uttered it clearly as threat, nor ever addressed to ei­
ther of them directly, but rather across her trained satin thighs to the
evening's guests, or down the length of Gottfried's docile spine ("theRome- Berlin Axis" he called it the night the Italian came and they wereall on the round bed, Captain Blicero plugged into Gottfried's upendedasshole and the Italian at the same time into his pretty mouth) Katje
only passive, bound and gagged and false-eyelashed, serving tonight ashuman pillow for the Italian's whitening perfumed curls (roses and fat
just at the edge of turning rancid) . . . each utterance a closed flower,
capable of exfoliation and infinite revealing (she thinks of a mathemati­
cal function that will expand for her bloom-like into a power series with
no general term, endlessly, darkly, though never completely by surprise)
. . . his phrase Padre Ignacio unfolding into Spanish inquisitor, blackrobes, brown arching nose, the suffocating smell of incense + confes­
sor / executioner + Katje and Gottfried both kneeling, side by side indark confessional + children out of old Marchen kneeling, knees cold

94



and aching, before the Oven, whispering to it secrets they
can tell no

one else + Captain Blicero's witch-paranoia, suspecting them both,

Katje despite her NSB credentials + the Oven
as listener/avenger

+ Katje kneeling before Blicero in highest drag,
black velvet and

Cuban heels, his penis squashed invisible under a flesh-colored leather

jockstrap, over which he wears a false cunt and
merkin of sable both

handcrafted in Berlin by the notorious Mme. Ophir, the mock labia and

bright purple clitoris molded of-Madame had
been abject, pleading

shortages-synthetic rubber and Mipolam, the new polyvinyl
chloride

... tiny blades of stainless steel bristle from
lifelike pink humidity,

hundreds of them, against which Katje, kneeling, is obliged to cut her

lips and tongue, and then kiss
blood-abstracts across the golden unges­

soed back of her "brother" Gottfried. Brother in play, in slavery ...

she had never seen him before coming to the requisitioned house
near

the firing sites, hidden in the woods and parkland
of this settled tongue

of small farms and estates that reaches eastward from
the royal city, be­

tween two expanses of polder, toward Wassenaar-yet his face,
for that

first time, seen in autumn sunlight through the great west
window of the

drawing-room, kneeling naked except for a studded dog collar,
mastur­

bating metronomic, at shouted commands
from Captain Blicero, all his

fair skin stained by afternoon a luminous synthetic orange
she has never

before associated with skin, his penis a blood monolith, its thickly gasp­

ing mouth audible in the carpeted silence,
his face raised to none of

them, but as if to something on the ceiling, or in the sky
which ceilings

may in his vision stand for, eyes-down
as he seems most of the time to

be-his face, ascending, tightening, coming, is so
close to what she's

been seeing all her life in mirrors, her
own studied mannequin's stare,

that she catches her breath, feels for a moment the speeded percussion
of her heart, before turning just such a stare toward

Blicero. He is de­

lighted. "Perhaps," he tells her, "I will
cut your hair." He smiles

at

Gottfried. "Perhaps I'll have him grow his." The
humiliation would be

good for the boy each morning at quarters,
ranked with his battery near

SchuBstelle 3, where horses
thundered once before the frantic, the los­

ing railbirds of the old peace-failing inspections
time after time yet

protected by his Captain from Army discipline.
Instead, between

firings, day or night, short of sleep, odd hours, suffering
the Captain's

own "Hexeszuchtigung." But did Blicero also
cut her hair? She can't re­

member now. She knows she wore Gottfried's
uniforms once or twice

(pushing her hair, yes, up under his forage cap), looking easily
his dou­

ble, spending these nights "in the cage," as
Blicero has set the rules,

while Gottfried must wear her silk stockings, her lace apron
and cap, all

nee)['(l:
95



her satin and her ribboned organdy. But afterward he must always go
back again to the cage. That's how it is. Their Captain allows no doubt
as to which, brother or sister, really is maidservant, and which fattening
goose.

How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one's own oc­
cupied country, it's better, she believes, to enter into some formal, ra­
tionalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form or decent
limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings,
subterfuge, paranoia, shame . . . though it is never discussed amongthem openly, it would seem Katje, Gottfried, and Captain Blicero have
agreed that this Northern and ancient form, one they all know and are
comfortable with-the strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible
house, the captivity, the fattening, the Oven-shall be their preserving
routine, their shelter, against what outside none of them can bear-the
War, the absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here,
in its midst. . . .

It isn't safe, even inside, in the house . . . nearly every day a rocket
misfires. Late in October, not far from this estate, one fell back and ex­
ploded, killing 12 of the ground crew, breaking windows for hundreds
of meters all around, including the west window of the drawing-room
where Katje first saw her golden game-brother. The official rumor stated
that only fuel and oxidizer had gone off. But Captain Blicero, with a
trembling-she must say nihilistic-pleasure, said that the Amatol
charge in the warhead had also exploded, making them as much target
as launch site. . . . That they were all condemned. The house lies west
of the Duindigt racecourse, quite the other direction from London, but
no bearing is exempt-often the rockets, crazed, turn at random,
whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its
madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable. When there's time
to, their owners destroy them, by radio, in mid-convulsion. Between
rocket launches there are the English raids. Spitfires come roaring inlow over the dark sea at suppertime, the searchlights in the city stag­
gering on, the after-hum of sirens hangs in the sky high above the wet
iron seats in the parks, the AA guns chug, searching, and the bombs fall
in woodland, in polder, among flats thought to be billeting rocket
troops.

It adds an overtone to the game, which changes the timbre slightly. Itis she who, at some indefinite future moment, must push the Witch into
the Oven intended for Gottfried. So the Captain must allow for the real
chance she's a British spy, or member of the Dutch underground. De­
spite all German efforts, intelligence inputs still flow from Holland back

96



to RAF Bomber Command in a steady torrent, telling of deployments,
supply routes, of which dark-green crumble of trees may hide an A4
emplacement-data changing hour-to-hour, so mobile are the rockets
and their support equipment. But the Spitfires will settle for a power
station, a liquid-oxygen supply, a battery commander's billet ... that's
the intriguing question. Will Katje feel her obligation canceled by some­

day calling down English fighter-bombers on this very house, her game's
prison, though it mean death? Captain Blicero can't be sure. Up to a

point he finds the agony delightful. Certainly her record with Mussert's

people is faultless, she's credited with smelling out at least three crypto­
Jewish families, she attends meetings faithfully, she works at a Luft­
waffe resort near Scheveningen, where her superiors find her efficient
and cheerful, no shirker. Nor, like so many of them, using party fanati­

cism to cover a lack of ability. Perhaps there's the only shadow of warn­

ing: her commitment is not emotional. She appears to
have reasons for

being in the Party. A woman with some background in mathematics,
and with reasons.... "Want the Change," Rilke said, "0 be inspired
by the Flame!" To laurel, to nightingale, to wind ... wanting it,

to be

taken, to embrace, to fall toward the flame growing to fill all the senses

and . . . not to love because it was no longer possible to act . . . but to
be helplessly in a condition of love. . . .

But not Katje: no mothlike plunge. He must conclude that secretly
she fears the Change, choosing instead only trivially to revise what mat­
ters least, ornament and clothing, going no further than politic transves­

tism, not only in Gottfried's clothing, but even in traditional
masochist

uniform, the French-maid outfit so inappropriate to her tall, longlegged
stride, her blondeness, her questing shoulders like wings-she plays at
this only . . . plays at playing.

He can do nothing. Among dying Reich, orders lapsing to paper
im­

potence he needs her so, needs Gottfried,
the straps and whips leathern,

real in his hands which still feel, her cries, the red welts across the boy's
buttocks, their mouths, his penis, fingers and toes-in all the winter

these are sure, can be depended on-he can give you no reason but in

his heart he trusts, perhaps only, by now, in the form, this out of all
Marchen und Sagen, trusts that this charmed house in the

forest will be

preserved, that no bombs could ever fall here by accident, only
be­

trayal, only if Katje really were a spotter for the English
and bade them

-and he knows she cannot: that through some magic, below the bone

resonance of any words, a British raid is the one prohibited shape
of all

possible pushes from behind, into the Oven's iron and
final summer. It

will come, it will, his Destiny . . . not that way-but it will come.
.

� DIll

fo�

1[0, I\j�

97



Und nicht einmal sein Schritt klingt aus dem tonlosen Los. . . . Of all
Hilke's poetry it's this Tenth Elegy he most loves, can feel the bitter
lager of Yearning begin to prickle behind eyes and sinuses at remem­
bering any passage of ... the newly-dead youth, embracing his La­
ment, his last link, leaving now even her marginally human touch for­
ever, climbing all alone, terminally alone, up and up into the mountains
of primal Pain, with the wildly alien constellations overhead. . . . And
not once does his step ring from the soundless Destiny.... It's he, Bli­
cero, who climbs the mountain, has been so climbing for nearly 20
years, since long before he embraced the Reich's flame, since Siidwest
... alone. No matter what flesh was there to appease the Witch, canni­
bal, and sorcerer, flourishing implements of pain-alone, alone. He
doesn't even know the Witch, can't understand the hunger that defines
him/her, is only, in times of weakness, bewildered that it should coexist
in the same body as himself. An athlete and his skill, separate aware­
nesses. . . . Young Rauhandel at least had said so . . . how many years
back into the peace . . . Blicero had watched his young friend (even
then already so blatantly, so pathetically doomed to some form of East­
ern Front) inside a bar, out in the street, wearing whatever tight or awk­
ward suit, whatever fragile shoes, react in all grace to the football which
jokers would recognizing him toss out of nowhere-the deathless per­
formances! that one impromptu boot so impossibly high, so perfectly
parabolic, the ball soaring miles to pass exactly between the two tall,
phallic electric columns of the Ufa-theatre on the Friedrichstrasse ...
the head-control he could keep up for city blocks, for hours, the feet ar­
ticulate as poetry.... Yet he could only shake his head, wanting to be
a good fellow when they asked, but unable really to say-"It's . . . it
happens . . . the muscles do it-" then recalling an old trainer's words
-"it's muscular," smiling beautifully and already, by the act, con­
scripted, already cannon fodder, the pale bar-light across the grating ofhis close-shaved skull-"it's reflexes, you see. . . . Not me. . . . Justthereflexes." When did it begin to change for Blicero, among those days,from lust to simple sorrow, dumb as Rauhandel's amazement with his
own talent? He has seen so many of these Rauhandels, especially since'39, harboring the same mysterious guests, strangers, often no more bi­
zarre than a gift for being always where shells were not ... do any ofthem, this raw material, "want the Change"? Do they even know? He
doubts it. . . . Their reflexes are only being used, hundreds of thousands
at a time, by others-by royal moths the Flame has inspired. Blicero has
lost, years ago, all his innocence on this question. So his Destiny is theOven: while the strayed children, who never knew, who change nothing

98



but uniforms and cards of identity, will survive and prosper long beyond
his gases and cinders, his chimney departure. So, so. A Wandervogel

in

the mountains of Pain. It's been going on for much too long, he has cho­
sen the game for nothing if not the kind of end it will bring him, nicht
wahr? too old these days, grippes taking longer to pass, stomach too
often in day-long agony, eyes measurably blinder with each examina­

tion, too "realistic" to prefer a hero's death or even a soldier's. He only
wants now to be out of the winter, inside the Oven's warmth, darkness,

steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen­

light gonging shut, forever. The rest is foreplay.
Yet he cares, more than he should and puzzled that he does, about

the children-about their motives. He gathers it is their freedom they
look for, yearningly as he for the Oven, and such perversity haunts

and

depresses him . . . he returns again and again to the
waste and senseless

image of what was a house in the forest,
reduced now to crumbs and

sugar-smears, the black indomitable
Oven all that remains, and the two

children, the peak of sweet energy behind them, hunger beginning
again, wandering away into a green blankness

of trees. . . . Where will

they go, where shelter the nights? The improvidence
of children . . .

and the civil paradox of this their Little State, whose base is
the same

Oven which must destroy it. . . .
But every true god must be both organizer and destroyer. Brought up

into a Christian ambience, this was difficult for him to see until
his jour­

ney to Siidwest: until his
own African conquest. Among the abrading

fires of the Kalahari, under the broadly-sheeted coastal sky, fire and

water, he learned. The Herero boy, long tormented by
missionaries into

a fear of Christian sins, jackal-ghosts, potent European strand-wolves,

pursuing him, seeking to feed on his soul,
the precious worm that lived

along his backbone, now tried to cage his old gods,
snare them in words,

give them away, savage, paralyzed, to
this scholarly white who seemed

so in love with language. Carrying in his kit a copy of
the Duino Elegies,

just off the presses when he embarked
for Siidwest, a gift from Mother

at the boat, the odor of new ink dizzying his nights as the
old freighter

plunged tropic after tropic . . . until the constellations,
like the new

stars of Pain-land, had become all unfamiliar and the
earth's seasons re­

versed . . . and he came ashore in a high-prowed wooden boat
that had

20 years earlier brought blue-trousered troops
in from the iron road­

stead to crush the great Herero Rising. To find, back
in the hinterland,

up in an outstretch of
broken mountains between the Namib and the

Kalahari, his own faithful native, his night-flower.
An impassable waste of rock blasted at by the

sun . . . miles of can-

aeaW('ii:
n, )o�nr
niliehlJ'
'cn)tr�

�I t1ef�

I lVanfu�1
-"Ifl"

trainer'H
ilieart

iliewa�
" "J�
n� ili011!
ment\\iffi

peci�J�

, Blicero:

estinr�!
geno�

99



yons twisting nowhere, drifted at the bottoms with white sand turning a
cold, queenly blue as the afternoons lengthened. . . . We make
Ndiambi Karunga now, omuhona ... a whisper, across the burning
thorn branches where the German conjures away energies present out­
side the firelight with his slender book. He looks up in alarm. The boy
wants to fuck, but he is using the Herero name of God. An extraordi­
nary chill comes over the white man. He believes, like the Rhenish Mis­
sionary Society who corrupted this boy, in blasphemy. Especially out
here in the desert, where dangers he can't bring himself to name even in
cities, even in daylight, gather about, wings folded, buttocks touchingthe cold sand, waiting. . . . Tonight he feels the potency of every word:
words are only an eye-twitch away from the things they stand for. The
peril of buggering the boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills
him insanely with lust, lust in the face-the mask-of instant talion
from outside the fire ... but to the boy Ndjambi Karunga is what hap­
pens when they couple, that's all: God is creator and destroyer, sun and
darkness, all sets of opposites brought together, including black and
white, male and female . . . and he becomes, in his innocence, Ndjambi
Karunga's child (as are all his preterite clan, relentlessly, beyond their
own history) here underneath the European's sweat, ribs, gut-muscles,cock (the boy's own muscles staying fiercely tight for what seems hours,
as if he intends to kill, but not a word, only the long, clonic, thick slices
of night that pass over their bodies).

What did I make of him? Captain Blicero knows that the African at
this moment is halfway across Germany, deep in the Harz, and that,
should the Oven this winter close behind him, why they have alreadysaid auf Wiedersehen for the last time. He sits, stomach crawling,glands stuffed with malaise, bowed over the console, inside the swarm­
painted launch-control car. The sergeants at motor and steering panels
are out taking a cigarette break-he's alone at the controls. Outside,
through the dirty periscope, gnarled fog unloosens from the bright zoneof frost that belly-bands the reared and shadowy rocket, where the liq­uid-oxygen tank's being topped off. Trees press close: overhead you seebarely enough sky for the rocket's ascent. The Bodenplatte-concreteplate laid over strips of steel-is set inside a space defined by three
trees, blazed so as to triangulate the exact bearing, 2600, to London.The symbol used is a rude mandala, a red circle with a thick black cross
inside, recognizable as the ancient sun-wheel from which tradition saysthe swastika was broken by the early Christians, to disguise their outlaw
symbol. Two nails are driven into the tree at the center of the cross.
Next to one of the painted blaze-marks, the most westerly, someone has

I
. I

100



is IV��I[

scratched in the bark with the point of a bayonet the words IN HOC
SIGNO VINCES. No one in the battery will admit to this act. Perhaps it is
the work of the Underground. But it has not been ordered removed.

Pale yellow stump-tops wink around the Bodenplatte, fresh chips
and

sawdust mix with older fallen leaves. The smell, childlike, deep, is con­
fused by petrol and alcohol. Rain threatens, perhaps, today, snow.

The

crews move nervously gray-green. Shiny black India-rubber cables
snake away into the forest to connect the ground equipment

with the

Dutch grid's 380 volts. Erwartung. . . .
For some reason he finds it harder these days to remember. What is

framed, dirt-blurry, in the prisms, the ritual, the daily iteration inside
these newly cleared triangles in the forests, has taken over

what used to

be memory's random walk, its innocent image-gathering. His
time away,

with Katje and Gottfried, has become shorter and
more precious as the

tempo of firings quickens. Though the boy is in
Blicero's unit, the cap­

tain hardly sees him when they're on duty-a flash of gold helping
the

surveyors chain the kilometers
out to the transmitting station, the gut­

tering brightness of his hair in the wind, vanishing among
trees. . . .

How strangely opposite to the African-a color-negative, yellow
and

blue. The Captain, in some sentimental overflow, some precognition,

gave his African boy the name "Enzian,"
after Hilke's mountainside

gentian of Nordic colors, brought down like a pure
word to the valleys:

Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange
des Bergrands

nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die aIle unsagliche, sondern

ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun
Enzian.

"Omuhona. . . . Look at me. I'm red, and brown . . . black,
omu­

hona....
"

"Liebchen, this is the other half of the earth. In Germany you
would

be yellow and blue." Mirror-metaphysics.
Self-enchanted by what he

imagined elegance, his bookish symmetries. . .
. And yet why speak so

purposeless to the arid mountain, the heat of
the day, the savage flower

from whom he drank, so endlessly . . . why lose those words
into the

mirage, the yellow sun and freezing blue
shadows in the ravines, unless

it was prophesying, beyond all predisaster syndrome, beyond
the terror

of contemplating his middle age however glancingly,
however impossi­

ble the chance of any "providing"-beyond was something heaving,

stirring, forever below, forever
before his words, something then that

could see a time coming terrible, at least as terrible
as this winter and

101



the shape to which the War has now grown, a shape making unavoid­
able the shape of one last jigsaw piece: this Oven-game with the yel­
lowhaired and blue eyed youth and silent doubleganger Katje (who was
her opposite number in Siidwest? what black girl he never saw, hidden ' \
always in the blinding sun, the hoarse and cindered passage of the trains
at night, a constellation of dark stars no one, no anti-Rilke, had
named ...)-but 1944 was much too late for any of it to matter. Those
symmetries were all prewar luxury. Nothing's left him to prophesy.

Least of all her sudden withdrawal from the game. The one variation
he didn't provide for, perhaps indeed because he never saw the black
girl either. Perhaps the black girl is a genius of meta-solutions-knock­
ing over the chessboard, shooting the referee. But after the act of
wounding, breaking, what's to become of the little Oven-state? Can't it
be fixed? Perhaps a new form, one more appropriate . . . the archer and
his son, and the shooting of the apple . . . yes and the War itself as ty­
rant king . . . it can still be salvaged can't it, patched up, roles re­
assigned, no need to rush outside where . . .

Gottfried, in the cage, watches her slip her bonds and go. Fair and
slender, the hair on his legs only visible in sunlight and then as a fine,
imponderable net of gold, his eyelids already wrinkling in oddly
young/ old signatures, flourishes, the eyes a seldom-encountered blue
that on certain days, in sync with the weather, is too much for these al­
mond fringes and brims over, seeps, bleeds out to illuminate the boy'sentire face, virgin-blue, drowned-man blue, blue drawn so insatiablyinto the chalky walls of Mediterranean streets we quietly cycledthrough in noontimes of the old peace.... He can't stop her. If the
Captain asks, he'll tell what he saw. Gottfried has seen her sneak out be­
fore, and there are rumors-she's with the Underground, she's in lovewith a Stuka pilot she met in Scheveningen. . . . But she must love
Captain Blicero too. Gottfried styles himself a passive observer. He has
waited for his present age, and the conscription notice, to catch him,with an impudent terror like watching the inrush of a curve you meanto take for the first time in a controlled skid, take me, gathering speedtill the last possible moment, take me his good-nights' one prayer. The 1danger he thinks he needs is still fictional for him: in what he flirts and ,�
teases with, death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of Ithe heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning-the blast is noise tand change, and diving for cover. Gottfried hasn't yet seen a stiff, not
up close. He hears now and then from home that friends have died, he'swatched long, flabby canvas sacks being handled in the distances into

102



the poisoned gray of the trucks, and the headlamps cutting the mist . . .
but when the rockets fail, and try to topple back on you who fired them,
and a dozen of you press down, bodies jammed together in the slit
trenches waiting all sweat-stunk wool and tense with laughter held in,

you only think-What a story to tell at mess, to write to Mutti. . . .
These rockets are his pet animals, barely domesticated, often
troublesome, even apt to revert. He loves them in the way he would

have loved horses, or Tiger tanks, had he pulled duty somewhere else.
Here he feels taken, at true ease. Without the War what could he

have hoped for? But to be part of this adventure . . . If you cannot sing
Siegfried at least you can carry a spear. On what mountainslope, from
what tanning and adored face did he hear that? All he remembers is the
white sweep upward, the quilted meadows mobbed with cloud. . . .
Now he's learning a trade, tending the rockets, and when the War ends
he'll study to be an engineer. He understands that Blicero will die or go
away, and that he will leave the cage.

But he connects this with the end

of the War, not with the Oven. He knows, like everyone, that captive
children are always freed in the moment of maximum danger. The fuck­

ing, the salt length of the Captain's weary, often impotent penis pushing
into his meek mouth, the stinging chastisements, his face reflected in the

act of kissing the Captain's boots, their shine mottled, corroded by
bear­

ing grease, oil, alcohol spilled in fueling, darkening his
face to the one

he can't recognize-these are necessary, they make specific his captiv­
ity, which otherwise would hardly be different from Army stifling, Army
repression. He's ashamed that he enjoys them so

much-the word bitch,

spoken now in a certain tone of voice, will give him an
erection he can­

not will down-afraid that, if not actually judged and damned, he's

gone insane. The whole battery knows of the arrangement: though they
still obey the Captain it's there, in their faces, felt trembling

out along
the steel tape-measures, splashing onto his tray at mess, elbowed

into

his right sleeve with each dressing of his squad. He
dreams often these

days of a very pale woman who wants him, who never speaks-but
the

absolute confidence in her eyes . . . his awful certainty that she,
a ce­

lebrity everyone recognizes on Sight, knows him and
has no reason to

speak to him beyond the beckoning that's in her face,
sends him vi­

brating awake in the nights, the Captain's exhausted
face inches away

across the silk of wrinkled silver, weak eyes staring as his own, whiskers

he suddenly must scrape his cheek against, sobbing, trying
to tell how

she was, how she looked at him. . . .

The Captain's seen her, of course. Who hasn't? His idea
of comfort is

103
ces ffil�



to tell the child, "She's real. You have no say in this. You must under­
stand that she means to have you. No use screaming awake, bothering
me this way."

"But if she comes back-"
"Submit, Gottfried. Give it all up. See where she takes you. Think of

the first time I fucked you. How tight you were. Until you knew I meant
to come inside. Your little rosebud bloomed. You had nothing, not even
by then your mouth's innocence, to lose. . . ."

But the boy continues to cry. Katje won't help him. Perhaps she's
asleep. He never knows. He wants to be her friend, but they hardly ever
speak. She's cold, mysterious, he's jealous of her sometimes and at oth­
ers-usually when he wants to fuck her and through some ingenuity ofthe Captain's cannot-at such times he thinks he loves her desperately.Unlike the Captain, he has never seen her as the loyal sister who'll free
him from the cage. He dreams that release, but as a dark exterior Proc­
ess that will happen, no matter what any of them may want. Whether
she goes or stays. So, when Katje quits the game for good, he is silent.

Blicero curses her. He flings a boot-tree at a precious TerBorch.
Bombs fall to the west in the Haagsche Bosch. The wind blows, rufflingthe ornamental ponds outside. Staff cars snarl away, down the longdrive lined with beeches. The half-moon shines among hazy clouds, its
dark half the color of aged meat. Blicero orders everyone down into the
shelter, a cellarful of gin in brown crocks, open-slat crates of anemone
bulbs. The slut has put his battery in the British crosshairs, the raid can
come at any moment! Everybody sits around drinking oude genever and
peeling cheeses. Telling stories, mostly funny ones, from before the
War. By dawn, they're all drunk and sleeping. Scraps of wax litter the
floor like leaves. No Spitfires come. But later that morning SchuBstelle 3
is moved, and the requisitioned house is abandoned. And she is gone.Crossed over the English lines, at the salient where the great airborneadventure lies bogged for the winter, wearing Gottfried's boots and an
old dress, black moire, calf-length, a size too large, dowdy. Her last dis­
guise. From here on she will be Katje. The only debt outstanding is to
Captain Prentice. The others=-Ptet, Wim, the Drummer, the Indian­
have all dropped her. Left her for dead. Or else this is her warningthat-

"Sorry, no, we need the bullet," Wim's face in shadows her eye can't
compensate for, bitterly whispering underneath the Scheveningen pier,ragged crowd-footfalls on the wood overhead, "every fucking bullet we
can get. We need the silence. We couldn't spare a man to get rid of the
body. I've wasted five minutes with you already ...

"

so he will take
104



up their last meeting with technical matters she can no longer share.
When she looks around, he's gone, guerrilla-silent, and she has no way
to bring this together with how he felt last year for a while under the
cool chenille, in the days before he got so many muscles, and the scars
on shoulder and thigh-a late bloomer, a neutral man goaded finally
past his threshold, but she'd loved him before that

. . . she must

have....

She's worth nothing to them now. They were after SchuBstelle 3. She

gave them everything else, but kept finding reasons not to pinpoint
the

Captain's rocket site, and there is too much doubt by now as to how

good the reasons were. True, the site was often moved about.
But she

could've been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own

expressionless servant's face that leaned in over their schnapps and ci­

gars, the charts coffee-ringed across the low tables,
the cream papers

stamped purple as bruised flesh. Wim and the others have
invested time

and lives-three [ewish families sent east-though wait now, she's more
than balanced it, hasn't she, in the months out at Scheveningen? They
were kids, neurotic, lonely, pilots and crews they all loved to talk, and
she's fed back who knows how many reams' worth of Most Secret

flimsies across the North Sea, hasn't she, squadron numbers, fueling
stops, spin-recovery techniques and turning radii, power settings,

radio

channels, sectors, traffic patterns-hasn't she? What more do they
want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor be­

tween information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written

down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the

real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the

violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals.
The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It

serves as

spectacle, as diversion from the real movements
of the War. It provides

raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught

History as sequences of violence, battle after battle,
and be more pre­

pared for the adult world. Best of all, mass
death's a stimulus to just or­

dinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece
of that Pie while

they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is
a celebration of mar­

kets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by
the professionals,

spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling,
Reichsmarks continue to move,

severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers.
But

out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies
come into

being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit
as negotiable as cigarettes,

cunt, or Hershey bars. Jews also carry an element
of guilt, of future

blackmail, which operates, natch, in favor of the professionals.
So Katje

105

verI
are �r
'tter�

�te�eJ
j� �onf,
irnome
ana�

lastM'

etWf

ofilie
WtaKe



here is hollering into a silence, a North Sea of hopes, and Pirate Pren­
tice, who knows her from hurried meetings-in city squares that man­
age to be barracksfaced and claustrophobic, under dark, soft-wood
smells of staircases steep as ladders, on a gaffrigger by an oily quai and a
eat's amber eyes staring down, in a block of old flats with rain in the roi
courtyard and a bulky, ancient Schwarzlose stripped to toggle links and
oil pump littered about the dusty room-who has each time seen her as
a face belonging with others he knows better, at the margin of each en­
terprise, now, confronted with this face out of context, an enormous skyall sea-clouds in full march, tall and plum, behind her, detects danger inher loneliness, realizes he's never heard her name, not till the meeting
by the windmill known as "The Angel." . . .

She tells him why she's alone-more or less-why she can't ever goback, and her face is somewhere else, painted on canvas, hung with
other survivals back in the house near Duindigt, only witnessing the w
Oven-game-centuries passing like the empurpled clouds, darkening an . �I
infinitesimal layer of varnish between herself and Pirate, granting her fu
the shield of serenity she needs, of classic irrelevance. . . .

"But where will you go?" Both of them hands in pockets, scarves
tightly wrapped, stones the water has left behind shining black wait like
writing in a dream, about to make sense printed here along the beach,
each fragment so amazingly clear yet . . . 1 ili

"I don't know. Where would be a good place?" ili"
'The White Visitation,'

"

Pirate suggested.

I ��"'The White Visitation' is fine," she said, and stepped into thevoid. . . .
ill

"Osbie, have 1 gone mad?" a snowy night, five rocket bombs since
noon, shivering in the kitchen, late and candlelit, Osbie Feel the house
idiot-savant so far into an encounter with nutmeg this evening that the . �
inquiry seems quite proper, the pale cement Jungfrau asquat, phleg- illmatic and one gathers nettled in a dim corner.

"Of course, of course," sez Osbie, with a fluid passage of fingers andwrist based on the way Bela Lugosi handed a certain glass of dopedwine to some fool of a juvenile lead in White Zombie, the first movie
Osbie ever saw and in a sense the last, ranking on his All-Time List
along with Son of Frankenstein, Freaks, Flying Down to Rio and perhapsDumbo, which he went to see in Oxford Street last night but midwaythrough noticed, instead of a magic feather, the humorless green and
magenta face of Mr. Ernest Bevin wrapped in the chubby trunk of the
longlashed baby elephant, and decided it would be prudent to excuse

106



himself. "No," since Pirate meantime has misunderstood whatever it

�as
Osbie sai,�' "not 'of course you've gone mad, Prentice,' that

wasn't

It at all. . . .
"What then," Pirate asks, after Osbie's lapse has passed the minute

mark.
"Ah?" sez Osbie.

Pirate is having second thoughts, is what it is. He keeps recalling that

Katje now avoids all mention of the house in the forest. She has glanced
into it, and out, but the truth's crystal sheets have diffracted all her au­
dible words-often to tears-and he can't quite make sense of what's

spoken, much less infer to the radiant crystal itself. Indeed, why did she
leave SchuBstelle 3? We are never told why. But now and then, players
in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play
-and be unable then to continue in the same spirit.... Nor need it be

anything sudden, spectacular-it may come in gentle-and regardless
of the score, the number of watchers, their collective wish, penalties
they or the Leagues may impose, the player will, waking deliberately,
perhaps with Katje's own tough, young isolate's shrug and stride, say
fuck it and quit the game, quit it cold. . . .

"All right," he continues alone, Osbie lost in a mooning doper's smile,

tracking the mature female snow-skin of the Alp in the corner,
he and

the frozen peak above and the blue night . . . "it's a lapse of character

then, a crotchet. Like carrying the bloody Mendoza." Everyone else in

the Firm packs a Sten you know. The Mendoza weighs three
times as

much, no one's even seen any 7 mm Mexican Mauser bullets lately, even
in Portobello Road: it hasn't the grand Garage Simplicity or the rate of
fire and still he loves it (yes, most likely it's love these days) "you see, it's
a matter of trade-off, i'n't i'," the nostalgia of its Lewis-style straight
pull, and being able to lift the barrel off in a second (ever

tried to take

the barrel off of a Sten?), and having a double-ended striker in case one
breaks.... "Am I going to let the extra weight make a difference? It's

my crotchet, I'm indifferent to weight, or I wouldn't
have brought the

girl back out, would I."
"I am not your responsibility." A statue in wine-colored [aconne

vel­

vet from neck to wrists and insteps, and how long, gentlemen, has she

been watching from the shadows?
"Oh," Pirate turning sheepish, "you are, you know."
"The happy couple!" Osbie roars suddenly, taking

another pinch of

nutmeg like snuff, eyeballs rolling white as the
miniature mountain.

Sneezing now loudly about the kitchen, it strikes
him as incredible that

IV7

into �



he has both these people inside the same field of vision. Pirate's face
darkening with embarrassment, Katje's unchanging, half struck by light
from the next room, half in slate shadows.

"Should I have left you, then?" and when she only compresses her
mouth, impatient, "or do you think someone over here owed it to you to
bring you out?"

"No.
"

That reached her. Pirate only asked because he's begun to sus­
pect, darkly, any number of Someones Over Here. But to Katje a debt is
for wiping out. Her old, intractable vice-she wants to cross seas, to
connect countries between whom there is no possible rate of exchange.Her ancestors sang, in Middle Dutch,

tlUlU

ic heb u liever dan en everswin,
al waert van finen goude ghewracht,

love incommensurate with gold, golden calf, even in this case golden
swine. But by the middle of the 17th century there were no more pigs of
gold, only of flesh mortal as that of Frans Van der Croov, another ances­
tor, who went off to Mauritius with a boatload of these live hogs and
lost thirteen years toting his haakbus through the ebony forests, wander­
ing the swamps and lava flows, systematically killing off the native
dodoes for reasons he could not explain. The Dutch pigs took care of
eggs and younger birds. Frans carefully drew beads on the parents at 10
or 20 meters, the piece propped on its hook, slowly squeezing the
trigger, eye focused on the molting ugliness while closer in the slow­
match, soaked in wine, held in the jaws of the serpentine, came bloom­
ing redly downward, its heat on his cheek like my own small luminary,he wrote home to Hendrik the older brother, the ruler of my Sign . . .
uncovering the priming-powder he'd been keeping shielded with his
other hand-sudden flash in the pan, through the touchhole, and the
loud report echoing off the steep rocks, recoil smashing the butt up
along his shoulder (the skin there at first raw, blistered, then callused
over, after the first summer). And the stupid, awkward bird, never in­
tended to fly or run at any speed-what were they good for?-unable
now even to locate his murderer, ruptured, splashing blood, raucously
dying....

At home, the brother skimmed the letters, some crisp, some sea­stained or faded, spanning years, delivered all at once-understanding
very little of it, only anxious to spend the day, as usual, in the gardensand greenhouse with his tulips (a reigning madness of the time), espe­cially one new variety named for his current mistress: blood-red, finely

108

oro
, Ill�

!o
rno

to

h
ili



tattooed in purple. . . . "Recent arrivals all carrying the new snaphaan
. . .

but I stick to my clumsy old matchlock . . . don't I deserve a

clumsy weapon for such a clumsy prey?" But Frans got no closer to
tell­

ing what kept him out among the winter cyclones, stuffing pieces
of old

uniform down after the lead balls, sunburned, bearded and filthy­
unless it rained or he was in the uplands where the craters of old volca­

noes cupped rainfall blue as the sky in upward offering.
He left the dodoes to rot, he couldn't endure to eat their flesh. Usu­

ally, he hunted alone. But often, after months of it,
the isolation would

begin to change him, change his very perceptions-the jagged
moun­

tains in full daylight flaring as he watched into freak saffrons, streaming
indigos, the sky his glass house, all the island his tulipomania.

The

voices-he insomniac, southern stars too thick for constellations
teem­

ing in faces and creatures of fable less likely
than the dodo-spoke the

words of sleepers, singly, coupled, in chorus. The rhythms and
timbres

were Dutch, but made no waking sense. Except that he thought they
were warning him . . . scolding, angry that he

couldn't understand.

Once he sat all day staring at a Single white dodo's egg in a grass
hum­

mock. The place was too remote for any foraging pig to've
found. He

waited for scratching, a first crack reaching to net the chalk
surface: an

emergence. Hemp gripped in the teeth of the steel snake, ready
to be

lit, ready to descend, sun to black-powder sea,
and destroy the infant,

egg of light into egg of darkness, within its first
minute of amazed vision,

of wet down stirred cool by these southeast trades. . . . Each hour
he

sighted down the barrel. It was then, if ever,
he might have seen how

the weapon made an axis potent as
Earth's own between himself and

this victim, still one, inside the egg, with the
ancestral chain, not to be

broken out for more than its blink of world's light. There they were, the

silent egg and the crazy Dutchman,
and the hookgun that linked them

forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer. Only
the sun

moved: from zenith down at last behind the snaggleteeth of
mountains

to Indian ocean, to tarry night. The egg, without a quiver,
still un­

hatched. He should have blasted it then where it lay: he understood

that the bird would hatch before dawn. But a cycle was finished. He got
to his feet, knee and hip joints in agony, head gonging with

instructions

from his sleeptalkers droning by, overlapping, urgent,
and only limped

away, piece at right shoulder arms.
When loneliness began to drive him into situations like this,

he often

returned to a settlement and joined a hunting party. A drunken,
univer­

sity hysteria would take hold of them all,
out on night-rampages where

they'd be presently firing at anything, treetops, clouds,
leather demon

109



bats screaming up beyond hearing. Tradewinds moving upslope to chill
their nights' sweating, sky lit half crimson by a volcano, rumblingsunder their feet as deep as the bats' voices were high, all these men
were caught in the spectrum between, trapped among frequencies of
their own voices and words.

This furious host were losers, impersonating a race chosen by God.
The colony, the venture, was dying-like the ebony trees they were
stripping from the island, like the poor species they were removing to­
tally from the earth. By 1681, Didus ineptus would be gone, by 1710 so
would every last settler from Mauritius. The enterprise here would have
lasted about a human lifetime.

To some, it made sense. They saw the stumbling birds ill-made to the
point of Satanic intervention, so ugly as to embody argument against a
Godly creation. Was Mauritius some first poison trickle through the
sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem it here, or perish in a
second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy. The act of
ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a
devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.

But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius, why had they also been
chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is it a passing-over? Are
they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as dodoes?

Frans could not know that except for a few others on the island of
Reunion, these were the only dodoes in the Creation, and that he was
helping exterminate a race. But at times the scale and frenzy of the
hunting did come through to trouble his heart. "If the species were notsuch a perversion," he wrote, "it might be profitably husbanded to feed
our generations. I cannot hate them quite so violently as do some here.
But what now can mitigate this slaughter? It is too late.... Perhaps a
more comely beak, fuller feathering, a capacity for flight, however brief
... details of Design. Or, had we but found savages on this island, the
bird's appearance might have then seemed to us no stranger than that ofthe wild turkey of North America. Alas, their tragedy is to be the domi­
nant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech."That was it, right there. No language meant no chance of co-optingthem in to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling Salvation.But Frans, in the course of morning lights lonelier than most, could not
keep from finally witnessing a miracle: a Gift of Speech . . . a Conver­
sion of the Dodoes. Ranked in thousands on the shore, with a luminous
profile of reef on the water behind them, its roar the only sound on the
morning, volcanoes at rest, the wind suspended, an autumn sunrise dis­
pensing light glassy and deep over them all . . . they have come from

110



their nests and rookeries, from beside the streams bursting out the
mouths of lava tunnels, from the minor islands awash like debris off the

north coast, from sudden waterfalls and the wasted rain-forests where

the axeblades are rusting and the rough flumes rot and topple in the
wind, from their wet mornings under the shadows of mountain-stubs

they have waddled in awkward pilgrimage to this assembly: to be sanc­
tified, taken in.... For as much as they are the creatures of God, and

mOlw: have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in His Word
on;; is eternal life to be found . . . And there are tears of happiness in the

\\'olli�l eyes of the dodoes. They are all brothers now, they and the humans who
used to hunt them, brothers in Christ, the little baby they dream now of

sitting near, roosting in his stable, feathers at peace, watching over him
and his dear face all night long. . . .

It is the purest form of European adventuring. What's it all been for,
the murdering seas, the gangrene winters and starving springs, our bone

pursuit of the unfaithful, midnights of wrestling with the Beast,
our

sweat become ice and our tears pale flakes of snow, if not for such mo­
ments as this: the little converts flowing out of eye's field, so meek, so

trusting-how shall any craw clench in fear, any recreant cry be
offered

in the presence of our blade, our necessary blade?
Sanctified now they

will feed us, sanctified their remains and droppings fertilize our crops.
Did we tell them "Salvation"? Did we mean a dwelling forever in the

City? Everlasting life? An earthly paradise restored, their
island as it

used to be given them back? Probably. Thinking all the time of the
little

brothers numbered among our own blessings. Indeed, if they save us

�eatof! from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ's kingdom,
our salva-

IOll1&' tions must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise
the dodoes

P1rn�� would be only what they appear
as in the world's illusory light-only

'ererN' our prey. God could not be that cruel.

illanu� Frans can look at both versions,
the miracle and the hunt of more

�an�1 years than he can remember now,
as real, equal possibilities. In both,

ilie�o[ eventually, the dodoes die. But as for faith .
. . he can believe only in

the one steel reality of the firearm he carries. "He knew that a snaphaan

CO-O�� would weigh less,
its cock, flint, and steel give him surer ignition-but

�ruva�:: he felt a nostalgia about the
haakbus ... he didn't mind the extra

coul�� weight, it was his crotchet. .
. ."

Pirate and Osbie Feel are leaning on their roof-ledge, a magnificent
sunset across and up the winding river, the imperial serpent,

crowds of

factories, flats, parks, smoky spires and gables, incandescent sky casting
downward across the miles of deep streets and roofs cluttering and sinu­

ous river Thames a drastic stain of burnt orange to remind a
visitor of

111



an

!�

his mortal transience here, to seal or empty all the doors and windows in
sight to his eyes that look only for a bit of company, a word or two in
the street before he goes up to the soap-heavy smell of the rented room
and the squares of coral sunset on the floorboards-an antique light,
self-absorbed, fuel consumed in the metered winter holocaust, the more
distant shapes among the threads or sheets of smoke now perfect ash
ruins of themselves, nearer windows, struck a moment by the sun, not
reflecting at all but containing the same destroying light, this intense
fading in which there is no promise of return, light that rusts the gov­
ernment cars at the curbsides, varnishes the last faces hurrying past the
shops in the cold as if a vast siren had finally sounded, light that makes
chilled untraveled canals of many streets, and that fills with the starlingsof London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying
squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric r:ngs,
on the radar screens. The operators call them "angels."

"He's haunting you," Osbie puffing on an Amanita cigarette.
"Yes," Pirate ranging the edges of the roof-garden, irritable in the

sunset, "but it's the last thing I want to believe. The other's been bad
enough....

"

"What d'you think of her, then."
"Someone can use her, I think," having decided this yesterday at

Charing Cross Station when she left for "The White Visitation." "An
unforeseen dividend, for somebody."

"Do you know what they have in mind, down there?"
Only that they're brewing up something that involves a giant octopus.But no one up here in London knows with any precision. Even at "The

White Visitation" there's this sudden great coming and going, and a
swampy ambiguity as to why. Myron Grunton is noted casting less than
comradely looks at Roger Mexico. The Zouave has gone back to his unit
in North Africa, back under the Cross of Lorraine, all that the German
might find sinister in his blackness recorded on film, sweet-talked or co­
erced out of him by none less than Gerhardt von Coll, once an intimate
and still the equal of Lang, Pabst, Lubitsch, more lately meshed in with
the affairs of any number of exile governments, fluctuations in curren­
cies, the establishment and disestablishment of an astonishing networkof market operations winking on, winking off across the embattled con­
tinent, even as the firefights whistle steel up and down the streets and
the firestorms sweep oxygen up in the sky and the customers fall smoth­
ered like bugs in the presence of Flit . . . but commerce has not taken
away von Coll's Touch: these days it has grown more sensitive than
ever. In these first rushes the black man moves about in SS uniform,

iJ]l'

\Va

�v

112



among the lath and canvas mockups of rocket and Meillerwagen (al­
ways shot through pines, through snow, from distant angles that

don't

give away the English location), the others in plausible blackface,
re­

cruited for the day, the whole crew on a lark, Mr. Pointsman, Mexico,
Edwin Treacle, and Rollo Groast, ARF's resident neurosurgeon Aaron

Throwster, all playing the black rocketeers of the fictional Schwarzkom­
mando-even Myron Grunton in a nonspeaking role, a blurry extra like
the rest of them. Running time of the film is three minutes, 25 seconds

and there are twelve shots. It will be antiqued, given a bit of fungus and

ferrotyping, and transported to Holland, to become part of
the "re­

mains" of a counterfeit rocket-firing site in the Rijkswijksche Bosch.
The Dutch resistance will then "raid" this site, making a lot of commo­

tion, faking in tire-tracks and detailing the litter of hasty departure.
The

inside of an Army lorry will be gutted by Molotov cocktails: among
ashes, charred clothing, blackened and slightly melted gin bottles, will be
found fragments of carefully forged Schwarzkommando documents,

and

of a reel of film, only three minutes and 25 seconds of which will be view­

able. Von Coll, with a straight face, proclaims it to be his greatest work.

"Indeed, as things were to develop," writes noted film critic
Mitchell

Prettyplace, "one cannot argue much with his estimate, though
for

vastly different reasons than von Coll might have given
or even from his

peculiar vantage foreseen."
At "The White Visitation," because of erratic funding, there is only

one film projector. Each day, about noon, after the Operation
Black

Wing people have watched their fraudulent
African rocket troops,

Webley Silvernail comes to carry the projector
back down the chilly

scuffed-wood corridors again to the ARF wing, in to the inner
room

where octopus Grigori oozes sullenly in his tank.
In other rooms the

dogs whine, bark shrilly in pain, whimper for a
stimulus that does not,

will never come, and the snow goes whirling, invisible tattooing
needles

against the nerveless window glass behind the green
shades. The reel is

threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori's attention
is directed to

the screen, where an image already walks. The camera
follows as she

moves deliberately nowhere longlegged about the rooms,
an adolescent

wideness and hunching to the shoulders, her hair not bluntly
Dutch at

all, but secured in a modish upsweep with an old,
tarnished silver

crown....



o 0 0 0 DOD

It was very early morning. He stumbled out alone into a wet brick
street. Southward the barrage balloons, surfriders on the combers of
morning, were glowing, pink and pearl, in the sunrise.

They've cut Slothrop loose again, he's back on the street, shit, last
chance for a Section 8 'n' he blew it. . . .

Why didn't they keep him on at that nut ward for as long as they said
they would-wasn't it supposed to be a few weeks? No explanation­
just "Cheerio!" and the onionskin sending him back to that
ACHTUNG. The Kenosha Kid, and that Crouchfield the Westwardman
and his sidekick Whappo have been all his world for these recent days
. . . there were still problems to be worked out, adventures not yet
completed, coercions and vast deals to be made on the order of the old
woman's arrangement for getting her pig home over the stile. But now,
rudely, here's that London again.

But something's different . . . something's . . . been changed . . .
don't mean to bitch, folks, but-well for instance he could almost swear
he's being followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty
slick, but others he can spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that
Woolworth's, he caught a certain pair of beady eyes in the toy section,
past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and little-kid-size Enfields. A
hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror of his Hum­
ber, no color or model he can pin down but something always presentinside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars when
he goes off on a morning's work. Things on his desk at ACHTUNG seem
not to be where they were. Girls have found excuses not to keep ap­
pointments. He feels he's being gently separated from the life he lived
before going into St. Veronica's. Even in movies there's always someonebehind him being careful not to talk, rattle paper, laugh too loud: Slo­
throp's been to enough movies that he can pick up an anomaly like that
right away.

The cubicle near Grosvenor Square begins to feel more and more like
a trap. He spends his time, often whole days, ranging the East End,
breathing the rank air of Thameside, seeking places the followers might
not follow.

One day, just as he's entering a narrow street all ancient brick walls
and lined with costermongers, he hears his name called-and hubba
hubba what's this then, here she comes all right, blonde hair Hying intelltales, white wedgies clattering on cobblestones, an adorable tomato
in a nurse uniform, and her name's, uh, well, oh-Darlene. Golly, it's

114



Darlene. She works at St. Veronica's hospital, lives nearby at the home
of a Mrs. Quoad, a lady widowed long ago and since suffering a series of
antiquated diseases-greensickness, tetter, kibes, purples, imposthumes
and almonds in the ears, most recently a touch of scurvy. So, out in
search of limes for her landlady, the fruit beginning to jog and spill from
her straw basket and roll yellowgreen back down the street, young Dar­
lene comes running in her nurse's cap, her breasts soft fenders for this

meeting on the gray city sea.
"You came back! Ah Tyrone, you're back," a tear or two, both of

them down picking up citrus, the starch khaki dress rattling, even the
odd sniffle from Slothrop's not unsentimental nose.

"It's me love . . ."
Tire tracks in the slush have turned to pearl, mellow pearl. Gulls

cruise slowly against the high windowless brick walls of the dis­
trict.

Mrs. Quoad's is up three dark flights, with the dome of faraway St.
Paul's out its kitchen window visible in the smoke of certain afternoons,

and the lady herself tiny in a rose plush chair in the sitting-room by the
wireless, listening to Primo Scala's Accordion Band. She looks healthy
enough. On the table, though, is her crumpled chiffon

handkerchief:

feathered blots of blood in and out the convolutions like a floral pat­
tern.

"You were here when I had that horrid quotidian ague," she recalls

Slothrop, "the day we brewed the wormwood tea," sure enough,
the

very taste now, rising through his shoe-soles, taking him along. They're
reassembling . . . it must be outside his memory . . . cool

clean inte­

rior, girl and woman, independent of his shorthand of stars . .
. so many

fading-faced girls, windy canalsides, bed-sitters, bus-stop good-bys,
how

can he be expected to remember? but this room has gone on clarifying:
part of whoever he was inside it has kindly remained,

stored quiescent
these months outside of his head, distributed through the grainy shad­

ows, the grease-hazy jars of herbs, candies, spices, all the Compton
Mackenzie novels on the shelf, glassy ambrotypes of her late husband

Austin night-dusted inside gilded frames up on the mantel
where last

time Michaelmas daisies greeted and razzled from a little Sevres vase

she and Austin found together one Saturday long ago in a Wardour

Street shop. . . .
"He was my good health," she often says. "Since he passed away

I've

had to become all but an outright witch, in pure self-defense." From the

kitchen comes the smell of limes freshly cut and squeezed. Darlene's in

and out of the room, looking for different botanicals, asking where the

115



�-�---
--' /

f!�:It#:-i"-'''''''''.'.'·.-'''''.'''''.'.''''''''.'.'.'''' •.•... � ;.;c', '. ./
N!

cheesecloth's got to, "Tyrone help me just reach down that-no next to
it, the tall jar, thank you love"-back into the kitchen in a creak of
starch, a flash of pink. "I'm the only one with a memory around here,"
Mrs. Quoad Sighs. "We help each other, you see." She brings out from
behind its cretonne camouflage a great bowl of candies. "Now," beam­
ing at Slothrop. "Here: wine jellies. They're prewar."

"Now I remember you-the one with the graft at the Ministry of
Supply!" but he knows, from last time, that no gallantry can help him
now. After that visit he wrote home to Nalline: "The English are kind of
weird when it comes to the way things taste, Mom. They aren't like us.
It might be the climate. They go for things we would never dream of.
Sometimes it is enough to turn your stomach, boy. The other day I had
had one of these things they call 'wine jellies.' That's their idea of
candy, Mom! Figure out a way to feed some to that Hitler 'n' I betcha
the war'd be over tomorrow!" Now once again he finds himself checking
out these ruddy gelatin objects, nodding, he hopes amiably, at Mrs.
Quoad. They have the names of different wines written on them in bas­
relief.

"Just a touch of menthol too," Mrs. Quoad popping one into her
mouth. "Delicious."

Slothrop finally chooses one that says Lafitte Rothschild and stuffs it
on into his kisser. "Oh yeah. Yeah. Mmm. It's great."

"If you really want something peculiar try the Bernkastler Doktor.
Oh! Aren't you the one who brought me those lovely American slimy
elm things, maple-tasting with a touch of sassafras-"

"Slippery elm. Jeepers I'm sorry, I ran out yesterday."
Darlene comes in with a steaming pot and three cups on a tray.

"What's that?" Slothrop a little quickly, here.
"You don't really want to know, Tyrone."
"Quite right," after the first sip, wishing she'd used more lime juice or

something to kill the basic taste, which is ghastly-bitter. These people
are really insane. No sugar, natch. He reaches in the candy bowl, comes
up with a black, ribbed licorice drop. It looks safe. But just as he's biting
in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez,
"Oh, I thought we got rid of all those-" a blithe, Gilbert & Sullivan in­
genue's thewse-"years ago," at which point Slothrop is encountering
this dribbling liquid center, which tastes like mayonnaise and orange
peels.

"You've taken the last of my Marmalade Surprises!" cries Mrs.
Quoad, having now with conjuror's speed produced an egg-shaped con-

116

tee

]0
, for

�ro
ne

�Ia
mli

�fJ; � ..• , , .. l-�."'.W.'- •• "':'- _ _ �j,�=o.,;.- -,---. -_ .
,..�



fection of pastel green, studded all over with lavender nonpareils. "Just
for that I shan't let you have any of these marvelous rhubarb

creams."

Into her mouth it goes, the whole thing.
"Serves me right," Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this,

sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy-oops but
that's a mistake, right, here's his mouth filling once again with horrible
alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in.
Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy,
molded like a stylized raspberry . . . mm, which oddly enough even
tastes like a raspberry, though it can't begin to take away that bitter­
ness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot,
he's been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the

most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric

acid, "Oh mercy that's really sour," hardly able to get the words out
he's so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull
to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby

trick then and

twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who's supposed to be
one of our Allies, shit he can't even see it's up his nose and whatever it is

won't dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and
crunches

like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is
meantime busy savor­

ing, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four.
She beams at the

young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting,
reaches again

for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has

brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of
the shelf, and now

he goes plunging, like a journey to the center
of some small, hostile

planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through
the mantle of choco­

late to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into
a core of some

very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece
of this out from be­

tween his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.
"Now you're getting the idea!" Mrs. Quoad waving at

him a marbled

conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, "you see, you
also have to enjoy the way it looks. Why are Americans so impulsive?"

"Well," mumbling, "usually we don't get any more complicated
than

Hershey bars, see....
"

"Oh, try this," hollers Darlene, clutching
her throat and swaying

against him.
"Gosh, it must really be something," doubtfully taking

this nasty­

looking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica
of a Mills-type

hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a
series of patriotic can­

dies put out before sugar was quite so scarce,
also including, he notices,

117

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peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped
taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and
a licorice bazooka.

"Go on then," Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it
and trying to shove it into his mouth.

"Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested."
"And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone."
Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious

pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a
chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop's head
begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue's a
hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. "Poi­
soned . . ." he is able to croak.

"Show a little backbone," advises Mrs. Quoad.
"Yes," Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, "don't

you know there's a war on? Here now love, open your mouth."
Through the tears he can't see it too well, but he can hear Mrs.

Quoad across the table going "Yum, yum, yum," and Darlene giggling.
It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow-unless
something is now going seriously wrong with his brain-it tastes like
gin. "Wha's 'is," he inquires thickly.

"A gin marshmallow," sez Mrs. Quoad.
"Awww ...

"

"Oh that's nothing, have one of these-" his teeth, in some perverse
reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet
spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it's tapioca, little glutinous chunks
of something all saturated with powdered cloves.

"More tea?" Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having
inhaled some of that clove filling.

"Nasty cough," Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of
English coughdrops, the Meggezone. "Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can
feel my scurvy going away, really I can."

The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp.
Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop's
mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alve­
olar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even
through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the
neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His
head floats in a halo of ice.

Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the
air. Slothrop lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a

118

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thing of the past, his groin now against her warm bottom. The one
candy he did not get to taste-one Mrs. Quoad withheld-was the Fire
of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste­
"salted plum" to one, "artificial cherry" to another ... "sugared vio­
lets" ... "Worcestershire sauce" ... "spiced treacle" ... any num­
ber of like descriptions, positive, terse-never exceeding two words in
length-resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases
found in training manuals, "sweet-and-sour eggplant" being perhaps the
lengthiest to date. The Fire of Paradise today is operationally extinct,
and in 1945 can hardly be found: certainly nowhere among the sunlit
shops and polished windows of Bond Street or waste Belgravia. But
every now and then one will surface, in places which deal usually other
merchandise than sweets: at rest, back inside big glass jars clouded by
the days, along with objects like itself, sometimes only one candy to a
whole jar, nearly hidden in the ambient tourmalines in German gold,
carved ebony finger-stalls from the last century, pegs, valve-pieces,
threaded hardware from obscure musical instruments, electronic com­

ponents of resin and copper that the War, in its glutton, ever-nibbling
intake, has not yet found and licked back into its darkness.... Places
where the motors never come close enough to be loud, and there are
trees outside along the street. Inner rooms and older faces developing
under light falling through a skylight, yellower, later in the year....

Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp
cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle . . . The
bedroom deepens into water and coolness. Somewhere the sun is going
down. Just enough light to see the darker freckles on her back. In the
parlor Mrs. Quoad is dreaming she's back in the gardens at Bourne­
mouth, among the rhododendrons, and a sudden rain, Austin crying
Touch-her throat, Majesty. Touch! and Yrj6-a pretender but the true
king, for a very doubtful branch of the family usurped the throne in
1878 during the intrigues over Bessarabia=-Yrjo in an old-fashioned
frock coat with golden galloons shining at the sleeves, bending toward
her in the rain to cure her forever of King's Evil, looking exactly as he
does in the rotogravure, his lovely Hrisoula a step or two behind kindly,
seriously waiting, around them the rain thundering down, the King's
white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch the hollow of
Mrs. Quoad's throat, the miracle touch, gently . . . touch . . .

The lightning-
And Slothrop is yawning "What time is it?" and Darlene is swimming

up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blind­

ing white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the con-

119



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

cussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating
in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning­
cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket's rush comes swelling, ele­
vated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been
breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched
like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop's penis has sprung
erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast,
palms and fingers in fear's pain, this hardon has seemed reasonably part
of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to
red strong flickering on the shade, she's begun to wonder . . . about the
two together ... but they're fucking now, and what does it matter, but
God's sake why shouldn't this stupid Blitz be good for something?

And who's that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing
carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveil­
lance, would you say the next one will fall?

The very first touch: he'd been saying something mean, a bit of the
usual Mexico self-reproach-ah you don't know me I'm really a bastard
sort of thing-"No," she went to put her fingers to his lips, "don't say
that. . . ." As she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist,
moved her hand away, pure defense-but kept holding her, by the
wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and neither would look away. Roger
brought her hand to his lips and kissed it then, still watching her eyes. A
pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the front of his chest ...
"Ohh ...

"

the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to hug him,
completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told him
later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first
time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica's soft cunt through her
knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking
her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt,
and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out
why, exactly.

Whenever it happens, though, the light always gets very red for them.
Once they met at a teashop: she was wearing a red sweater with short

sleeves, and her bare arms glowed red by her sides. She hadn't any
make-up on, the first time he'd seen her so. Walking to the car, she
takes his hand and puts it, for a moment, lightly between her moving
legs. Roger's heart grows erect, and comes. That's really how it feels. Up

120



sharply to skin level in a V around his centerline, washing over his nip­
ples . . . it is love, it is amazing. Even when she isn't there, after a
dream, at a face in the street that might against chance be Jessica's,
Roger can never control it, he's in its grasp.

About Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother, Roger tries
not to think any more than he has to. Of course he agonizes over techni­
cal matters. She cannot possibly-can she?-be Doing The Same
Things with Jeremy. Does Jeremy ever kiss her cunt, for example?
Could that prig actually-does she reach around as they're fucking
a-and slide a mischievous finger, his English rose, into Jeremy's asshole?
Stop, stop this (but does she suck his cock? Has he ever had his habitu­
ally insolent face between her lovely buttocks?) no use, it's youthful
folly time here and you're better off up at the Tivoli watching Maria
Montez and Jon Hall, or looking for leopards or peccaries in Regents
Park Zoo, and wondering if it'll rain before 4:30.

The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only
comes to hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average
SHAEF memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that

the statistician can make these figures mean anything.
Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as mus­

cles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.
Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play

alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against
her sky, with his wind humming among the loops of barbed wire down
along the beach. The Mayfair Hotel. "We are quite the jet-propelled
one aren't we, only half an hour late."

"Well," Wrens and NAAFI girls, jeweled young widows side­
glancing on by, "I'm sure you've put the time to good use."

"Time enough for several assignations," he replies, looking elabo­
rately at his watch, worn WW II style on the inside of his wrist, "and by
now, I should say, a confirmed pregnancy or two, if not indeed-"

"Ah," she blithely jumps (but upward, not on), "that reminds
me ...

"

"Yaaahhh!" Roger reeling back to a potted plant, among the lilting
saxophones of Roland Peachey and his Orchestra playing "There, I Said
It Again," and cowering.

"So, that's on your mind. If mind is the word I want."

They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately
want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death,
business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica are there. It's all shortages,
songs and boy friends, films and blouses . . .

of�

121



With her hair pulled back of her ears, her soft chin in profile, she
looks only 9 or 10, alone by windows, blinking into the sun, turning her
head on the light counterpane, coming in tears, child's reddening wrin­
kling face about to cry, going oh, oh . . .

One night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to
and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm
breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three
notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with
snowflakes remembered from around nightfall. Trees outside sifting the
wind, out of her Sight the lorries forever rushing down the streets and
roads, behind houses, across canals or river, beyond the simple park. Oh
and the dogs and cats who went padding in the fine snow....

"

... pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I
mean I'm not making them....

"

A bright swarm of them is passing
by, against the low isotonic glimmer of the ceiling. He and she lie and
breathe mouth-up. His soft cock drools down around his thigh, the
downhill one, closest to Jessica. The night room heaves a sigh, yes
Heaves, a Sigh-old-fashioned comical room, oh me I'm hopeless, born
a joker never change, flirting away through the mirrorframe in some­
thing green-striped, pantalooned, and rufHed-meantime though, it is
quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been known also to
"breathe," yes even wait in hushed expectancy and that ought to be the
rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures, heavy perfume and
capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with spiral stairways, blue­
petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one, however provoked or
out of touch, my dear young lady, ever, Heaves, a Sigh. It is not done.

But here. Oh, this young lady. Checked gingham. Ragged eyebrows,
grown wild. Red velvet. On a dare once, she took off her blouse, motor­
ing up on the trunk road near Lower Beeding.

"My God she's gone insane, what is this, why do they all come to
me?"

"Well, ha, ha," Jessica twirling the necktie of her Army blouse like a
stripper, "you uh, said I was afraid to. Di'n't you. Called me 'cowardly,
cowardly custard' or something, 's I recall-" No brassiere of course,
she never wears one.

"Look here," glaring Sideways, "do you know you can get arrested?
Never mind you," just occurring to him, here, "I'll get arrested!"

"They'll blame it all on you, la, la." Lower teeth edging out in a
mean-girl's smile. "I'm just an innocent lamb and this-" flinging a little

122

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arm out, striking light from the fair hairs on her forearm, her small
breasts bouncing free, "this Roger-the-rake! here, this awful beast!
makes me perform, these degrading . . ."

Meantime, the most gigantic lorry Roger has ever seen in his life has
manoeuvred steel-shuddering nearby, and now not only the driver, but
also several-well, what appear to be horrid . . . midgets, in strange op­
eretta uniforms actually, some sort of Central European government-in­
exile, all of them crammed somehow into the high-set cab, all are star­
ing down, scufHing like piglets on a sow for position, eyes popping,
swarthy, mouths leaking spit, to take in the spectacle of his Jessica
Swanlake scandalously bare-breasted and himself desperately looking to
slow down and drop behind the lorry-except that now, behind Roger,
pressing him on, in fact, at a speed identical with the lorry's, has ap­
peared, oh shit it is, a military police car. He can't slow down, and if he
speeds up, they'll really get suspicious. . . .

"Uh, Jessie, please get dressed, um, would you love?" Making a show
of looking for his comb which is, as usual, lost, suspect is known as a no­
torious ctenophile . . .

The driver of the huge, loud lorry now tries to get Roger's attention,
the other midgets crowding at the windows calling, "Hey! Hey!" and
emitting oily, guttural laughs. Their leader speaks English with some
liquid, unspeakably nasty European accent. Lot of winking and nudging
up there now, too: "Meester! Ay, zhu! Wet a meeneh', eh?" More

laughter. Roger in the rearview mirror sees English cop-faces pink with
rectitude, red insignia leaning, bobbing, consulting, turning sharply now
and then to stare ahead at the couple in the Jaguar who're acting so­
"What are they doing, Prigsbury, can you make it out?"

"Appears to be a man and a woman, sir."
Q�� "Ass." And it's out with the black binoculars.

m�

Through rain . . . then through dreaming glass, green with the eve­
ning. And herself in a chair, old-fashioned bonneted, looking west over
the deck of Earth, inferno red at its edges, and further in the brown and

gold clouds. . . .
Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue

by-is it the moon, or some other light from the sky? just the hard chair,
empty now, in the very clear night, and this cold light coming
down....

The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful
... but she's snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she
loves the line of his neck all at once so-why there it is right there, the
back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten's. She kisses him up and down

123

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the sour salt reach of skin that's taken her so, taken her nightlit along
this high tendoning, kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and
never ending.

124

One morning-he had not seen her for about a fortnight-he woke in
his hermit's cell at "The White Visitation" with a hardon, scratchy eye­
lids and a long pale brown hair tangled in his mouth. It wasn't one of his
own hairs. It wasn't anybody's he could think of but Jessica's. But it
couldn't be-he hadn't seen her. He sniffled a couple of times, then
sneezed. Morning developed out the window. His right canine ached.
He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth­
breather's morning fur, and stared at it. How'd it get here? Eerie,
dearie. A bit of the je ne sais quoi de sin istre, all right. He had to piss.
Shuffling to the lavatory, his graying government flannel tucked limply
inside the cord of his pajamas, it came to him: what if it's some mauve
turn-of-the-century tale of ghostly revenge and this hair here's some
First Step ... Oh, paranoia? You should've seen him going through all
the combinations as he moved around doing lavatory things among the
stumbling, farting, razor-scraping, hacking, sneezing and snot-crusted
inmates of Psi Section. Only later in this did he even begin to think of
Jessica-of her safety. Thoughtful Roger. What if, if she'd died in the
night, an accident at the magazines . . . with this hair the only good-by
her ghostly love had been able to push back through to this side, to the
only one who'd ever mattered. . . . Some spider-statistician: his eyes
had actually filled with tears before the Next Idea-oh. Gboy. Turn off
that faucet, Dorset, and get hep to this. He stood, half-stooped, over the
washbasin, paralyzed, putting his worry for Jessica on Hold for a bit,
wanting very much to look back over his shoulder, even into the, the old
mirror, you know, see what they're up to, but too frozen to risk even
that ... now ... oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed in
his brain, and here it is. What if they are all, all these Psi Section freaks
here, ganged up on him in secret? O.K.? Yes: suppose they can see into
your mind! a-and how about-what if it's hypnotism? Eh? Jesus: then a
whole number of other occult things such as: astral projection, brain
control (nothing occult about that), secret curses for impotence, boils,
madness, yaaahhh-potions! (as he straightens at last and back in his
mind's eyes to his office now glances, very gingerly, at the coffee mess,
oh God . . . ), psychic-unity-with-the-Controlling-Agency such that
Roger would be he and he Roger, yes yes a number of these notions
rambling through his mind here, none of them really pleasant, either­
especially inside this staff latrine, with Gavin Trefoil's face this morning

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125

colored bright magenta, a clover blossom flashing in the wind, Ronald
Cherrycoke hawking fine-marbled amber phlegm into the basin­
what's all this, who are all these people.... Freaks! Freeeeaks! He's
surrounded! they've been out there night and day all the war long tap­
ping his brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions
tuning in on everything-even when he and Jessica are in bed fuck­
ing-

Try to hold it down old man, panic if you must but later, not here.
. . . Faint washroom light bulbs deepen the thousands of old clustered
water and soap spots on the mirrors to an interfeathering of clouds, of
skin and smoke as he swings his head past, lemon and beige, oilsmoke
black and twilight brown in here, very loosely crumbled, that's the
texture....

Lovely morning, World War Two. All he can keep in front of his
mind are the words I want a transfer, kind of humming tunelessly at the
mirror, yes sir got to put in a chit right away. I'll volunteer for duty in
Germany's what I'll do. Dum de dum, de dum. Right, there was an ad

only Wednesday in the classified section of Nazis in the News, sand­
wiched between a Merseyside Labour branch that was looking for a

publicist, and a London advertising agency with positions open immedi­

ately on demob, they said. This ad in the middle was placed by some
arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few "re-education" experts.
Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta,

sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the 'works of some neu­
rotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of
the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window­

"Anything!" Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, "anything at
all's better than this. . . ."

That's how bad it was. He knew he'd feel more at home in mad Ger­

many with the Enemy than here in Psi Section. The time of year makes
it even worse. Christmas. Bwweeeaaaagghh, clutching to his stomach.

Jessica was all that made it human or tolerable. Jessica ...
He was taken over then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in

his long underwear, soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclo­
sure, among so many sharp edges of books, sheafs and Himsies, charts
and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of

lady London, watching over all. . . wait. . . disease on skin. . . does
she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are

the sites predestined, and
does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption

la­

tent in the city . . . but he can't hold it, no more than he understands
Pointsman's obsession with the reversal of sound stimuli and please,

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She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs
off of stale Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks
passing for sympathy. Tonight she'll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but
she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn't. Does she?
She can't remember ever being so confused. When she's with Roger it's
all love, but at any distance-any at all, Jack-she finds that he depres­
ses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding
up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to
turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming
there's only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out
of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the
War, the winter: he hates England so, hates "the System," gripes end­
lessly, says he'll emigrate when the War's over, stays inside his paper
cynic's cave hating himself . . . and does she want to bring him out, re­
ally? Isn't it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too
often, but it's there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be
married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches
and easings. She's worn old Beaver's bathrobes, brewed his tea and
coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields

126

please can't we just drop it for a bit ... ), visited, not knowing till it
passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that [essica
was now, how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her
beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he'd not so long
ago believed in-her unflappable hope (though she hated to make
plans), her exile from childhood (though she refused ever to hold on to
memories) ....

His life had been tied to the past. He'd seen himself a point on a mov­
ing wavefront, propagating through sterile history-a known past, a
projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly
there was a beach, the unpredictable . . . new life. Past and future
stopped at the beach: that was how he'd set it out. But he wanted to be­
lieve it too, the same way he loved her, past all words-believe that no
matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be
changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it
away. And (selfishly) that from a somber youth, squarely founded on
Death-along for Death's ride-he might, with her, find his way to life
and to joy. He'd never told her, he avoided telling himself, but that was
the measure of his faith, as this seventh Christmas of the War came
wheeling in another charge at his skinny, shivering flank. . . .

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127

fOlio

when all the day's mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look
-familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word is invoked for quaint­
ness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic,
self-centered-boy, really. Weepers, he's supposed to be past thirty,
he's years older than she. He ought to've learned something, surely? A
man of experience?

The worst of it's that she has no one to talk to. The politics of this
mixed battery, the professional incest, the unwholesome obsessions with
who said what to whom in the spring of 1942 for God's sake, outside of
Grafty Green, Kent, or someplace, and who ought to have answered
what but didn't but told someone else instead thus provoking hatreds
that have thrived wonderfully down to the present day-six years of
slander, ambition and hysteria make confiding anything to anyone
around here an act of pure masochism.

"Girl in distress, Jess?" Maggie Dunkirk on the way by, smoothing
her gauntlets. On the Tannoy a BBC swing band is blaring hotly' synco­
pated Christmas music.

"Got a fag, Mag?" pretty automatic by now, you guess, Jess?
Well- "Thought it looked somewhat like a bloody Garbo film

around here, not at all the usual nicotine starvation, sorry wrong again,
ta-ta....

"

Oh be on your way. "Thinking about me Xmas shopping."
"What're you getting the Beaver then."
Concentrating on gartering her nylons, the older pair, up-in-front­

down-in-back mnemonically stirring in wafts among her fingers, laun­
dry-white puckered elastic being stretched fine and tangent now to the
gentle front curve of her thigh, suspender-clips glittering silver under or
behind her lacquered red fingernails, passing like distant fountains be­
hind red topiary trees, Jessica replies, "Oh, Mm. A Pipe, I sup­
pose....

"

Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and
Jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamplit,
growing out of the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before ves­
pers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the
entrance, American Hiers in leather lined with sheep's wool, a few
women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no
children, not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their
bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the
Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines. Jessica said, "Oh, I re-



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but didn't go on. She was remembering other Advents,
and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be
pasted up on the sky again.

Roger pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military
going in to evensong. The wind smelled of fresh snow.

"We ought to be home," she said, after a bit, "it's late."
"We could just pop in here for a moment."
Well, that surprised her, but def, after weeks of his snide comments?

His unbeliever's annoyance with the others in Psi Section he thought
were out to drive him dotty as they were, and his Scroogery growing as
shopping days till Xmas dwindled-"You' re not supposed to be the
sort," she told him. But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in to­
night's snow-sky, her own voice ready to betray her and run to join the
waits whose carols we're so apt to hear now in the distances, these days
of Advent dropping one by one, voices piping across frozen downs
where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding . . . often
above sounds of melting snow, winds that must blow not through
Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her those
child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn't ready to take
on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was the
fear that she was beginning to lose them-that one winter she would go
running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but
in vain, their voices fading. . . .

They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she
gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once
on ice. "To hear the music," he explained.

Tonight's scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible
under the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as
white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, ca­
bles strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents
whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the cross­
hatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed
there. Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican cor­
poral, taken from his warm island to this-from singing his childhood
along the rum-smoky saloons of High Holborn Street where the sailors
throw mammoth red firecrackers, quarter of a stick of dynamite man,
over the swinging doors and run across the street giggling, or come
walking out with high-skirted girls, girls of the island, Chinese and
French girls . . . lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the streets
scented the early mornings where he used to sing, 0 have you seen my
darlin' Lola, with a shape like a bottle of Coca-Cola, sailors running up

128



� - -

� ,�-:-� ._ ••_ ..._-_.. • ...M..·' '-

In dulci jubilo
Nun singet und seid froh!
Unsers Herzens Wonne
Leit in praesipio,
Leuchtet vor die Sonne
Matris in gremio.
Alpha es 'et 0.

M and down in the brown shadows of alleys, flapping at neckerchief and
0r pants-leg, and the girls whispering together and laughing . . . each

morning he counted out half a pocket full of coins of all nations. From
palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire
(1939-1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in
earshot of a northern sea he'd hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a compline
service, a program tonight of plainsong in English, forays now and then

m� into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macronic
from the fifteenth century, attributed to Heinrich Suso:

With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head
falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice
brought over years of woodshedding up to this range ... he was bring­
ing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the
ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May,
Plongette who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free
-not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These
are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black
man's presence, from acts of minor surrealism-which, taken in the
mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless
version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day,
completely unaware of what it's doing. . . . So the pure counter-tenor
voice was soaring, finding its way in to buoy Jessica's heart and even
Roger's, she guessed, risking glances at his face sideways and up
through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives or releases. He
wasn't looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. He was ...

No, Jessica's never seen his face exactly like this, in the light of a few
hanging oil lamps, the flames unguttering and very yellow, on the near­
est the verger's two long fingerprints in fine, pollen V-for-victory up
around the belly of the glass, Roger's skin more child-pink, his eyes
more glowing than the lamplight alone can account for-isn't it? or is
that how she wants it to be? The church is as cold as the night outside.
There's the smell of damp wool, of bitter on the breaths of these profes-

129



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130

sionals, of candle smoke and melting wax, of smothered farting, of hair
tonic, of the burning oil itself, folding the other odors in a maternal way,
more closely belonging to Earth, to deep strata, other times, and listen
... listen: this is the War's evensong, the War's canonical hour, and
the night is real. Black greatcoats crowd together, empty hoods full of
dense, church-interior shadows. Over on the coast the Wrens work late,
down inside cold and gutted shells, their blue torches are newborn stars
in the tidal evening. Hullplates swing in the sky, like great iron leaves,
on cables that creak in splinters of sound. At ease, on standby, the
flames of the torches, softened, fill the round glass faces of the gauges
with apricot light. In the pipefitters' sheds, icicled, rattling when the
gales are in the Straits, here's thousands of old used toothpaste tubes,
heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings made
tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white
spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thou­
sands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths,
who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bub­
bles-bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat
or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the coun­
terpane-uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to
sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths grow­
ing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idle­
ness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the
week's offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the
usual points, and isn't menthol a marvelous invention to take just
enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bub­
bles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intri­
cate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by
one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War,
heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter
shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of
London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, wait­
ing now-it is true return-to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for
castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of
that other domestic incarnation will never see. Yet the continuity, flesh
to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death
that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper
routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our
lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its
propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War
does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the



-.
� - -

� -.0___ ._ ..- ---- , '-
.

Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fuhrer-it wants a machine of
many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can
presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absen­
tee. Perhaps the War isn't even an awareness-not a life at all, really.
There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At "The
White Visitation" there's a long-time schiz, you know, who believes that
he is World War II. He gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wire­
less, but still, the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his tempera­
ture shot up to 1040• Now, as the pincers east and west continue their
slow reflex contraction, he speaks of darkness invading his mind, of an
attrition of self. . . . The Rundstedt offensive perked him up though,
gave him a new lease on life-"A beautiful Christmas gift," he con­
fessed to the resident on his ward, "it's the season of birth, of fresh be­

ginnings." Whenever the rockets fall-those which are audible-he
smiles, turns out to pace the ward, tears about to splash from the cor­
ners of his merry eyes, caught up in a ruddy high tonicity that can't help
cheering his fellow patients. His days are numbered. He's to die on V-E
Day. If he's not in fact the War then he's its child-surrogate, living high
for a certain term but come the ceremonial day, look out. The true king
only dies a mock death. Remember. Any number of young men may be
selected to die in his place while the real king, foxy old bastard, goes on.
Will he show up under the Star, slyly genuflecting with the other kings
as this winter solstice draws on us? Bring to the serai gifts of tungsten,
cordite, high-octane? Will the child gaze up from his ground of golden
straw then, gaze into the eyes of the old king who bends long and un­
furling overhead, leans to proffer his gift, will the eyes meet, and what
message, what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king
and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do
you want it to be?

Advent blows from the sea, which at sunset tonight shone green and
smooth as iron-rich glass: blows daily upon us, all the sky above preg­
nant with saints and slender heralds' trumpets. Another year of wedding
dresses abandoned in the heart of winter, never called for, hanging in
quiet satin ranks now, their white-crumpled veils begun to yellow, rip­
pling slightly only at your passing, spectator . . . visitor to the city at all
the dead ends.... Glimpsing in the gowns your own reflection once or
twice, halfway from shadow, only blurred flesh-colors across the peau
de soie, urging you in to where you can smell the mildew's first horrible
touch, which was really the idea-covering all trace of her own smell,
middleclass bride-to-be perspiring, genteel soap and powder. But virgin
in her heart, in her hopes. None of your bright-Swiss or crystalline sea-

131



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---. /
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.�j

son here, but darkly billowed in the day with cloud and the snow falling
like gowns in the country, gowns of the winter, gentle at night, a nearly
windless breathing around you. In the stations of the city the prisoners
are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as
dreamers or men on the moon, among chrome-sprung prams of black
hide resonant as drumheads, blonde wood high-chairs pink and blue
with scraped and mush-spattered floral decals, folding-cots and bears
with red felt tongues, baby-blankets making bright pastel clouds in the
coal and steam smells, the metal spaces, among the queued, the drifting,
the warily asleep, come by their hundreds in for the holidays, despite
the warnings, the gravity of Mr. Morrison, the tube under the river a
German rocket may pierce now, even now as the words are set down,
the absences that may be waiting them, the city addresses that surely
can no longer exist. The eyes from Burma, from Tonkin, watch these
women at their hundred perseverances-stare out of blued orbits,
through headaches no Alasils can ease. Italian P /Ws curse underneath
the mail sacks that are puffing, echo-clanking in now each hour, in sea­
sonal swell, clogging the snowy trainloads like mushrooms, as if the
trains have been all night underground, passing through the country of
the dead. If these Eyeties sing now and then you can bet it's not "Ciovi­
nezza" but something probably from Rigoletto or La Boheme-indeed
the Post Office is considering issuing a list of N onacceptable Songs, with
ukulele chords as an aid to ready identification. Their cheer and songful­
ness, this lot, is genuine up to a pOint-but as the days pile up, as this
orgy of Christmas greeting grows daily beyond healthy limits, with no
containment in sight before Boxing Day, they settle, themselves, for
being more professionally Italian, rolling the odd eye at the lady evac­
uees, finding techniques of balancing the sack with one hand whilst the
other goes playing "dead"-cioe, conditionally alive-where the crowds
thicken most feminine, directionless . . . well, most promising. Life has
to go on. Both kinds of prisoner recognize that, but there's no mana
morto for the Englishmen back from CBI, no leap from dead to living at
mere permission from a likely haunch or thigh-no play, for God's sake,
about life-and-death! They want no more adventures: only the old
dutch fussing over the old stove or warming the old bed, cricketers in
the wintertime, they want the semi-detached Sunday dead-leaf somno­
lence of a dried garden. If the brave new world should also come about,
a kind of windfall, why there'll be time to adjust certainly to that. . ..
But they want the nearly postwar luxury this week of buying an electric
train set for the kid, trying that way each to light his own set of sleek lit­
tle faces here, calibrating his strangeness, well-known photographs all,

132

�rou

�r
iliem
�ol
�



brought to life now, oohs and aahs but not yet, not here in the station,
any of the moves most necessary: the War has shunted them, earthed
them, those heedless destroying signalings of love. The children have
unfolded last year's toys and found reincarnated Spam tins, they're hep
this may be the other and, who knows, unavoidable side to the Christ­
mas game. In the months between-country springs and summers­
they played with real Spam tins-tanks, tank-destroyers, pillboxes,
dreadnoughts deploying meat-pink, yellow and blue about the dusty
floors of lumber-rooms or butteries, under the cots or couches of their
exile. Now it's time again. The plaster baby, the oxen frosted with gold
leaf and the human-eyed sheep are turning real again, paint quickens to
flesh. To believe is not a price they pay-it happens all by itself. He is
the New Baby. On the magic night before, the animals will talk, and the
sky will be milk. The grandparents, who've waited each week for the
Radio Doctor asking, What Are Piles? What Is Emphysema? What Is A
Heart Attack? will wait up beyond insomnia, watching again for the
yearly impossible not to occur, but with some mean residue-this is the
hillside, the sky can show us a light-like a thrill, a good time you
wanted too much, not a complete loss but still too far short of a miracle
... keeping their sweatered and shawled Vigils, theatrically bitter, but
with the residue inside going through a new winter fermentation every
year, each time a bit less, but always good for a revival at this season.
. . . All but naked now, the shiny suits and gowns of their pubcrawling
primes long torn to strips for lagging the hot-water pipes and heaters of
landlords, strangers, for holding the houses' identities against the
winter. The War needs coal. They have taken the next-to-last steps, at­
tended the Radio Doctor's certifications of what they knew in their bod­
ies, and at Christmas they are naked as geese under this woolen, murky,
cheap old-people's swaddling. Their electric clocks run fast, even Big
Ben will be fast now until the new spring's run in, all fast, and no one
else seems to understand or to care. The War needs electricity. It's a

lively game, Electric Monopoly, among the power companies, the Cen­
tral Electricity Board, and other War agencies, to keep Grid Time syn­
chronized with Greenwich Mean Time. In the night, the deepest con­
crete wells of night, dynamos whose locations are classified spin faster,
and so, responding, the clock-hands next to all the old, sleepless eyes­
gathering in their minutes whining, pitching higher toward the vertigo
of a siren. It is the Night's Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the
shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the
numerals. The power companies speak of loads, war-drains so vast the
clocks will slow again unless this nighttime march is stolen, but the

133



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�:f.iI�i.�.,.-.-.-.:- � ,!_: '. ' ,

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loads expected daily do not occur, and the Grid runs inching ever faster,
and the old faces turn to the clock faces, thinking plot, and the numbers
go whirling toward the Nativity, a violence, a nova of heart that will
turn us all, change us forever to the very forgotten roots of who we are.
But over the sea the fog tonight still is quietly scalloped pearl. Up in the
city the arc-lamps crackle, furious, in smothered blaze up the cen­
terlines of the streets, too ice-colored for candles, too chill-dropleted for
holocaust ... the tall red busses sway, all the headlamps by regulation
newly unmasked now parry, cross, traverse and blind, torn great fistfuls
of wetness blow by, desolate as the beaches beneath the nacre fog,
whose barbed wire that never knew the inward sting of current, that
only lay passive, oxidizing in the night, now weaves like underwater
grass, looped, bitter cold, sharp as the scorpion, all the printless sand
miles past cruisers abandoned in the last summers of peacetime that
once holidayed the old world away, wine and olive-grove and pipe­
smoke evenings away the other side of the War, stripped now to rust
axles and brackets and smelling inside of the same brine as this beach
you cannot really walk, because of the War. Up across the downs, past
the spotlights where the migrant birds in autumn choked the beams
night after night, fatally held till they dropped exhausted out of the sky,
a shower of dead birds, the compline worshipers sit in the unheated
church, shivering, voiceless as the choir asks: where are the joys? Where
else but there where the Angels sing new songs and the bells ring out in
the court of the King. Eia-strange thousand-year sigh-eia, warn wir
da! were we but there. . . . The tired men and their black bellwether

reaching as far as they can, as far from their sheeps' clothing as the year
will let them stray. Come then. Leave your war awhile, paper or iron
war, petrol or flesh, come in with your love, your fear of losing, your ex­
haustion with it. All day it's been at you, coercing, jiving, claiming your
belief in so much that isn't true. Is that who you are, that vaguely crimi­
nal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as
the guillotine shutter fell-or maybe just left behind with your heart, at
the Stage Door Canteen, where they're counting the night's take, the
N AAFI girls, the girls named Eileen, carefully sorting into refrigerated
compartments the rubbery maroon organs with their yellow garnishes of
fat-oh Linda come here feel this one, put your finger down in the ven­
tricle here, isn't it swoony, it's still going. . . . Everybody you don't sus­
pect is in on this, everybody but you: the chaplain, the doctor, your
mother hoping to hang that Gold Star, the vapid soprano last night on
the Home Service programme, let's not forget Mr. Noel Coward so styl­
ish and cute about death and the afterlife, packing them into the

Duel
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Dull1
una
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oone

mar

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134

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Duchess for the fourth year running, the lads in Hollywood telling us
how grand it all is over here, how much fun, Walt Disney causing
Dumbo the elephant to clutch to that feather like how many carcasses
under the snow tonight among the white-painted tanks, how many
hands each frozen around a Miraculous Medal, lucky piece of worn
bone, half-dollar with the grinning sun peering up under Liberty's
wispy gown, clutching, dumb, when the 88 fell-what do you think, it's
a children's story? There aren't any. The children are away dreaming,
but the Empire has no place for dreams and it's Adults Only in here to­
night, here in this refuge with the lamps burning deep, in pre-Cambrian
exhalation, savory as food cooking, heavy as soot. And 60 miles up the
rockets hanging the measureless instant over the black North Sea before
the fall, ever faster, to orange heat, Christmas star, in helpless plunge to
Earth. Lower in the sky the flying bombs are out too, roaring like the
Adversary, seeking whom they may devour. It's a long walk home to­
night. Listen to this mock-angel singing, let your communion be at least
in listening, even if they are not spokesmen for your exact hopes, your
exact, darkest terror, listen. There must have been evensong here long
before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights
bad as this one-something to raise the possibility of another night that
could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish
the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies,
our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only
the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too

frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir

heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only an­
other Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that
one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful
gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the
foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just
like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration
thing, and up in the capital they're wondering should they, maybe, give
everybody a number, yeah, something to help SPQR Record-keeping
... and Herod or Hitler, fellas (the chaplains out in the Bulge are
manly, haggard, hard drinkers), what kind of a world is it ("You forgot
Roosevelt, padre," come the voices from the back, the good father can
never see them, they harass him, these tempters, even into his dreams:
"Wendell Willkie!" "How about Churchill?" "'Arry Pollitt!") for a

baby to come in tippin' those Toledos at 7 pounds 8 ounces thinkin' he's
gonna redeem it, why, he oughta have his head examined. . . .

But on the way home tonight, you wish you'd picked him up, held

135



him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hol­
low of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, some­
how, save him. For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be
registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say
you are.

o [esu parvule,
Nach dir ist mir so weh

So this pickup group, these exiles and horny kids, sullen civilians
called up in their middle age, men fattening despite their hunger, flatu­
lent because of it, pre-ulcerous, hoarse, runny-nosed, red-eyed, sore­
throated, piss-swollen men suffering from acute lower backs and all-day
hangovers, wishing death on officers they truly hate, men you have seen
on foot and smileless in the cities but forgot, men who don't remember
you either, knowing they ought to be grabbing a little sleep, not out
here performing for strangers, give you this evensong, climaxing now
with its rising fragment of some ancient scale, voices overlapping three­
and fourfold, up, echoing, filling the entire hollow of the church-no
counterfeit baby, no announcement of the Kingdom, not even a try at
warming or lighting this terrible night, only, damn us, our scruffy obliga­
tory little cry, our maximum reach outward-praise be to Godl-for you
to take back to your war-address, your war-identity, across the snow's
footprints and tire tracks finally to the path you must create by yourself,
alone in the dark. Whether you want it or not, whatever seas you have
crossed, the way home. . . .

D D D D D D D

Paradoxical phase, when weak stimuli get strong responses. . . . When
did it happen? A certain early stage of sleep: you had not heard the
Mosquitoes and Lancasters tonight on route to Germany, their engines
battering apart the sky, shaking and ripping it, for a full hour, a few
puffs of winter cloud drifting below the steel-riveted underside of the
night, Vibrating with the constancy, the terror, of so many bombers out­
ward bound. Your own form immobile, mouth-breathing, alone face-up
on the narrow cot next to the wall so pictureless, chartless, mapless: so
habitually blank. . . . Your feet pointed toward a high slit window at
the far end of the room. Starlight, the steady sound of the bombers' de­
parture, icy air seeping in. The table littered with broken-spined books,

136

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137

scribbled columns headed Time / Stimulus / Secretion (30 sec) / Re­
marks, teacups, saucers, pencils, pens. You slept, you dreamed: thou­
sands of feet above your face the steel bombers passed, wave after
wave. It was indoors, some great place of assembly. Many people were
gathered. In recent days, at certain hours, a round white light, quite in­
tense, has gone sliding along and down in a straight line through the air.
Here, suddenly, it appears again, its course linear as always, right to left.
But this time it isn't constant-instead it lights up brilliantly in short
bursts or jangles. The apparition, this time, is taken by those present as a
warning-something wrong, drastically wrong, with the day.... No
one knew what the round light signified. A commission had been ap­
pointed, an investigation under way, the answer tantalizingly close­
but now the light's behavior has changed. . . . The assembly adjourns.
On seeing the light jangling this way, you begin to wait for something
terrible-not exactly an air raid but something close to that. You look
quickly over at a clock. It's six on the dot, hands perfectly straight up
and down, and you understand that six is the hour of the appearance of
the light. You walk out into the evening. It's the street before your
childhood home: stony, rutted and cracked, water shining in puddles.
You set out to the left. (Usually in these dreams of home you prefer the
landscape to the right-broad night-lawns, towered over by ancient
walnut trees, a hill, a wooden fence, hollow-eyed horses in a field, a
cemetery. . . . Your task, in these dreams, is often to cross-under the
trees, through the shadows-before something happens. Often you go
into the fallow field just below the graveyard, full of autumn brambles
and rabbits, where the gypsies live. Sometimes you fly. But you can
never rise above a certain height. You may feel yourself being slowed,
coming inexorably to a halt: not the keen terror of falling, only an inter­
diction, from which there is no appeal . . . and as the landscape begins
to dim out . . . you know . . . that . . .) But this evening, this six
o'clock of the round light, you have set out leftward instead. With you is
a girl identified as your wife, though you were never married, have
never seen her before yet have known her for years. She doesn't speak.
It's just after a rain. Everything glimmers, edges are extremely clear, il­
lumination is low and very pure. Small clusters of white flowers peep
out wherever you look. Everything blooms. You catch another glimpse
of the round light, following its downward slant, a brief blink on and off.
Despite the apparent freshness, recent rain, flower-life, the scene dis­
turbs you. You try to pick up some fresh odor to correspond to what you
see, but cannot. Everything is silent, odorless. Because of the light's be­
havior something is going to happen, and you can only wait. The land-



scape shines. Wetness on the pavement. Settling a warm kind of hood ffi h
around the back of your neck and shoulders, you are about to remark to mi

your wife, "This is the most sinister time of evening." But there's a bet- ory
ter word than "sinister." You search for it. It is someone's name. It waits tra�
behind the twilight, the clarity, the white flowers. There comes a light �er
tapping at the door. lev

You sat bolt upright in bed, your heart pounding in fright. You waited fiia
for it to repeat, and became aware of the many bombers in the sky. An- de
other knock. It was Thomas Gwenhidwy, come down all the way from rai
London, with the news about poor Spectro. You slept through the loud ner
squadrons roaring without letup, but Cwenhidwy's small, reluctant tap ron
woke you. Something like what happens on the cortex of Dog during MIl
the "paradoxical" phase. be

Now ghosts crowd beneath the eaves. Stretched among snowy soot rea
chimneys, booming over air-shafts, too tenuous themselves for sound,
dry now forever in this wet gusting, stretched and never breaking, �e
whipped in glassy French-curved chase across the rooftops, along the re I
silver downs, skimming where the sea combs freezing in to shore. They om
gather, thicker as the days pass, English ghosts, so many jostling in the ili�
nights, memories unloosening into the winter, seeds that will never take r�
hold, so lost, now only an every-so-often word, a clue for the living- mrl
"Foxes," calls Spectro, across astral spaces, the word intended for Mr. ll�Pointsman who is not present, who won't be told because the few Psi it'!
Section who're there to hear it get cryptic debris of this sort every sit- ITa
ting-if recorded at all it finds its way into Milton Gloaming's word- toj
counting project-"Foxes," a buzzing echo on the afternoon, Carroll W�
Eventyr, "The White Visitation" 's resident medium, curls thickly tight- eVI
ened across his head, speaking the word "Foxes," out of very red, thin D�
lips . . . half of St. Veronica's hospital in the morning smashed roofless Y�
as the old Ick Regis Abbey, powdered as the snow, and poor Spectro til
picked off, lighted cubbyhole and dark ward subsumed in the blast and ��
he never hearing the approach, the sound too late, after the blast, the �\\
rocket's ghost calling to ghosts it newly made. Then silence. Another M
"event" for Roger Mexico, a round-headed pin to be stuck in his map, a m:
square graduating from two up to three hits, helping fill out the threes �a
prediction, which lately's being lagged behind. . . . �

A pin? not even that, a pinhole in paper that someday will be taken 01
down, when the rockets have stopped their falling, or when the young i�1
statistician chooses to end his count, paper to be hauled away by the
charwomen, torn up, burned. . . . Pointsman alone, sneezing helplessly

138



',-
� - -

� ...;-:-� - ...._..._--_....",....'. '-

in his dimming bureau, the barking from the kennels flat now and di­
minished by the cold, shaking his head no . . . inside me, in my mem­
ory . . . more than an "event" . . . our common mortality . . . these
tragic days. . . . But by now he is shivering, allowing himself to stare
across his office space at the Book, to remind himself that of an original
seven there are now only two owners left, himself and Thomas Gwen­

hidwy tending his poor out past Stepney. The five ghosts are strung in
clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a
raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Cor­
ner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro . . . auto,
bomb, gun, V-I, and now V-2, and Pointsman has no sense but terror's,
all his skin aching, for the mounting sophistication of this, for the dialec­
tic it seems to imply. . . .

"Ah, yes indeed. The mummy's curse, you idiot. Christ, Christ, I'm

ready for D Wing."
Now D Wing is "The White Visitation" 's cover, still housing a few

genuine patients. Few of the PISCES people go near it. The skeleton of

regular hospital staff have their own canteen, W.C.s, sleeping quarters,
offices, carrying on as under the old peace, suffering the Other Lot in
their midst. Just as, for their part, PISCES staff suffer the garden or

peacetime madness of D Wing, only rarely finding opportunity to swap
information on therapies or symptoms. Yes, one would expect more of a
link. Hysteria is, after all, is it not, hysteria. Well, no, come to find out,
it's not. How does one feel legitimist and easy for very long about the
transition? From conspiracies so mild, so domestic, from the serpent
coiled in the teacup, the hand's paralysis or eye's withdrawal at words,
words that could frighten that much, to the sort of thing Spectro found

every day in his ward, extinguished now . . . to what Pointsman finds in

Dogs Piotr, Natasha, Nikolai, Sergei, Katinka-or Pavel Sergevich,
Var­

vara Nikolaevna, and then their children, and- When it can be read so

clearly in the faces of the physicians . . . Gwenhidwy inside his fluffy
beard never as impassive as he might have wished, Spectro hurrying
away with a syringe for his Fox, when nothing can really stop

the

Abreaction of the Lord of the Night unless the Blitz stops, rockets dis­

mantle, the entire film runs backward: faired skin back to sheet steel

back to pigs to white incandescence to ore, to Earth. But
the reality

is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound
of arrival, is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the revers­
ible process: with each one the Lord

further legitimizes his State,
and we who cannot find him, even to see, come to think of death no

more often, really, than before . . . and, with no warning when they

139



.

---

--_.

/
a·�·''':;·····''''-·",;··-·,·····"······-·····.·,,·,, � '0' •. �. • .r'

will come, and no way to bring them down, pretend to carryon as
in Blitzless times. When it does happen, we are content to call it
"chance." Or we have been persuaded. There do exist levels where
chance is hardly recognized at all. But to the likes of employees
such as Roger Mexico it is music, not without its majesty, this power

( m? m3 mr:' )series Ne-m 1 + m + - + - + ... + ' terms num-2! 3! (n - I)!
bered according to rocketfalls per square, the Poisson dispensation rul-
ing not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry
accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per
year. ...

Pointsman stands by a window, his own vaguely reflected face
blown through with the driven snow outside in the darkening day.
Far across the downs cries a train whistle, grainy as late fog: a cock­
crow- . - . --, a long whistle, another crow, fire at trackside, a
rocket, another rocket, in the woods or valley . . .

Well ... Why not renounce the Book then Ned, give it up that's all,
the obsolescent data, the Master's isolated moments of poetry, it's paper
that's all, you don't need it, the Book and its terrible curse ... before
it's too late.... Yes, recant, grovel, oh fabulous-but before whom?
Who's listening? But he has crossed back to the desk and actually laid
hands on it....

"Ass. Superstitious ass." Wandering, empty-headed ... these epi­
sodes are coming more often now. His decline, creeping on him like the
cold. Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro . . . what
should he've done then, gone down to Psi Section, asked Eventyr to get
up a seance, try to get on to one of them at least . . . perhaps . . . yes
... What holds him back? "Have I," he whispers against the glass, the
aspirate, the later plosives clouding the cold pane in fans of breath,
warm and disconsolate breath, "so much pride?" One cannot, he cannot
walk down that particular corridor, cannot even suggest, no not even to
Mexico, how he misses them . . . though he hardly knew Dromond, or
Easterling . . . but . . . misses Allen Lamplighter, who would bet on
anything, you know, on dogs, thunderstorms, tram numbers, on street­
corner wind and a likely skirt, on how far a given doodle would get, per­
haps . . . oh God . . . even the one that fell on him. . . . Pumm's ar­
ranger-style piano and drunken baritone, his adventuring among the
nurses.... Spectro ... Why can't he ask? When there are a hundred
ways to put it. . . .

I should ... should have.... There are, in his history, so many of
140

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these unmade moves, so many "should haves""':_should have married

her, let her father steer him, should have stayed in Harley Street, been
kinder, smiled more at strangers, even smiled back this afternoon at
Maudie Chilkes ... why couldn't he? A silly bleeding smile, why not,
what inhibits, what snarl of the mosaic? Pretty, amber eyes behind those

government spectacles . . . Women avoid him. He knows in a general
way what it is: he's creepy. He's even aware, usually, of the times when
he's being creepy-it's a certain set to his face-muscles, a tendency to
sweat . . . but he can't seem to do anything about it, can't ever concen­
trate for long enough, they distract him so--and next thing he knows
he's back to radiating the old creepiness again . . . and their response to
it is predictable, they run uttering screams only they, and he, can hear.
Oh but how he'd like someday to give them something really to scream
about....

Here's an erection stirring, he'll masturbate himself to sleep again to­

night. A joyless constant, an institution in his life. But goading him, just
before the bright peak, what images will come whirling in? Why, the
turrets and blue waters, the sails and churchtops of Stockholm-the yel­
low telegram, the face of a tall, cognizant, and beautiful woman turned
to watch him as he passes in the ceremonial limousine, a woman who

will later, hardly by chance, visit him in his suite at the Grand Hotel
. . . it's not all ruby nipples and black lace cami-knickers, you know.
There are hushed entrances into rooms that smell of paper, satellite

votes on this Committee or that, the Chairs, the Prizes . . . what could

compare! Later, when you're older, you'll know, they said. Yes and it
grows upon him, each war year equal to a dozen of peacetime, oh my,
how right they were.

As his luck has always known, his subcortical, brute luck, his gift of
survival while other and better men are snatched away into Death,
here's the door, one he's imagined so often in lonely Thesean brushings
down his polished corridors of years: an exit out of the orthodox-Pavlov­
ian, showing him vistas of Norrmalm, S6dermalm, Deer Park and Old

City....
One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle

of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each
winter, and fewer living . . . and with each one, he thinks he feels

patterns on his cortex going dark, settling to sleep forever, parts
of

whoever he's been now losing all definition, reverting to dumb chem-

istry....
Kevin Spectro did not differentiate as much as he between

Outside

and Inside. He saw the cortex as an interface organ, mediating between



the two, but part of them both. "When you've looked at how it really
is," he asked once, "how can we, any of us, be separate?" He is my
Pierre Janet, Pointsman thought. . . .

Soon, by the dialectic of the Book, Pointsman will be alone, in a black
field lapsing to isotropy, to the zero, waiting to be last to go. . . . Will
there be time? He has to survive ... to try for the Prize, not for his
own glory, no-but to keep a promise, to the human field of seven he
once was, the ones who didn't make it. . . . Here's a medium shot, him­
self backlit, alone at the high window in the Grand Hotel, whisky glass
tipped at the bright subarctic sky and here's to you then, chaps, it'll be
all of us up there onstage tomorrow, Ned Pointsman only happened to
survive that's all ... TO STOCKHOLM his banner and cry, and after
Stockholm a blur, a long golden twilight. . . .

Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him:
used to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at
the ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last-some
true marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time, as
the face turned his way, ancient, weary, seeing none of Pointsman's hu­
manity, ready only to assume him in another long-routinized nudge of
horn, flip of hoof (but this time there would be struggle, Minotaur blood
the fucking beast, cries from far inside himself whose manliness and vio­
lence surprise him).... This was the dream. The settings, the face
changed, little of it past the structure survived the first cup of coffee and
flat beige Benzedrine pill. It might be a vast lorry-park just at dawn, the
pavement newly hosed, mottled in grease-browns, the hooded olive
trucks standing each with a secret, each waiting ... but he knows that
inside one of these . . . and at last, sifting among them, finds it, the
identifying code beyond voicing, climbs up into the back, under the
canvas, waits in the dust and brown light, until through the cloudy
oblong of the cab window a face, a face he knows begins to turn . . .
but the underlying structure is the turning face, the meeting of eyes
. . . stalking Reichssieger von Thanatz Alpdrucken, that most elusive of
Nazi hounds, champion Weimaraner for 1941, bearing studbook num­
ber 416832 tattooed inside his ear along through a Londonized Ger­
many, his liver-gray shape receding, loping at twilit canalsides strewn
with debris of war, rocket blasts each time missing them, their chase
preserved, a plate etched in firebursts, the map of a sacrificial city, of a
cortex human and canine, the dog's ear-leather mildly aswing, top of hisskull brightly reflecting the winter clouds, into a shelter lying steel-clad
miles below the city, an opera of Balkan intrigue, in whose hermetic
safety, among whose clusters of blue dissonance unperiodically stressed

142

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he's unable to escape completely because of how always the Reichs­
sieger persists, leading, serene, uncancelable, and to the literal pursuit
of whom he thus returns, must return time and again in a fever-rondo,
until at last they are on some hillside at the end of a long afternoon of

dispatches from Armageddon, among scarlet banks of bougainvillea,
golden pathways where dust is rising, pillars of smoke far away over the

spidery city they've crossed, voices in the air telling of South America
burned to cinders, the sky over New York glowing purple with the new
all-sovereign death-ray, and here at last is where the gray dog can turn
and the amber eyes gaze into Ned Pointsman's own....

Each time, each turning, his own blood and heart are stroked, beaten,

brought jubilantly high, and triggered to the icy noctiluca, to flare and

fusing Thermite as he begins to expand, an uncontainable light, as the
walls of the chamber turn a blood glow, orange, then white and begin to

slip, to flow like wax, what there is of labyrinth collapsing in rings out­
ward, hero and horror, engineer and Ariadne consumed, molten inside

the light of himself, the mad exploding of himself. . . .
Years ago. Dreams he hardly remembers. The intermediaries come

long since between himself and his final beast. They would deny
him

even the little perversity of being in love with his death. . . .
But now with Slothrop in it-sudden angel, thermodynamic surprise,

whatever he is . . . will it change now? Might Pointsman get to have a

go at the Minotaur after all?

Slothrop ought to be on the Riviera by now, warm, fed,
well-fucked.

But out in this late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still rang­
ing the back-streets and mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets
of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering in their wet pools of Prussian

blue

. . . seeking to avoid what cannot be smelled or seen, what
announces

itself with the roar of a predator so absolute they sink to the snow whin­

ing and roll over to give It their soft and open
bellies. . . .

Has Pointsman renounced them in favor of one untried human sub­

ject? Don't think he hasn't doubts as to the validity of
this scheme, at

least. Let Vicar de la Nuit worry about its "rightness," he's the staff

chaplain. But . . . what about the dogs? Pointsman knows
them. He's

deftly picked the locks of their awareness. They have no
secrets. He can

drive them mad, and with bromides in adequate doses he can bring
them back. But Slothrop ...

So the Pavlovian dithers about his office, feeling restless and old. He

should sleep but he can't. It has to be more than the simple conditioning
of a child, once upon a time. How can he've been a doctor

this long and

not developed reflexes for certain conditions? He
knows better: he

143



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knows it is more. Spectro is dead, and Slothrop (sentiments d'emprise,
old man, softly now) was with his Darlene, only a few blocks from St.
Veronica's, two days before.

When one event happens after another with this awful regularity, of
course you don't automatically assume that it's cause-and-effect. But
you do look for some mechanism to make sense of it. You probe, you de­
sign a modest experiment. . . . He owes Spectro that much. Even if the
American's not legally a murderer, he is sick. The etiology ought to be
traced, the treatment found.

There is to this enterprise, Pointsman knows, a danger of seduction.
Because of the symmetry. . . . He's been led before, you know, down
the garden path by symmetry: in certain test results . . . in assumingthat a mechanism must imply its mirror image-"irradiation," for exam­
ple, and "reciprocal induction" . . . and who'd ever said that either had
to exist? Perhaps it will be so this time, too. But how it haunts him, the
symmetry of these two secret weapons, Outside, out in the Blitz, the
sounds of V-1 and V -2, one the reverse of the other. . . . Pavlov showed
how mirror-images Inside could be confused. Ideas of the opposite. But
what new pathology lies Outside now? What sickness to events-to His­
tory itself-can create symmetrical opposites like these robot weapons?

Sign and symptoms. Was Spectro right? Could Outside and Inside be
part of the same field? If only in fairness . . . in fairness . . . Pointsman
ought to be seeking the answer at the interface . . . oughtn't he ... on
the cortex of Lieutenant Slothrop. The man will suffer-perhaps, in
some clinical way, be destroyed-but how many others tonight are
suffering in his name? For pity's sake, every day in Whitehall they're
weighing and taking risks that make his, in this, seem almost trivial. Al­
most. There's something here, too transparent and swift to get a hold
on-Psi Section might speak of ectoplasms-but he knows that the time
has never been better, and that the exact experimental subject is in hishands. He must seize now, or be doomed to the same stone hallways,whose termination he knows. But he must remain open-even to the
possibility that the Psi people are right. "We may all be right," he putsin his journal tonight, "so may be all we have speculated, and more.Whatever we may find, there can be no doubt that he is, physiologi­cally, historically, a monster. We must never lose control. The thought ofhim lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I
cannot extinguish. . . ."

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D D D D D D D

More and more, these days of angelic visit and communique, Carroll

Eventyr feels a victim of his freak talent. As Nora Dodson-Truck once
called it, his "splendid weakness." It showed late in life: he was 35
when out of the other world, one morning on the Embankment, be­

tween strokes of a pavement artist's two pastels, salmon darkening to

fawn, and a score of lank human figures, rag-sorrowful in the distances

interlacing with ironwork and river smoke, all at once someone was

speaking through Eventyr, so quietly that Nora caught hardly any of it,
not even the identity of the soul that took and used him. Not then. Some
of it was in German, some of the words she remembered. She would ask

her husband, whom she was to meet that afternoon out in Surrey-ar­

riving late though, all the shadows, men and women, dogs, chimneys,
very long and black across the enormous lawn, and she with a dusting

of .

ocher, barely noticeable in the late sun, making a fan shape near
the

edge of her veil-it was that color she'd snatched from
the screever's

wood box and swiftly, turning smoothly, touching only at shoe tip and
the creamy block of yellow crumbling onto the surface,

never leaving it,
drew a great five-pointed star on the pavement, just upriver

from an un­

friendly likeness of Lloyd George in heliotrope and sea-green: pulling
Eventyr by the hand to stand inside the central pentagon, seagulls

in a

wailing diadem overhead, then stepping in herself,
an instinctive, a

motherly way, her way with anyone she loved. She'd
drawn her penta­

gram not even half in play. One couldn't be too safe,
there was always

evil. ...
Had he felt her, even then, beginning to recede ... called up the

control from across the Wall as a way of holding on? She was deepening
from his waking, his social eye like light at the edge of the evening
when, for perhaps a perilous ten minutes, nothing helps: put

on your

glasses and light lamps, sit by the west window and
still it keeps going

away, you keep losing the light and perhaps it is forever
this time ... a

good time of day for learning surrender, learning to
diminish like the

light, or like certain music. This surrender is his only gift.
Afterward he

can recall nothing. Sometimes, rarely, there may be tantalizing-not
words, but halos of meaning around words his mouth evidently spoke,
that only stay behind-if they do-for a moment,

like dreams, can't be

held or developed, and, presently, go away. He's been
under Rollo

Groast's EEG countless times since first he came to "The
White Visita-

145



tion," and all's normal-adult except for, oh once or twice perhaps a stray
50-millivolt spike off a temporal lobe, now left now right, really no pat-
tern to it-indeed a kind of canals-of-Mars controversy has been in ioUI
progress for these years among the different observers-Aaron Throw- COO
ster swears he's seen slow delta-wave shapes out of the left frontal and
suspects a tumor, last summer Edwin Treacle noted a "subdued petit­
mal spike-and-wave alternation, curiously much slower than the usual
three per second"-though admittedly Treacle was up in London all
the night before debauching with Allen Lamplighter and his gambling
crowd. Less than a week later the buzzbomb gave Lamplighter his
chance: to find Eventyr from the other side and prove him to be what
others had said: an interface between the worlds, a sensitive. Lamp-
lighter had offered 5-to-2 odds. But so far he's been silent: nothing in An
the soft acetate/metal discs or typed transcripts that mightn't be any of nol
a dozen other souls. . . . Ga

They've come, in their time, from as far away as the institute at Bris- of
tol to gape at, to measure and systematically doubt the freaks of Psi Sec- Dr�
tion. Here's Ronald Cherrycoke, the noted psychometrist, eyes lightly
fluttering, hands a steady inch away framing the brown-wrapped box in �
which are securely hidden certain early-War mementos, a dark-maroon fur
cravat, a broken Schaeffer fountain pen, a tarnished pince-nez of white tra
gold, all belonging to a Group Captain "Basher" St. Blaise, stationed far tr
away north of London ... as this Cherrycoke, a normal-looking lad, Ire
perhaps a bit overweight, begins now to recite in his lathe-humming
Midland accents an intimate resume of the Group Captain, his anxieties
about his falling hair, his enthusiasm over the Donald Duck cinema car- a
toons, an incident during the Lubeck raid which only he and his wing- no
man, now passed on, shared and agreed not to report-nothing that vio­
lated security: confirmed later, in fact, by St. Blaise himself smiling a bit
openmouthed well the joke's certainly on me and now tell me how'd
you do it? Indeed, how does Cherrycoke do it? How do any of them?
How does Margaret Quartertone produce voices on discs and wire re-
corders miles distant without speaking or physically touching the equip- ax
ment? And what speakers are now beginning to assemble? Where are
the five-digit groups coming from which the Reverend Dr. Paul de la
Nuit, chaplain and staff automatist, has been writing for weeks now, and
which, it is felt ominously, no one up in London quite knows how to de-
crypt? What do Edwin Treacle's recent dreams of flight mean, espe-
cially as time-correlated with Nora Dodson-Truck' s dreams of falling?
What gathers among them all, that each in his own freak way can testify
to but not in language, not even the lingua franca of the offices? Turbu-

146

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--.

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lences in the aether, uncertainties out in the winds of karma. Those

souls across the interface, those we call the dead, are increasingly anx­

ious and evasive. Even Carroll Eventyr's own control, the habitually
cool and sarcastic Peter Sachsa, the one who found him that day long
ago on the Embankment and

thereafter-whenever there are messages

to be passed across-even Sachsa's become nervous. . . .

Lately, as if all tuned in to the same aethereal Xth Programme,
new

varieties of freak have been showing up at "The White Visitation," all

hours of the day and night, silent, staring, expecting to be taken care of,

carrying machines of black metal and glass gingerbread, off
on waxy

trances, hyperkinetically waiting only the right trigger-question to start

blithering 200 words a minute about their special,
terrible endowments.

An assault. What are we to make of Gavin Trefoil, for whose gift there's

not even a name yet? (Rollo Groast wants to call it autochrornatism.)
Gavin, the youngest here, only 17, can somehow metabolize at

will one

of his amino acids, tyrosine. This will produce melanin, which is the

brown-black pigment responsible for human skin color.
Gavin can also

inhibit this metabolizing by-it appears-varying the level of
his blood

phenylalanine. So he can change his color from most ghastly
albino up

through a smooth spectrum to very deep, purplish,
black. If he concen­

trates he can keep this up, at any level, for weeks. Usually
he is dis­

tracted, or forgets, and gradually drifts back to his rest state,
a pale

freckled redhead's complexion. But you can imagine how useful he
was

to Gerhardt von Coll during the shooting of the
Schwarzkommando

footage: he helped save literally hours of make-up
and lighting work,

acting as a variable reflector. The best theory
of how is Rollo's, but it's

hopelessly vague-we do know that the
dermal cells which produce

melanin-the melanocytes-were once, in each of us, at an early stage
of embryonic growth, part of the central nervous system.

But as the em­

bryo grows, as tissue goes on differentiating,
some of these nerve cells

move away from what will be
the CNS, and migrate out to the skin, to

become melanocytes. They keep their original tree-branch shapes,
the

axon and dendrites of the typical nerve cell. But the dendrites are
used

now to carry not electric signals but skin pigment.
Rollo Groast believes

in some link, so far undiscovered-some surviving cell-memory
that

will, retrocolonial, still respond to messages from
the metropolitan

brain. Messages that young Trefoil may not consciously
know of. "It is

part," Rollo writes home to the elder Dr.
Groast in Lancashire, in elabo­

rate revenge for childhood
tales of Jenny Greenteeth waiting out in the

fens to drown him, "part of an old and clandestine drama for
which the

human body serves only as a set of very allusive,
often cryptic pro-

147



gramme-notes-it's as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this pro­
gramme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we
cannot enter. The convolutions of language denied us! the great Stage,
even darker than Mr Tyrone Guthrie's accustomed murk. . . . Gilt and
mirroring, red velvet, tier on tier of box seats all in shadows too, as
somewhere down in that deep proscenium, deeper than geometries we
know of, the voices utter secrets we are never told. . . ."

-Everything that comes out from CNS we have to file here, you see.
It gets to be a damned nuisance after a while. Most of it's utterly use­
less. But you never know when they'll want something. Middle of the
night, or during the worst part of an ultraviolet bombardment you
know, it makes no difference to them back there.

-Do you ever get out much to . . . well, up to the Outer Level?
(A long pause in which the older operative stares quite openly, as sev­

eral changes flow across her features-amusement, pity, concern-until
the younger one speaks again.) I-I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be­

-(Abruptly) I'm supposed to tell you, eventually, as part of the
briefing.

-Tell me what?

-Just as I was told once. We hand it on, one generation to the next.
(There is no piece of business plausible enough for her to find refuge in.
We sense that this has not yet become routine for her. Out of decency
now, she tries to speak quietly, if not gently.) We all go up to the Outer
Level, young man. Some immediately, others not for a while. But sooner
or later everyone out here has to go Epidermal. No exceptions.

-Has to-
-I'm sorry.
-But isn't it . . . I thought it was only a-well, a level. A place you'dvisit. Isn't it . . . ?
-Outlandish scenery, oh yes so did I-unusual formations, a peepinto the Outer Radiance. But it's all of us, you see. Millions of us,

changed to interface, to horn, and no feeling, and silence.
-Oh, God. (A pause in which he tries to take it in-then, in panic,

pushes it back:) No-how can you say that-you can't feel the memory?the tug ... we're in exile, we do have a home! (Silence from the other.)Back there! Not up at the interface. Back in the CNS!
-(Quietly) It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments ofvessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end,

a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving atthe last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home
148

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-only the millions of last moments . . . no more. Our history is an ag­
gregate of last moments.

She crosses the complex room dense with its supple hides, lemon­
rubbed teak, rising snarls of incense, bright optical hardware, faded
Central Asian rugs in gold and scarlet, hanging open-ribbed wrought­
ironwork, a long, long downstage cross, eating an orange, section by
acid section, as she goes, the faille gown flowing beautifully, its elabo­
rate sleeves falling from very broadened shoulders till tightly gathered
into long button-strung cuffs all in some nameless earth tone-a hedge­
green, a clay-brown, a touch of oxidation, a breath of the autumnal­
the light from the street lamps comes in through philodendron stalks
and fingered leaves arrested in a grasp at the last straining away of sun­
set, falls a tranquil yellow across the cut-steel buckles at her insteps and
streaks on along the flanks and down the tall heels of her patent shoes,
so polished as to seem of no color at all past such mild citrus light where
it touches them, and they refuse it, as if it were a masochist's kiss. Be­
hind her steps the carpet relaxes ceilingward, sole and heel-shapes dis­

appearing visibly slow out of the wool pile. A single rocket explosion
comes thudding across the city, from far east of here, east by southeast.
The light along her shoes flows and checks like afternoon traffic. She

pauses, reminded of something: the military frock trembling, silk filling­
yarns shivering by crowded thousands as the chilly light slides over

and

off and touching again their unprotected backs. The smells of burning
musk and sandalwood, of leather and spilled whisky, thicken in the
room.

And he-passive as trance, allowing her beauty: to enter him or avoid
him, whatever's to be her pleasure. How shall he be other than mild re­

ceiver, filler of silences? All the radii of the room are hers, watery cello­

phane, crackling tangential as she turns on her heel-axis, lancing as
she

begins to retrace her path. Can he have loved her for nearly a
decade?

It's incredible. This connoisseuse of "splendid weaknesses," run not by
any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope.
She is frightening. Someone called her an erotic nihilist . . . each

of

them, Cherrycoke, Paul de la Nuit, even, he would imagine, young
Tre­

foil, even-so he's heard-Margaret Quartertone, each of them used for

the ideology of the Zero . . . to make Nora's great rejection
that much

more awesome. For . . . if she does love him: if all her words, this dec­

ade of rooms and conversations meant anything . . . if she loves him

and still will deny him, on the short end of 5-to-2 deny his gift, deny
what's distributed in his every cell . . . then . . .

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149



If she loves him. He's too passive, he hasn't the nerve to reach in, as
Cherrycoke has tried to. . . . Of course Cherrycoke is odd. He laughs
too often. Not aimlessly either, but directed at something he thinks ev­
eryone else can see too. All of us watching some wry newsreel, the beam
from the projector falling milky-white, thickening with smoke from bri­
ers and cheroots, Abdullas and Woodbines . . . the lit profiles of mili­
tary personnel and young ladies are the edges of clouds: the manly
crepe of an overseas cap knifing forward into the darkened cinema, the
shiny rounding of a silk leg tossed lazily toe-in between two seats in the
row ahead, the keen-shadowed turbans of velvet and feathering eye­
lashes beneath. Among these nights' faint and lusting couples, Ronald
Cherrycoke's laughing and bearing his loneliness, brittle, easily crazed,
oozing gum from the cracks, a strange mac of most unstable plastic. . . .
Of all her splendid weaklings, it is he who undertakes the most perilous
trips into her void, looking for a heart whose rhythms he will call. It
must astonish her, Nora-so-heartless, Cherrycoke kneeling, stirring her
silks, between his hands old history flowing in eddy-currents-scarves of
lime, aqua, lavender passing, pins, brooches, opalescent scorpions (her
birth sign) inside gold mountings in triskelion, shoe-buckles, broken
nacre fans and theatre programs, suspender-tabs, dark, lank, pre-auster­
ity stockings . . . on his unaccustomed knees, hands swimming, turning,
seeking out her past in molecular traces so precarious among the flow of
objects, the progress through his hands, she delighted to issue her deni­
als, covering up his hits (close, often dead on) skillfully as if it were
drawing-room comedy....

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the
sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate,
burn him out . . . she seems determined to overwhelm him with her
history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cut­
ting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that
very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face,
more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there.And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It
comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's van­
ishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy
wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference. . . .
Any more than she can accept the truth he knows about himself. He
does receive emanations, impressions . . . the cry inside the stone . . .
excremental kisses stitched unseen across the yoke of an old shirt . . . a
betrayal, an informer whose guilt will sicken one day to throat cancer,
chiming like daylight through the fourchettes and quirks of a tattered

150

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Italian glove . . . Basher St. Blaise's angel, miles beyond designating,
rising over Lubeck that Palm Sunday with the poison-green domes

un­

derneath its feet, an obsessive crossflow of red tiles rushing up and
down a thousand peaked roofs as the bombers banked and dived, the
Baltic already lost in a pall of incendiary smoke behind, here was the

Angel: ice crystals swept hissing away from the back edges of wings per­
ilously deep, opening as they were moved into new white abyss.
For half a minute radio silence broke apart. The traffic being:

St. Blaise: Freakshow Two, did you see that, over.

Wingman: This is Freakshow Two-affirmative.
St. Blaise: Good.

No one else on the mission seemed to've had radio communication.

After the raid, St. Blaise checked over the equipment of those who got
back to base and found nothing wrong: all the crystals on frequency, the

power supplies rippleless as could be expected-but
others remem­

bered how, for the few moments the visitation lasted, even static
van­

ished from the earphones. Some may have heard a high singing, like
wind among masts, shrouds, bedspring or dish antennas

of winter fleets

down in the dockyards . . . but only Basher and his wingman saw it,

droning across in front of the fiery leagues of face, the eyes,
which went

towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises
red as embers

fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all
their bombs in no

particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops
in the air all

around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced
need to

climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at
heaven. . . .

Group Captain St. Blaise did not include an
account of this angel in

his official debriefing, the W.A.A.F. officer who interrogated
him being

known around the base as the worst sort of literal-minded dragon (she
had reported Blowitt to psychiatric for his

rainbowed Valkyrie over

Peenemiinde, and Creepham for the bright blue gremlins scattering
like

spiders off of his Typhoon's wings and falling gently
to the woods of The

Hague in little parachutes of the same color). But
damn it, this was not a

cloud. Unofficially, in the fortnight between the fire-raising
at Lubeck

and Hitler's order for "terror attacks of a retaliatory nature"-meaning
the V-weapons-word of the Angel got around. Although

the Group

Captain seemed reluctant, Ronald Cherrycoke
was allowed to probe

certain objects along on the flight. Thus the Angel
was revealed.

Carroll Eventyr attempted then to reach across to
Terence Over­

baby, St. Blaise's wingman. Jumped by a skyful
of MEs and no way out.

The inputs were confusing. Peter Sachsa
intimated that there were in

fact many versions of the Angel which might apply. Overbaby's
was not

151

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as available as certain others. There are problems with levels, and with
Judgment, in the Tarot sense.... This is part of the storm that sweeps
now among them all, both sides of Death. It is unpleasant. On his side,
Eventyr tends to feel wholly victimized, even a bit resentful. Peter
Sachsa, on his, falls amazingly out of character and into nostalgia for
life, the old peace, the Weimar decadence that kept him fed and mov­
ing. Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon dur­
ing a street action in Neukolln, he recalls now, sentimentally, evenings
of rubbed darkwood, cigar smoke, ladies in chiseled jade, panne, attar of
damask roses, the latest angular pastel paintings on the walls, the latest
drugs inside the many little table drawers. More than any mere "Kreis,"
on most nights full mandalas came to bloom: all degrees of society, all
quarters of the capital, palms down on that famous blood veneer,
touching only at little fingers. Sachsa's table was like a deep pool in the
forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to
rise. . . . Walter Asch ("Taurus") was visited one night by something so
unusual it took three "Hieropons" (250 mg.) to bring him back, and
even so he seemed reluctant to sleep. They all stood watching him, in
ragged rows resembling athletic formations, Wimpe the IG-man who
happened to be holding the Hieropon keying on Sargner, a civilian at­
tached to General Staff, flanked by Lieutent Weissmann, recently back
from South-West Africa, and the Herero aide he'd brought with him,
staring, staring at them all, at everything . . . while behind them ladies
moved in a sibilant weave, sequins and high-albedo stockings aflash,
black-and-white make-up in daintily nasal alarm, eyes wide going oh .
. . . Each face that watched Walter Asch was a puppet stage: each a
separate routine.

· . . shows good hands yes droop and wrists as far up as muscle re­
laxant respiratory depression . . .

· .. same ... same ... my own face white in mirror three
threethirty four march of the Hours clock ticking room no can't go in no
not enough light not enough no aaahhh-

· . . theatre nothing but Walter really look at head phony angle
wants to catch light good fill-light throw a yellow gel . . .

(A pneumatic toy frog jumps up onto a lily pad trembling: beneaththe surface lies a terror . . . a late captivity . . . but he floats now
over the head of what would take him back ... his eyes cannot beread....)

· . . mba rara m' eroto ondyoze . . . mbe mu munine m' oruroto ayo
u n'omuinyo . . . (further back than this is a twisting of yarns or cord­
age, a giant web, a wrenching of hide, of muscles in the hard grip of

152

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something that comes to wrestle when the night is deep . . . and a
sense, too, of visitation by the dead, afterward a sick feeling that they
are not as friendly as they seemed to be . . . he has wakened, cried,
sought explanation, but no one ever told him anything he could believe.
The dead have talked with him, come and sat, shared his milk, told sto­
ries of ancestors, or of spirits from other parts of the veld-for time and

space on their side have no meaning, all is together).
"There are sociologies," Edwin Treacle, his hair going all directions,

attempts to light a pipeful of wretched leftovers-autumn leaves, bits of
string, fag-ends, "that we haven't even begun to look into. The sociol­
ogy of our own lot, for example. Psi Section, the S.P.R., the old ladies in
Altrincham trying to summon up the Devil, all of us on this side, you
see, are still only half the story."

"Careful with that 'we,'
"

Roger Mexico distracted today by a hun­
dred things, chi-square fittings that refuse to jibe, textbooks lost, Jessi­
ca's absence. . . .

"It makes no sense unless we also consider those who've passed over
to the other side. We do transact with them, don't we? Through special­
ists like Eventyr and their controls over there. But all together we form
a single subculture, a psychical community, if you will."

"I won't," Mexico says dryly, "but yes I suppose someone ought to be

looking into it."
"There are peoples-these Hereros for example-who carryon busi­

ness every day with their ancestors. The dead are as real as the living.
How can you understand them without treating both sides of the wall of
death with the same scientific approach?"

And yet for Eventyr it's not the social transaction Treacle hopes it is.
There's no memory on his side: no personal record. He has to read
about it in the notes of others, listen to discs. Which means he has to

trust the others. That's a complicated social setup. He must base the

major part of his life on the probity of men charged with acting as inter­
face between what he is supposed to be and himself. Eventyr knows
how close he is to Sachsa on the other side, but he doesn't remember,
and he's been brought up a Christian, a Western European, believing in
the primacy of the "conscious" self and its memories, regarding all the
rest as abnormal or trivial, and so he is troubled, deeply. . . .

The transcripts are a document on Peter Sachsa as much as on
the

souls he puts in touch. They tell, in some detail, of his obsessive love for
Leni Pokler, who was married to a young chemical engineer and also ac­

tive with the K.P.D., shuttling between the rzth District and Sachsa's

sittings. Each night she came he wanted to cry at the Sight of her captiv-

tit:

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153



ity. In her smudged eyes was clear hatred of a life she would not leave:
a husband she didn't love, a child she had not learned to escape feeling
guilty for not loving enough.

The husband Franz had a connection, too vague for Sachsa to pass
across, with Army Ordnance, and so there were also ideological barriers
that neither one found energy enough to climb. She attended street ac­
tions, Franz reported to the rocket facility at Reinickendorf after swal­
lowing his tea in an early-morning room full of women he thought were
sullen and waiting for him to leave: bringing their bundles of leaflets,
their knapsacks stuffed with books or political newspapers, filtering
through the slum courtyards of Berlin at sunrise. . . .

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They are shivering and hungry. In the Studentenheim there's no heat,
not much light, millions of roaches. A smell of cabbage, old second
Reich, grandmothers' cabbage, of lard smoke that has found, over the
years, some detente with the air that seeks to break it down, smells of
long illness and terminal occupation stir off the crumbling walls. One of
the walls is stained yellow with waste from the broken lines upstairs.
Leni sits on the floor with four or five others, passing a dark chunk of
bread. In a damp nest of Die Faust Hoch, back issues no one will read,
her daughter Ilse sleeps, breathing so shallow it can hardly be seen. Her
eyelashes make enormous shadows on the upper curves of her cheeks.

They have left for good this time. This room will be all right for an­
other day, even two ... after that Leni doesn't know. She took one va­
lise for both of them. Does he know what it means for a woman born
under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home in a valise? She has a
few marks with her, Franz has his toy rockets to the moon. It is really
over.

As she used to dream it, she'd go directly to Peter Sachsa. If he didn't
take her in, he'd at least help her to find a job. But now that she's really
broken away from Franz ... there's something, some nasty earth-sign
belligerence that will rise up in Peter now and then. . . . Lately she
isn't sure about his moods. He's under pressure from levels she guesses
to be higher than usual, and he isn't handling it well. . . .

But Peter's worst infantile rages are still better than the most tranquil
evenings of her Piscean husband, swimming his seas of fantasy, death­
wish, rocket-mysticism-Franz is just the type they want. They know

154

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how to use that. They know how to use nearly everybody. What will
happen to the ones they can't use?

Rudi, Vanya, Rebecca, here we are a slice of Berlin life, another Ufa

masterpiece, token La Boheme Student, token Slav, token Jewess, look
at us: the Revolution. Of course there is no Revolution, not even in the

Kinos, no German October, not under this "Republic." The Revolution

died-though Leni was only a young girl and not political-with Rosa
Luxemburg. The best there is to believe in right now is a Revolution-in­
exile-in-residence, a continuity, surviving at the bleak edge over these
Weimar years, waiting its moment and its reincarnated Lux­

emburg....
AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls

of the Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down
author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they're one
and the same. Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness.

They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought
about, expanded on, translated into action by the people. . . .

"It's true," Vanya now, "look at the forms of capitalist expression.
Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy­
and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and por­
nographies of deduction-ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer­
all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they're ap­
proaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort." A

pause to allow Rudi a quick and sour grin. "The self-induced orgasm."
"

'Absolute'?" Rebecca coming forward on her bare knees to hand
him the bread, damp, melting from the touch of her wet mouth, "Two

people are-"
"Two people is what you are told," Rudi does not quite smirk.

Through her attention, sadly and not for the first time around here,
there passes the phrase male supremacy . . . why do they cherish their

masturbating so? "but in nature it is almost unknown. Most of it's soli­

tary. You know that."
"I know there's coming together," is all she says. Though they have

never made love she means it as a reproach. But he turns away as we do
from those who have just made some embarrassing appeal to faith
there's no way to go into any further.

Leni, from inside her wasted time with Franz, knows enough about

coming alone. At first his passivity kept her from coming at all. Then she
understood that she could make up anything at all to fill the freedom he
allowed her. It got more comfortable: she could dream such

tender-

155



nesses between them (presently she was dreaming also of other men)­
but it became more solitary. Yet her lines will not deepen fast enough,
her mouth not learn hardening past a face she keeps surprising herself
with, a daydreaming child's face, betraying her to anyone who'll look,
exactly the sort of fat-softened, unfocused weakness that causes men to
read her as Dependent Little Girl-even in Peter Sachsa she's seen the
look-and the dream is the same one she went to find while Franz
groaned inside his own dark pain-wishes, a dream of gentleness, light,
her criminal heart redeemed, no more need to run, to struggle, a man
arriving tranquil as she and strong, the street becoming a distant mem­
ory: exactly the one dream 'that out here she can least allow herself. She
knows what she has to impersonate. Especially with Ilse watching her
more. Ilse is not going to be used.

Rebecca's been carrying on an argument with Vanya, half flirting,
Vanya trying to keep it all in intellectual code, but the Jewess reverting,
time and again, to the bodily ... so sensual: the insides of her thighs,
just above the knee, smooth as oil, the tenseness of all her muscles, the
alert face, the Judenschnautze feinting, pushing, the flashes of tongue
against thick lips . . . what would it be like, to be taken to bed by her?
To do it not just with another woman, but with a [euiess.... Their ani­
mal darkness ... sweating hindquarters, pushing aggressively toward
her face, black hairs darkening in fine crescent around each buttock
from the crevice . . . the face turned over a shoulder smiling in coarse
delight . . . all by surprise, really, during a moment's refuge in a pale
yellow room, while the men wandered the halls outside with drugged
smiles ... "No, not that hard. Be gentle. I'll tell you when to do it
harder. . . ." Leni's fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess' s
darker coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni's delicacy of struc­
ture and skin, pelvic bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins
and around belly, the two women sliding, snarling, gasping ... I know
there's coming together . . . and Leni waking alone-the Jewess out al­
ready in some other room of the place-never having known the instant
at which she fell into her true infant sleep, a soft change of state that
just didn't happen with Franz. . . . So she brushed and batted with
fingertips her hair to show something of how she felt about the night's
clientele and strolled down to the baths, stripped without caring what
eyes were on her and slid into the body-warmth, the conventional per­
fume of it. . . . All at once, through a shouting and humidity that might
have made it hard to concentrate, she saw, there, up on one of the
ledges, looking down at her . . . Yes he was Richard Hirsch, from the
Mausigstrasse, so many years ago . . . she knew immediately that her

156

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face had never looked more vulnerable-she could see it in his

eyes....
All around them the others splashed, made love, carried on comic

monologues, perhaps they were friends of his-yes wasn't that Siggi
frog-kicking by, we called him "the Troll," he hasn't grown a centime­
ter since then . . . since we ran home along the canal, tripped and fell
on the hardest cobblestones in the world, and woke in the mornings to
see snow on the spokes of the wagon wheels, steam out the old horse's
nose.... "Leni. Leni." Richard's hair pushed all the way back, his
body golden, leaning to lift her from the cloudy bath, to sit beside him.

"You're supposed to be ...
"

she's flustered, doesn't know how to

put this. "Someone told me you hadn't come back from France....
"

She stares at her knees.
"Not even the French girls could have kept me in France." He's still

there: she feels him trying to look in her eyes: and he speaks so simply,
he's so alive, sure that French girls must be more coercive than English
machine guns . . . she knows, filled with crying for his innocence, that
he can't have been with anyone there, that French girls still are to him
beautiful and remote agents of Love. . . .

In Leni, now, nothing of her long employment shows, nothing. She is
the child he looked at across park pathways, or met trudging home
down the gassen in the crust-brown light, her face, rather broad then,
angled down, fair eyebrows troubled, bookpack on her back, hands in
apron pockets . . . some of the stones in the walls were white as paste
. . . she may have seen him coming the other way, but he was older, al­

ways with friends....
Now they all grow less raucous around them, more deferent, even

shy, happy for Richard and Leni. "Better late than never!" pipes Siggi
in his speeded-up midget's voice, reaching on tiptoe to pour May wine
in all their glasses. Leni goes to get her hair restyled and lightened a
shade, and Rebecca comes with her. They talk, for the first time, of

plans and futures. Without touching, Richard and she have fallen in
love, as they should have then. It's understood he'll take her away with
him....

Old Gymnasium friends have been showing up in recent days, bring­
ing exotic food and wine, new drugs, much ease and honesty in sexual
matters. Noone bothers to dress. They show one another their naked
bodies. No one feels anxious, or threatened about the size of her breasts

or his penis. . . . It is all beautifully relaxing for everyone. Leni prac­
tices her new name, "Leni Hirsch," even sometimes when she's sitting
with Richard at a cafe table in the morning: "Leni Hirsch," and he ac-

157



tually smiles, embarrassed, tries to look away but can't escape her eyes
and finally he turns full into her own look, laughs out loud, a laugh of
pure joy, and reaches his hand, the palm of his dear hand, to hold her
face....

On a multi-leveled early evening of balconies, terraces, audiences
grouped at the different levels, all looking downward, in toward a com­
mon center, galleries of young women with green leaves at their waists,
tall evergreen trees, lawns, flowing water and national solemnity, the
President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with his familiar
clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down
suddenly: "Oh, fuck it . . ." Fickt es, the soon-to-be-immortal phrase,
rings in the sky, rings over the land, la, fickt es! "I'm sending all the sol­
diers home. We'll close down the weapon factories, we'll dump all the
weapons in the sea. I'm sick of war. I'm sick of waking up every morn­
ing afraid I'm going to die." It is suddenly impossible to hate him any
more: he's as human, as mortal now, as any of the people. There will be
new elections. The Left will run a woman whose name is never given,
but everyone understands it is Rosa Luxemburg. The other candidates
will be chosen so inept or colorless that no one will vote for them. There
will be a chance for the Revolution. The President has promised.

Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a
dialectical process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is
in love....

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.

Rudi and Vanya have fallen to arguing street tactics. Somewhere
water is dripping. The street reaches in, makes itself felt everywhere.
Leni knows it, hates it. The impossibility of any rest . . . needing to
trust strangers who may be working for the police, if not right now then
a little later, when the street has grown for them more desolate than
they can bear . . . She wishes she knew of ways to keep it from her
child, but already that may be too late. Franz-Franz was never much
in the street. Always some excuse. Worried about security, being caught
on a stray frame by one of the leather-coated photographers, who will
be always at the fringes of the action. Or it was, "What'll we do with
Ilse? What if there's violence?" If there's violence, what'Il we do with
Franz?

She tried to explain to him about the level you reach, with both feet
in, when you lose your fear, you lose it all, you've penetrated the mo­
ment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, metal-gray but soft as latex,
and now the figures are dancing, each pre-choreographed exactly where
it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored frock as the girl in the ba-

158

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bushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in the black suitcoat and
brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one on either arm,

trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older liberal
in the

dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening demonstrator,

looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-me, his eye­
glasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. There is the moment,

and

its possibilities.
She even tried, from what little calculus she'd picked up, to explain it

to Franz as .6.t approaching zero, eternally approaching, the slices of

time growing thinner and thinner, a succession of rooms
each with walls

more silver, transparent, as the pure light of the zero comes

nearer....

But he shook his head. "Not the same, Leni. The important thing is

taking a function to its limit . .6.t is just a convenience, so
that it can hap­

pen."
He has, had, this way of removing all the excitement from things with

a few words. Not even well-chosen words: he's that way by instinct.
When they went to movies he would fall asleep. He fell asleep during
Nibelungen. He missed Attila the Hun roaring in from

the East to wipe
out the Burgundians. Franz loved films but this was how he

watched

them, nodding in and out of sleep. "You're the
cause-and-effect man,"

she cried. How did he connect together the fragments he saw while his

eyes were open?
He was the cause-and-effect man: he kept at her astrology without

mercy, telling her what she was supposed to believe,
then denying it.

"Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is
no way for

changes out there to produce changes here."
"Not produce," she tried, "not cause. It all goes along together.

Paral­

lel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to
different

coordinate systems, I don't know ...
"

She didn't know, all she was

trying to do was reach.
But he said: "Try to design anything that way and have it

work."

They saw Die Frau im Mond. Franz was amused, condescending.
He

picked at technical points. He knew some of the people
who'd worked

on the special effects. Leni saw a dream of flight. One
of many possible.

Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part
of the same

movement. Not A before B, but all together....
Could anything with him ever have lasted? If the Jewish

wolf Pflaum­

baum had not set the torch to his own paint factory by the canal, Franz

might have labored out their days dedicated to
the Jew's impossible

scheme of developing patterned paint, dissolving crystal after patient

159



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,

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crystal, controlling the temperatures with obsessive care so that on
cooling the amorphous swirl might, this time might, suddenly shift, lock
into stripes, polka-dots, plaid, stars of David-instead of finding one
early morning a blackened waste, paint cans exploded in great bursts of
crimson and bottle-green, smells of charred wood and naphtha, Pflaum­
baum wringing his hands oy, oy, oy, the sneaking hypocrite. All for the
insurance.

So Franz and Leni were very hungry for a time, with Ilse growing in
her belly each day. What jobs came along were menial and paid hardly
enough to matter. It was breaking him. Then he met his old friend from
the T.H. Munich one night out in the swampy suburbs.

He'd been out all day, the proletarian husband, out pasting up bills to
advertise some happy Max Schlepzig film fantasy, while Leni lay preg­
nant, forced to turn when the pain in her back got too bad, inside their
furnished dustbin in the last of the tenement's Hinterhofe, It was well
after dark and bitter cold by the time his paste bucket was empty and
the ads all put up to be pissed on, torn down, .swastikaed over. (It may
have been a quota film. There may have been a misprint. But when he
arrived at the theatre on the date printed on the bill, he found the place
dark, chips of plaster littering the floor of the lobby, and a terrible
smashing far back inside the theatre, the sound of a demolition crew ex­
cept that there were no voices, nor even any light that he could see
back there . . . he called, but the wrecking only went on, a loud creak­
ing in the bowels behind the electric marquee, which he noticed now
was blank. ... ) He had wandered, bone-tired, miles northward into
Reinickendorf, a quarter of small factories, rusted sheeting on the roofs,
brothels, sheds, expansions of brick into night and disuse, repair shops
where the water in the vats for cooling the work lay stagnant and
scummed over. Only a sprinkling of lights. Vacancy, weeds in the lots,
no one in the streets: a neighborhood where glass breaks every night. It
must have been the wind that was carrying him down a dirt road, pastthe old army garrison the local police had taken over, among the shacks
and tool cribs to a wire fence with a gate. He found the gate open, and
pushed through. He'd become aware of a sound, somewhere ahead. One
summer before the World War, he'd gone to Schaffhausen on holidaywith his parents, and they'd taken the electric tram to the Rhine Falls.
They went down a stairway and out on to a little wood pavilion with a
pointed roof-all around them were clouds, rainbows, drops of fire. And
the roar of the waterfall. He held on to both their hands, suspended inthe cold spray-cloud with Mutti and Papi, barely able to see above to
the trees that clung to the fall's brim in a green wet smudge, or the little

160



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tour boats below that came up nearly to where the cataract crashed into
the Rhine. But now, in the winter heart of Reinickendorf, he was alone,
hands empty, stumbling over frozen mud through an old ammunition
dump grown over with birch and willow, swelling in the darkness to
hills, sinking to swamp. Concrete barracks and earthworks 40 feet high
towered in the middle distance as the sound beyond them, the sound of
a waterfall, grew louder, calling from his memory. These were the kinds
of revenants that found Franz, not persons but forms of energy, abstrac­

tions....

Through a gap in the breastwork he saw then a tiny silver egg, with a
flame, pure and steady, issuing from beneath, lighting the forms of men
in suits, sweaters, overcoats, watching from bunkers or trenches. It was
a rocket, in its stand: a static test.

The sound began to change, to break now and then. It didn't sound
ominous to Franz in his wonder, only different. But the light grew
brighter, and the watching figures suddenly started dropping for cover
as the rocket now gave a sputtering roar, a long burst, voices screaming
get down and he hit the dirt just as the silver thing blew apart, a terrific
blast, metal whining through the air where he'd stood, Franz hugging
the ground, ears ringing, no feeling even for the cold, no way for the
moment of knowing if he was still inside his body. . . .

Feet approached running. He looked up and saw Kurt Mondaugen.
The wind all night, perhaps all year, had brought them together. This is
what he came to believe, that it was the wind. Most of the schoolboy fat
was replaced now by muscle, his hair was thinning, his complexion
darker than anything Franz had seen in the street that winter, dark
even in the concrete folds of shadow and the Hames from the scattered

rocket fuel, but it was Mondaugen sure enough, seven or eight years
gone but they knew each other in the instant. They'd lived in the same

drafty mansarde in the Liebigstrasse in Munich. (Franz had seen the ad­
dress then as a lucky omen, for Justus von Liebig had been one of his
heroes, a hero of chemistry. Later, as confirmation, his course in poly­
mer theory was taught by Professor-Doctor Laszlo Jamf, who was latest
in the true succession, Liebig to August Wilhelm von Hofmann, to Her­
bert Canister to Laszlo Jamf, a direct chain, cause-and-effect.) They'd
ridden the same rattling Schnellbahnwagen with its three contact arms
frail as insect legs squeaking along the wires overhead to the T .H.:

Mondaugen had been in electrical engineering. On graduating he'd

gone off to South-West Africa, on some kind of radio research project.
They had written for a while, then stopped.

Their reunion went on till very late, in a Reinickendorf beer hall, un-

161



dergraduate hollering among the working-class drinkers, a jubilant and
grandiose post-mortem on the rocket test-scrawling on soggy paper
napkins, all talking at once around the glass-cluttered table, arguing
through the smoke and noise heat flux, specific impulse, propellant
flow....

"It was a failure," Franz weaving under their electric bulb at three or
four in the morning, a loose grin on his face, "it failed, Leni, but they
talk only of success! Twenty kilograms of thrust and only for a few sec­
onds, but no one's ever done it before. I couldn't believe it Leni I saw
something that, that no one ever did before....

"

He meant to accuse her, she imagined, of conditioning him to despair.
But she only wanted him to grow up. What kind of Wandervogel idiocy
is it to run around all night in a marsh calling yourselves the SOCiety for
Space Navigation?

Leni grew up in Lubeck, in a row of kleinbiirger houses beside the
Trave. Smooth trees, spaced evenly all along the riverward edge of her
cobbled street, arched their long boughs over the water. From her bed­
room window she could see the twin spires of the Dom rising above the
housetops. Her fetid back-court existence in Berlin was only a decom­
pression lock-must be. Her way out of that fussy Biedermeier strangu­
lation, her dues payable against better times, after the Revolution.

Franz, in play, often called her "Lenin." There was never doubt
about who was active, who passive-still she had hoped he'd grow
beyond it. She has talked to psychiatrists, she knows about the German
male at puberty. On their backs in the meadows and mountains, watch­
ing the sky, masturbating, yearning. Destiny waits, a darkness latent in
the texture of the summer wind. Destiny will betray you, crush your
ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Biirgcrhchkeit as your fa­
ther, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row
houses by the river-dress you in the gray uniform of another family
man, and without a whimper you will serve out your time, fly from pain
to duty, from joy to work, from commitment to neutrality. Destiny does
all this to you.

Franz loved her neurotically, masochistically, he belonged to her and
believed that she would carry him on her back, away to a place where
Destiny couldn't reach. As if it were gravity. He had half-awakened one
night burrowing his face into her armpit mumbling, "Your wings . . .
oh, Leni, your wings . . ."

But her wings can only carry her own weight, and she hopes Ilse's, for
a while. Franz is a dead weight. Let him look for flight out at the Raket-

162



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enflugplatz, where he goes to be used by the military and the cartels.
Let him fly to the dead moon if he wants to. . . .

Use is awake, and crying. No food all day. They ought to try Peter's
after all. He'll have milk. Rebecca holds out what's left of the end crust
she's been eating. "Would she like this?"

Not much of the Jew in her. Why are half the Leftists she knows Jew­
ish? She immediately reminds herself that Marx was one. A racial
affinity for the books, the theory, a rabbinical love of loud argument
. . . She gives the crust to her child, picks her up.

"If he comes here, tell him you haven't seen me."
They arrive at Peter Sachsa's well after dark. She finds a seance just

about to begin. She is immediately aware of her drab coat and cotton
dress (hemline too high), her scuffed and city-dusted shoes, her lack of
jewelry. More middle-class reflexes . . . vestiges, she hopes. But most of
the women are old. The others are too dazzling. Hmm. The men look
more affluent than usual. Leni spots a silver lapel-swastika here and
there. Wines on the tables are the great '20S and '21S. Schloss Vollrads,
Zeltinger, Piesporter-it is an Occasion.

The objective tonight is to get in touch with the late foreign minister
Walter Rathenau. At the Gymnasium, Leni sang with the other children
the charming anti-Semitic street refrain of the time:

Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau,
Die gottverdammte Judensau .

After he was assassinated she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the
singing hadn't brought it about, at least it had been a prophecy, a
spell....

There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minis­
ter. A gentle sorting-out process is under way. Reasons of security. Only
certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter's sitting room. The preter­
ite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving
their hands. . . . The big scandal around I G Farben this week is the un­
lucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are
about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design
proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, in­
side a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the
scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind
what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war. The
Gotterdammerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-

163



5227, L standing for light, another comical German euphemism, like the
A in rocket designations which stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Inter­
essengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests ... and what about the
case of catalyst poisoning in Prague-was it true that the VI b Group
Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been
flown east on emergency status, and that it's a complex poisoning, both
selenium and tellurium . . . the names of the poisons sober the conver­
sation, like a mention of cancer. . . .

The elite who will sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd,
among whom Leni recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an
IG branch that was interested, for a time, in her husband. But then
abruptly there'd been no more contact. It would have been mysterious,
a little sinister, except that everything iu those days could reasonably be
blamed on the economy....

In the crowd her eyes meet Peter's. "I've left him," she whispers,
nodding, as he shakes hands.

"You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk
later?" There is to his eyes tonight a definite faunish slant. Will he ac­
cept that she is not his, any more than she belonged to Franz?

"Yes, of course. What's going on?"
He snorts, meaning they haven't told me. They are using him-have

been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by
rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and
forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients. . . .

Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whis­
per to his protege as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what
you'd expect to get from them-it says exactly nothing. The moment of
assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power
come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other
then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a
truth so terrible that history-at best a conspiracy, not always among
gentlemen, to defraud-will never admit it. The truth will be repressed
or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What
will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence,
have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible
as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as
the Angel swooped in. . . .

But they will see. Rathenau-according to the histories-was prophet
and architect of the cartelized state. From what began as a tiny bureau
at the War Office in Berlin, he had coordinated Germany's economy
during the World War, controlling supplies, quotas and prices, cutting

164

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across and demolishing the barriers of secrecy and property that sepa­
rated firm from firm-a corporate Bismarck, before whose power no ac­
count book was too privileged, no agreement too clandestine. His father
Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Com­

pany, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir-he was

a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in
progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red
communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which
business would be the true, the rightful authority-a structure based,
not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the
World War.

Thus the official version. Grandiose enough. But Generaldirektor
Smaragd and colleagues are not here to be told what even the masses
believe. It might almost-if one were paranoid enough-seem to be a
collaboration here, between both sides of the Wall, matter and spirit.
What is it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure
behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?

Gallows humor. A damned parlor game. Smaragd cannot really be­
lieve in any of this, Smaragd the technician and manager. He may only
want signs, omens, confirmations of what's already in being, something
to giggle over among the Herrenklub-"We even have the Jew's
blessing!" Whatever comes through the medium tonight they will warp,
they will edit, into a blessing. It is contempt of a rare order.

Leni finds a couch in a quiet corner of a room full of Chinese ivory
and silk hangings, lies on it, one calf dangling, and tries to relax. Franz
now will be home from the rocket-field, blinking under the bulb as Frau
Silberschlag next door delivers Leni's last message. Messages tonight,
borne on the lights of Berlin . . . neon, incandescent, stellar . . . mes­
sages weave into a net of information that no one can escape. . . .

"The path is clear," a voice moving Sachsa's lips and rigid white
throat. "You are constrained, over there, to follow it in time, one step
after another. But here it's possible to see the whole shape at once-not
for me, I'm not that far along-but many know it as a clear presence

. . . 'shape' isn't really the right word. . . . Let me be honest with you.
I'm finding it harder to put myself in your shoes. Problems you may be
having, even those of global implication, seem to many of us here only
trivial side-trips. You are off on a winding and difficult road, which you
conceive to be wide and straight, an Autobahn you can travel at your
ease. Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion?

I

don't know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know
about your path, your Autobahn.

\\�



"All right. Mauve: that's in the pattern. The invention of mauve, the
coming to your level of the color mauve. Are you listening, Ceneraldi­
rektor?"

"I am listening, Herr Rathenau," replies Smaragd of IC Farben.
"Tyrian purple, alizarin and indigo, other coal-tar dyes are here, but

the important one is mauve. William Perkin discovered it in England,
but he was trained by Hofmann, who was trained by Liebig. There is a
succession involved. If it is karmic it's only in a very limited sense . . .
another Englishman, Herbert Canister, and the generation of chemists
he trained. . . . Then the discovery of Oneirine. Ask your man Wimpe.
He is the expert on cyclized benzylisoquinilines. Look into the clinical
effects of the drug. I don't know. It seems that you might look in that di­
rection. It converges with the mauve-Perkin-Canister line. But all I
have is the molecule, the sketch . . . Methoneirine, as the sulfate. Not
in Germany, but in the United States. There is a link to the United
States. A link to Russia. Why do you think von Maltzan and I saw the
Rapallo treaty through? It was necessary to move to the east. Wimpe
can tell you. Wimpe, the V-Mann, was always there. Why do you think
we wanted Krupp to sell them agricultural machinery so badly? It was
also part of the process. At the time I didn't understand it as clearly as I
do now. But I knew what I had to do.

"Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The in­
terface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the
earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient,
prehistoric, species we will never see again. Crowing older, blacker,
deeper, in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out
fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal tars, darker and heavier, must
be taken from the original coal. Earth's excrement, purged out for the
ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.

"We thought of this as an industrial process. It was more. We passed
over the coal-tars. A thousand different molecules waited in the preter­
ite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning
of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth's light from its
grave miles and aeons below. There is the other meaning . . . the suc­
cession ... I can't see that far yet....

"But this is all the impersonation of life. The real movement is not
from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured. The
best you can do is to polymerize a few dead molecules. But polymeriz­
ing is not resurrection. I mean your IC, Ceneraldirektor."

"Our IG, I should have thought," replies Smaragd with more than the
usual ice and stiffness.

166



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"That's for you to work out. If you prefer to call this a liaison, do. I
am here for as long as you need me. You don't have to listen. You think
you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kar­
tell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dy­
namic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows.
Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of
original waste over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they
are strongest in compression. A smokestack can survive any explosion­
even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs"-a bit of a

murmur around the table at this-" as you all must know. The persist­
ence' then, of structures favoring death. Death converted into more
death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and
overlaid with more strata-epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined
city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.

"These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The proc­
ess follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will
follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secu­
lar history is a diversionary tactic. Useful to you, gentlemen, but no
longer so to us here. If you want the truth-I know I presume-you
must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of
certain molecules-it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pres­
sures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers....

"You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthe­
sis? And then: what is the real nature of control?

"You think you know, you cling to your beliefs. But sooner or later
you will have to let them go....

"

A silence, which prolongs itself. There is some shifting in the seats
around the table, but the sets of little fingers stay in touch.

"Herr Rathenau? Could you tell me one thing?" It is Heinz Rippen­
stoss, the irrepressible Nazi wag and gadabout. The sitters begin to gig­
gle, and Peter Sachsa to return to his room. "Is God really Jewish?"

Pumm, Easterling, Dromond, Lamplighter, Spectro are stars on the doc­
tor's holiday tree. Shining down on this holiest of nights. Each is a cold

rm announcement of dead ends, suns that will refuse to stand, but flee

south, ever south, leaving us to north-without-end. But Kevin Spectro is
�W brightest, most distant of all. And the crowds they swarm in Knights­

bridge, and the wireless carols drone, and the Underground's a mob-

167



scene, but Pointsman's all alone. But he's got his Xmas present, fa la la,
he won't have to settle for any Spam-tin dog this year mates, he's got his
own miracle and human child, grown to manhood but carrying, some­
place on the Slothropian cortex now a bit of Psychology's own child­
hood, yes pure history, inert, encysted, unmoved by jazz, depression,
war-a survival, if you will, of a piece of the late Dr. Jamf himself, past
death, past the reckoning of the, the old central chamber you
know....

He has no one to ask, no one to tell. My heart, he feels, my heart
floods now with such virility and hope. . . . News from the Riviera is
splendid. Experiments here begin to run smoothly for a change. From
some dark overlap, a general appropriation or sinking fund someplace,
Brigadier Pudding has even improved the funding for ARF. Does he
feel Pointsman's power too? Is he buying some insurance?

At odd moments of the day Pointsman, fascinated, discovers himself
with an erect penis. He begins making jokes, English Pavlovian jokes,
nearly all of which depend on one unhappy accident: the Latin cortex
translates into English as "bark," not to mention the well-known and
humorous relation between dogs and trees (these are bad enough, and
most PISCES folk have the good sense to avoid them, but they are daz­
zling witticisms compared with jokes out of the mainstream, such as the
extraordinary "What did the Cockney exclaim to the cowboy from San
Antonio?"). Sometime during the annual PISCES Christmas Party,
Pointsman is led by Maudie Chilkes to a closet full of belladonna, gauze,
thistle tubes, and the scent of surgical rubber, where in a flash she's
down on her red knees, unbuttoning his trousers, as he, confused, good
God, strokes her hair, clumsily shaking much of it loose from its wine­
colored ribbon-here what's this, an actual, slick and crimson, hot,
squeak-stockinged slavegirl "gam" yes right among these winter-pale
clinical halls, with the distant gramophone playing rumba music, basses,
woodblocks, wearied blown sheets of tropic string cadences audible as
everyone dances back there on the uncarpeted floors, and the old Palla­
dian shell, conch of a thousand rooms, gives, resonates, shifting stresses
along walls and joists . . . bold Maud, this is incredible, taking the pink
Pavlovian cock in as far as it will go, chin to collarbone vertical as a
sword-swallower, releasing him each time with some small ladylike
choking sound, fumes of expensive Scotch rising flowerlike, and her
hands up grabbing the loose wool seat of his pants, pleating, unpleating
-it's happening so fast that Pointsman only sways, blinks a bit drunk­
enly you know, wondering if he's dreaming or has found the perfect
mixture, try to remember, amphetamine sulphate, 5 mg q 6 h, last night

168



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amobarbital sodium 0.2 Gm. at bedtime, this morning assorted breakfast
vitamin capsules, alcohol an ounce, say, per hour, over the past ...
how many cc.s is that and oh, Jesus I'm coming. Am I? yes . . . well
... and Maud, dear Maudie, swallowing, wastes not a drop ... smil­

ing quietly, unplugged at last, she returns the unstiffening hawk to its
cold bachelor nest but kneels still a bit longer in the closet of this mo­
ment, the drafty, white-lit moment, some piece by Ernesto Lecuona,
"Siboney" perhaps, now reaching them down corridors long as the sea­
lanes back to the green shoals, slime stone battlements, and palm eve­

nings of Cuba . . . a Victorian pose, her cheek against his leg, his high­
veined hand against her face. But no one saw them, then or ever, and in
the winter ahead, here and there, her look will cross his and she'll begin
to blush red as her knees, she'll come to his room off the lab once or

twice perhaps, but somehow they're never to have this again, this sud­
den tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this mo­
ment of perfect peace. . . .

No one to tell. Maud knows something's up all right, the finances of
PISCES pass through her hands, nothing escapes her. But he can't tell
her ... or not everything, not the exact terms of his hope, he's never,
even to himself . . . it lies ahead in the dark, defined inversely, by hor­
ror, by ways all hopes might yet be defeated and he find only his death,
that dumb, empty joke, at the end of this Pavlovian's Progress.

Now Thomas Gwenhidwy too senses change fibrillating in the face
and step of his colleague. Fat, prematurely white Santa Claus beard, a

listing, rumpled showman, performing every instant, trying to speak a
double language, both Welsh comic-provincial and hard diamond gone­
a-begging truth, hear what you will. His singing voice is incredible, in
his spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking
for bigger planes-for he loves to practice the bass part to "Diadem" as
the Flying Fortresses take off at full power, and even so you can hear
him, bone-vibrating and pure above the bombers, all the way to Stoke

Poges, you see. Once a lady even wrote in to the Times from Luton
Hoo, Bedfordshire, asking who was the man with the lovely deep voice

singing "Diadem." A Mrs. Snade. Gwenhidwy likes to drink a lot, grain
alcohol mostly, mixed in great strange mad-scientist concoctions with
beef tea, grenadine, cough syrup, bitter belch-gathering infusions of
blue scullcap, valerian root, motherwort and lady's-slipper, whatever's
to hand really. His is the hale alcoholic style celebrated in national leg­
end and song. He is descended directly from the Welshman in Henry

V

who ran around forcing people to eat his Leek. None of your sedentary
drinkers though. Pointsman has never seen Gwenhidwy off of his feet or

169



standing still-he fusses endlessly pitch-and-roll avast you scum down
the long rows of sick or dying faces, and even Pointsman has noted
rough love in the minor gestures, changes of breathing and voice. They
are blacks, Indians, Ashkenazic Jews speaking dialects you never heard
in Harley Street: they have been bombed out, frozen, starved, meanly
sheltered, and their faces, even the children's, all possess some ancient
intimacy with pain and reverse that amazes Pointsman, who is more po­
larized upon West End catalogues of genteel signs and symptoms, head­
born anorexias and constipations the Welshman could have little pa­
tience with. On Cwenhidwy's wards some BMRs run low as - 35, - 40.
The white lines go thickening across the X-ray ghosts of bones, gray
scrapings from underneath tongues bloom beneath his old wrinkle-black
microscope into clouds of Vincentesque invaders, nasty little fangs
achop and looking to ulcerate the vitamin-poor tissue they came from.
A quite different domain altogether, you see.

"I don't know, man-no, I don't," flinging a fat slow-motion arm out
of his hedgehog-colored cape, back at the hospital, as they walk in the
falling snow-to Pointsman a clear separation, monks here and cathe­
dral there, soldiers and garrison-but not so to Gwenhidwy, part of
whom remains behind, hostage. The streets are empty, it's Christmas
day, they are tramping uphill to Cwenhidwy's rooms as the quiet snow
curtains fall on and on between themselves and the pierced walls of the
institution marching in stone parallax away into a white gloom. "How
they persist. The poor, the black. And the Jews! The Welsh, the Welsh
once upon a time were JeWish too? one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a
black tribe, who wandered overland, centuries? oh an incredible jour­
ney. Until at last they reached Wales, you see."

"Wales ...
"

"Stayed on, and became the Cymri. What if we're all Jews, you see?
all scattered like seeds? still flying outward from the primal fist so long
ago. Man, I believe that."

"Of course you do, Gwenhidwy."
"Aren't we then? What about you?"
"I don't know. I don't feel [ewish today."
"I meant flying outward?" He means alone and forever separate:

Pointsman knows what he means. So, by surprise, something in him is
touched. He feels the Christmas snow now at crevices of his boots, the
bitter cold trying to get in. The brown wool flank of Gwenhidwy moves
at the edge of his Sight, a pocket of color, a holdout against this whiten­
ing day. Flying outward. Flying ... Gwenhidwy, a million ice-points
falling at a slant across his caped immensity, looking so improbable of

1 70



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extinction that now, from where it's been lying, the same yawing-drunk
chattering fear returns, the Curse of the Book, and here is someone he
wants, truly, with all his mean heart, to see preserved ... though he's
been too shy, or proud, ever to've smiled at Gwenhidwy without some
kind of speech to explain and cancel out the smile. . . .

Dogs run barking at their approach. They get the Professional Eye
from Pointsman. Gwenhidwy is humming "Aberystwyth." Out comes
the doorkeeper's daughter Estelle with a shivering kid or two underfoot
and a Christmas bottle of something acrid but very warming inside the
breast after about the first minute it's down. Smells of coal smoke, piss,
garbage, last night's bubble-and-squeak, fill the hallways. Gwenhidwy is
drinking from the bottle, carrying on a running slap-and-tickle with Es­
telle and getting in a fast game of where'd-he-go-there-he-is with Arch
her youngest around the broad mouton hipline of his mother who keeps
trying to smack him but he's too fast.

Gwenhidwy breathes upon a gas meter which is frozen all through,
too tight to accept coins. Terrible weather. He surrounds it, curses it,
bending like a screen lover, wings of his cape reaching to enfold­

Gwenhidwy, radiating like a sun. . . .
Out the windows of the sitting-room are a row of bare Army-colored

poplars, a canal, a snowy trainyard, and beyond it a long sawtooth pile
of scrap coal, still smoldering from a V-bomb yesterday. Ragged smoke
is carried askew, curling, broken and back to earth by the falling snow.

"It's the closest yet," Gwenhidwy at the kettle, the sour smell of a
sulfur match in the air. After a moment, still on watch over the gas ring,
"Pointsman, do you want to hear something really paranoid?"

"You too?"
"Have you consulted a map of London lately? All this great me-te­

oric plague of V-weapons, is being dumped out here, you see. Not back
on Whitehall, where it's supposed to be, but on me, and I think it is

beast-ly?"
"What a damned unpatriotic thing to say."
"Oh," hawking and spitting into the washbowl, "you don't want to

believe it. Why should you? Harley Street lot, my good Jesus Christ."
It's an old game with Gwenhidwy, Royal Fellow-baiting. Some unac­

customed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the

deep choral hum of American bombers: Death's white Gymanfa Ganu.
A switching-locomotive creeps silently across the web of tracks below.

"They're falling in a Poisson distribution," says Pointsman in a
small

voice, as if it was open to challenge.
"No doubt man, no doubt-an excellent point. But all over the fuck-

1 71

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ing East End, you see." Arch, or someone, has drawn a brown, orange,
and blue Gwenhidwy carrying a doctor's bag along a flat horizon-line
past a green gasworks. The bag's full of gin bottles, Gwenhidwy is smil­
ing, a robin is peeking out from its nest in his beard, and the sky is blue
and the sun yellow. "But have you ever thought of why? Here is the
City Paranoiac. All these long centuries, growing over the country-Side?
like an intelligent creature. An actor, a fantastic mimic, Pointsman!
Count-erfeiting all the correct forces? the eco-nomic, the demographic?
oh yes even the ran-dom, you see."

"What do you mean 'I see'? I don't see." Against the window, backlit
by the white afternoon, Pointsman's face is invisible except for a tiny
bright crescent glowing off each eyeball. Should he fumble behind him
for the window catch? Is the woolly Welshman gone raving mad, then?

"You don't see them," steam in tight brocade starting to issue from
the steel-blotched swan's mouth, "the blacks and Jews, in their dark­
ness. You can't. You don't hear their silence. You became so used to
talking, and to light."

"To barking, anyway."
"Nothing comes through my hos-pital but fail-ure, you see." Staring

with a fixed, fool-alcoholic smile. "What can I cure? I can only send
them back, outside again? Back to that? It might as well be Europe
here, com-bat, splint-ing and drug-ging them all into some mini-mum
condition to get on with the kill-ing?"

"Here, don't you know there's a war on?" Thus Pointsman receives,
with his cup, a terrible scowl. In truth, he is hoping with nitwit irrele­
vancies to discourage Gwenhidwy from going on about his City Para­
noiac. Pointsman would rather talk about the rocket victims admitted
today to the hospital down there. But this is exorcism man, it is the poet
singing back the silence, adjuring the white riders, and Gwenhidwy
knows, as Pointsman cannot, that it's part of the plan of the day to sit
inside this mean room and cry into just such a deafness: that Mr. Points­
man is to play exactly himself-stylized, irritable, uncomprehend­
ing....

"In some cities the rich live upon the heights, and the poor are found
below. In others the rich occupy the shoreline, while the poor must live
inland. Now in London, here is a gra-dient of wretchedness? increasing
as the river widens to the sea. I am only ask-ing, why? Is it because of
the ship-ping? Is it in the pat-terns of land use, especially those relating
to the Industrial Age? Is it a case of an-cient tribal tabu, surviving down
all the Eng-lish generations? No. The true reason is the Threat From
The East, you see. And the South: from the mass of Eu-rope, certainly.

172

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The people out here were meant to go down first. We're expendable:
those in the West End, and north of the river are not. Oh, I don't mean

the Threat has this or that specific shape. Political, no. If the City Para­
noiac dreams, it's not accessible to us. Perhaps the Ci-ty dreamed of an­
other, en-emy city, float-ing across the sea to invade the es-tuary . . . or
of waves of darkness ... waves of fire.... Perhaps of being swal­
lowed again, by the immense, the si-lent Mother Con-tinent? It's none
of my business, city dreams. . . . But what if the Ci-ty were a growing
neo-plasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing, to meet exactly the

chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears? The raggedy pawns, the

disgraced bish-op and cowardly knight, all we condemned, we irreversi­

bly lost, are left out here, exposed and wait-ing. It was known, don't

deny it-known, Pointsman! that the front in Eu-rope someday must

develop like this? move away east, make the rock-ets necessary, and
known how, and where, the rockets would fall short. Ask your friend

Mexico? look at the densities on his map? east, east, and south of the
river too, where all the bugs live, that's who's getting it thick-est, my
friend."

"You're right, Gwenhidwy," judicious, sipping his tea, "that is very
paranoid.

"

"It's true." He is out with the festive bottle of Vat 69 now, and about

to pour them a toast.

"To the babies." Grinning, completely mad.
"Babies, Gwenhidwy?"
"Ah, I've been keep-ing my own map? Plot-ting da-ta from the mater­

nity wards. The ba-bies born during this Blitz are al-so fol-Iowing a
Pois­

son distribution, you see."
"Well-to the oddness of it, then. Poor little bastards."

Later, toward dusk, several enormous water bugs, a very dark reddish

brown, emerge like elves from the wainscoting, and go lumbering to­
ward the larder-pregnant mother bugs too, with baby translucent out­
rider bugs flowing along like a convoy escort. At night, in the very late
silences between bombers, ack-ack fire and falling rockets, they can be
heard, loud as mice, munching through Cwenhidwy's paper sacks,

leaving streaks and footprints of shit the color of themselves behind.

They don't seem to go in much for soft things, fruits, vegetables,
and

such, it's more the solid lentils and beans they're into, stuff they can

gnaw at, paper and plaster barriers, hard interfaces to be pierced,
for

they are agents of unification, you see. Christmas bugs. They were deep
in the straw of the manger at Bethelehem, they stumbled, climbed, fell

glistening red among a golden lattice of straw that must have seemed
to

173



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extend miles up and downward-an edible tenement-world, now and
then gnawed through to disrupt some mysterious sheaf of vectors that
would send neighbor bugs tumbling ass-over-antennas down past you as
you held on with all legs in that constant tremble of golden stalks. A
tranquil world: the temperature and humidity staying nearly steady, the
day's cycle damped to only a soft easy sway of light, gold to antique­
gold to shadows, and back again. The crying of the infant reached you,
perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly un­
sensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see. . . .

D D D D D D D

Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail
and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little
sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells
she and her sisters have brought back from the sea.

Aunt Jessica and Uncle Roger are out in the kitchen, hugging and
kissing. Elizabeth is teasing Claire in the hallway. Their mother is in the
W.C. Sooty the cat sleeps in a chair, a black thundercloud on the way to
something else, who happens right now to look like a cat. It's Boxing
Day. The evening's very still. The last rocket bomb was an hour ago,
somewhere south. Claire got a golliwog, Penelope a sweater, Elizabeth
a frock that Penelope will grow into.

The pantomime Roger took them all to see this afternoon was Hansel
and Gretel. Claire immediately took off under the seats where others
were moving about by secret paths, a flash of braid or of white collar
now and then among the tall attentive uncles in uniform, the coat­
draped backs of seats. On stage Hansel, who was supposed to be a boy
but was really a tall girl in tights and smock, cowered inside the cage.
The funny old Witch foamed at the mouth and climbed the scenery.
And pretty Gretel waited by the Oven for her chance. . . .

Then the Germans dropped a rocket just down the street from the
theatre. A few of the little babies started crying. They were scared. Gre­
tel, who was just winding up with her broom to hit the Witch right in
the bum, stopped: put the broom down, in the gathering silence
stepped to the footlights, and sang:

Oh, don't let it get you,
It will if they let you, but there's
Something I'll bet you can't see-

174



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1 75

It's big and it's nasty and it's right over there,
It's waiting to get its sticky claws in your hair!
Oh, the greengrocer's wishing on a rainbow today,
And the dustman is tying his tie . . .
And it all goes along to the same jolly song,
With a peppermint face in the sky!

"Now sing along," she smiled, and actually got the audience, even

Roger, to sing:

With a peppermint face in the sky-y,
And a withered old dream in your heart,
You'll get hit with a piece of the pie-ie,
With the pantomime ready to start!
Oh, the Tommy is sleeping in a snowbank tonight,
And the Jerries are learning to fly-
We can fly to the moon, we'll be higher than noon,
In our polythene home in the sky. . .

Pretty polythene home in the sky,
Pretty platinum pins in your hand-
Oh your mother's a big fat machine gun,
And your father's a dreary young man. .

(Whispered and staccato):
Oh, the, man-a-ger's suck-ing on a corn-cob, pipe,
And the bank-ers are, eat-ing their, wives,
All the world's in a daze, while the orchestra plays,
So turn your pockets and get your surprise-

Turn your pockets and get-your surpri-ise,
There was nobody there af-ter all!
And the lamps up the stairway are dying,
It's the season just after the ball . . .
Oh the palm-trees whisper on the beach somewhere,
And the lifesaver's heaving a sigh,
And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year,
Are of children who are learning to die. . . .

Penelope's father's chair, in the corner, next to the table
with the

lamp, is empty. It faces her now. She can see the crocheted shawl
over

the back, many knots of gray, tan, black, and brown, with amazing
clar­

ity. In the pattern, or in front of it, something is stirring:
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than refraction, as if there were a source of heat directly in front of the
empty chair.

"No," she whispers out loud. "I don't want to. You're not him. I don't
know who you are but you're not my father. Go away."

Its arms and legs are silent and rigid. She stares into it.
I only want to visit you.
"You want to possess me."
Demonic possessions in this house are not unknown. Is this really

Keith, her father? taken when she was half her present age, and re­
turned now as not the man she knew, but only the shell-with the soft
meaty slug of soul that smiles and loves, that feels its mortality, either
rotted away or been picked at by the needle mouths of death-by-gov­
ernment-a process by which living souls unwillingly become the de­
mons known to the main sequence of Western magic as the Qlippoth,
Shells of the Dead. . . . It is also what the present dispensation often
does to decent men and women entirely on this side of the grave. In nei­
ther process is there any dignity, or any mercy. Mothers and fathers are
conditioned into deliberately dying in certain preferred ways: giving
themselves cancer and heart attacks, getting into motor accidents, going
off to fight in the War-c-leaving their children alone in the forest.
They'll always tell you fathers are "taken," but fathers only leave­
that's what it really is. The fathers are all covering for each other, that's
all. Perhaps it's even better to have this presence, rubbing the room dry
as glass, slipping in and out of an old chair, than a father who still hasn't
died yet, a man you love and have to watch it happening to. . . .

In the kitchen, the water in the kettle shakes, creaks toward boiling,
and outside the wind blows. Somewhere, in another street, a roofslate
slides and falls. Roger has taken Jessica's cold hands in to warm against
his breast, feeling them, icy, through his sweater and shirt, folded in
against him. Yet she stands apart, trembling. He wants to warm all of
her, not just comic extremities, wants beyond reasonable hope. His
heart shakes like the boiling kettle.

It has begun to reveal itself: how easily she might go. For the first
time he understands why this is the same as mortality, and why he will
cry when she leaves. He is learning to recognize the times when nothing
really holds her but his skinny, zo-pushup arms.... If she leaves, then
it ceases to matter how the rockets fall. But the coincidence of maps,
girls, and rocketfalls has entered him silently, silent as ice, and Quisling
molecules have shifted in latticelike ways to freeze him. If he could be
with her more . . . if it happened when they were together-in another
time that might have sounded romantic, but in a culture of death, cer-

176

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Hark, the herald angels sing:
Mrs. Simpson's pinched our King

tain situations are just more hep to the jive than others-but they're
apart so much. . . .

If the rockets don't get her there's still her lieutenant. Damned Bea­
ver/Jeremy is the War, he is every assertion the fucking War has ever
made-that we are meant for work and government, for austerity: and
these shall take priority over love, dreams, the spirit, the senses and the
other second-class trivia that are found among the idle and mindless

hours of the day. . . . Damn them, they are wrong. They are insane.
Jeremy will take her like the Angel itself, in his joyless weasel-worded
come-along, and Roger will be forgotten, an amusing maniac, but with
no place in the rationalized power-ritual that will be the coming peace.
She will take her husband's orders, she will become a domestic bureau­

crat, a junior partner, and remember Roger, if at all, as a mistake thank
God she didn't make.... Oh, he feels a raving fit coming on-how the

bloody hell can he survive without her? She is the British warm that

protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds
in­

side his hands. She is his deepest innocence in spaces of bough and hay
before wishes were given a separate name to warn that they might not
come true, and his lithe Parisian daughter of joy, beneath the eternal
mirror, forswearing perfumes, capeskin to the armpits, all that is too

easy, for his impoverishment and more worthy love.
You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage

to my last

shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no

longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are "yours"
and which are "mine." It's past sorting out. We're both being someone
new now, someone incredible. . . .

His act of faith. In the street the children are singing:

Up on the mantelpiece Sooty's son Kim, an alarmingly fat crosseyed Sia­
mese, lurks waiting to do the only thing he enjoys these days. Beyond
eating, sleeping or fucking his chief obsession is to jump, or topple, on
his mother, and lie there laughing while she runs screaming around the
room. Jessica's sister Nancy comes out of the 100 to break up what's be­

coming a full-scale row between Elizabeth and Claire. Jessica steps
away from Roger to blow her nose. The sound is as familiar to

him as a

bird's song, ip-ip-ip-ip NGUNNGG as the handkerchief
comes away

... "Oh sooper dooper," she says, "think I'm catching a cold."
You're catching the War. It's infecting you and I don't know how to

keep it away. Oh, Jess. Jessica. Don't leave me....

177



 



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Un Perm' au Casino

Hermann Goering

You will have the tallest, darkest leading man
in Hollywood.

-MERIAN C. COOPER to Fay Wray

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This morning's streets are already clattering, near and far, with wood­
soled civilian feet. Up in the wind is a scavenging of gulls, sliding, easy,
side to side, wings hung out still, now and then a small shrug, only to

gather lift for this weaving, unweaving, white and slow faro shufHe off
invisible thumbs. . . . Yesterday's first glance, coming along the espla­
nade in the afternoon, was somber: the sea in shades of gray under gray
clouds, the Casino Hermann Goering flat white and the palms in black
sawtooth, hardly moving. . . . But this morning the trees in the sun now
are back to green. Leftward, far away, the ancient aqueduct loops
crumbling, dry yellow, out along the Cap, the houses and villas there
baked to warm rusts, gentle corrosions all through Earth's colors, pale
raw to deeply burnished.

The sun, not very high yet, will catch a bird by the ends of his wings,
turning the feathers brightly there to curls of shaved ice. Slothrop
rattles his teeth at the crowd of birds aloft, shivering down on his own
miniature balcony, electric fire deep in the room barely touching the
backs of his legs. They have filed him high on the white sea-facade, in a
room to himself. Tantivy Mucker-Maffick and his friend Teddy Bloat
are sharing one down the hall. He takes back his hands into ribbed

cuffs

of a sweatshirt, crosses his arms, watches the amazing foreign morning,
the ghosts of his breathing into it, feeling first sunwarmth, wanting a
first cigarette-and perversely he waits for a sudden noise to begin his

day, a first rocket. Aware all the time he's in the wake of a great
war

gone north, and that the only explosions around here will have
to be

champagne corks, motors of sleek Hispano-Suizas, the odd
amorous

slap, hopefully.... No London? No Blitz? Can he get used to it? Sure,
and by then it'll be just time to head back.

"Well, he's awake." Bloat in uniform, Sidling into the room gnawing
on a smoldering pipe, Tantivy behind in a pin-striped lounge suit. "Up
at the crack, reconnoitering the beach for the unattached mamzelle

or

two, no doubt . . ."

"Couldn't sleep," Slothrop yawning back down into the room,
birds

in the sunlight kiting behind him.
"Nor we," from Tantivy. "It must take years to adjust."
"God," Bloat really pushing the forced enthusiasm this morning,

pointing theatrically at the enormous bed, collapsing onto it, bouncing

181

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vigorously. «They must have had advance word about you, Slothrop!
Luxury! They gave us some disused closet, you know."

«Hey, what are you telling him?" Slothrop forages around for ciga­
rettes. "I'm some kind of a Van Johnson or something?"

«Only that, in the matter of," Tantivy from the balcony tossing his
green pack of Cravens, «girls, you know-"

«Englishmen being rather reserved," Bloat explains, bouncing for em­
phasis.

"Oh, raving maniacs," Slothrop mumbles, heading for his private lav­
atory, «been invaded by a gang of those section 8s, all right....

"

Stands pleased, pissing no-hands, lighting up, but wondering a little
about that Bloat. Supposed to be oldtime pals with Tantivy. He snaps
the match into the toilet, a quick hiss: yet something about the way he
talks to Slothrop, patronizing? maybe nervous . . .

«You're expecting me to fix you guys up?" he yells over the crash of
the toilet flushing, «I thought the minute you guys get across that Chan­
nel, set foot on that France, you all turn into Valentinos."

«I hear there was some prewar tradition," Tantivy hanging plaintive
now in the doorway, «but Bloat and I are members of the New Genera­
tion, we have to depend on Yank expertise. . . ."

Whereupon Bloat leaps from the bed and seeks to enlighten Slothrop
with a song:

"W

llnce

THE ENGLISHMAN'S VERY SHY (FOX-TROT) �een
tloili

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(Bloat): The Englishman's very shy,
He's none of your Ca-sa-no-va,
At bowling the ladies o-ver,
A-mericans lead the pack-

(Tantivy): -You see, your Englishman tends to lack
That recklessness transatlantic,
That women find so romantic

Though frankly I can't see why
(Bloat): The polygamous Yank with his girls galore

Gives your Brit-ish rake or carouser fits,
(Tantivy): Though he's secretly held in re-ve-rent awe

As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz.

(Together): If only one could al-ly
A-merican bedroom know-how



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With British good looks, then oh how
Those lovelies would swoon and sigh,
Though you and I know the Englishman's very shy.

em·

"Well you've sure come to the right place," nods Slothrop, con­
vinced. "Only don't expect me to put it in for you."

"Just the initial approach," Bloat says.
"Moi," Tantivy has meanwhile been screaming down from the bal­

cony, "Moi Tantivy, you know. Tantivy."
"Tantivy," replies a dim girl-chorus from outside and below.

''J'ai deux amis, aussi, by an odd coincidence. Par un bizarre coinci­
dence, or something, oui?"

Slothrop, at this point shaving, wanders out with the foamy badger
brush in his fist to see what's happening, and collides with Bloat, who's

dashing to peer down over his compatriot's left epaulet at three pretty
girls' faces, upturned, straw-haloed each by a giant sun-hat, smiles all

dazzling, eyes mysterious as the sea behind them.
"I say ou," inquires Bloat, "ou, you know, dejeuner?"
"Glad I could help you out," Slothrop mutters, lathering Tantivy be­

tween the shoulderblades.

"But come with us," the girls are calling above the waves, two of
them holding up an enormous wicker basket out of which lean sleek

green wine bottles and rough-crusted loaves still from under their white
cloth steaming in little wisps feathering off of chestnut glazes and paler
split-streaks, "come-sur la plage . . ."

"I'll just," Bloat half out the door, "keep them company, until

you ...
"

"Sur la plage," Tantivy a bit dreamy, blinking in the sun, smiling
down at their good-morning's wishes come true, "oh, it sounds like a

painting. Something by an Impressionist. A Fauve. Full of light. . . ."

Slothrop goes flicking witch hazel off his hands. The smell in the room

brings back a moment of Berkshire Saturdays-bottles of plum and
amber tonics, fly-studded paper twists swayed by the overhead fan,
twinges of pain from blunt scissors. . . . Struggling out of his sweatshirt,
lit cigarette in his mouth, smoke coming out the neck like a volcano,

"Hey could I bum one of your-"
"You've already got the pack," cries Tantivy-"God almighty, what

is that supposed to be?"
"What's what?" Slothrop's face nothing but innocent as he slips into

and begins to button the object in question.

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"You're joking, of course. The young ladies are waiting, Slothrop, do
put on something civilized, there's a good chap-"

"All set," Slothrop on the way past the mirror combing his hair into
the usual sporty Bing Crosby pompadour.

"You can't expect us to be seen with-"
"My brother Hogan sent it to me," Slothrop lets him know, "for my

birthday, all the way from the Pacific. See on the back? under the fel­
lows in that outrigger canoe there, to the left of those hibiscus blossoms,
it sez SOUVENIR OF HONOLULU? This is the authentic item, Mucker­
Maffick, not some cheap imitation."

"Dear God," moans Tantivy, trailing him forlornly out of the room,
shading his eyes from the shirt, which glows slightly in the dimness of
the corridor. "At least tuck it in and cover it with something. Here, I'll
even lend you this Norfolk jacket....

"

Sacrifice indeed: the coat is
from a Savile Row establishment whose fitting rooms are actually deco­
rated with portraits of all the venerable sheep-some nobly posed up on
crags, others in pensive, soft close-ups-from whom the original fog-sil­
vered wool was sheared.

"Must be woven out of that barbed wire," is Slothrop's opinion,
"what girl'd want to get near anything like that?"

"Ah, but, but would any woman in her right mind want to be within
ten miles of that-that ghastly shirt, eh?"

"Wait!" From someplace Slothrop now produces a gaudy yellow,
green and orange display handkerchief, and over Tantivy's groans of
horror arranges it in his friend's jacket pocket so as to stick out in three
points. "There!" beaming, "that's what you call real sharp!"

They emerge into sunlight. Gulls begin to wail, the garment on Slo­
throp blazes into a refulgent life of its own. Tantivy squeezes his eyes
shut. When he opens them, the girls are all attached to Slothrop, strok­
ing the shirt, nibbling at its collar-points, cooing in French.

"Of course." Tantivy picks up the basket. "Right."
The girls are dancers. The manager of the Casino Hermann Goering,

one Cesar Fleb6tomo, brought in a whole chorus-line soon as the libera­
tors arrived, though he hasn't yet found time to change the place's occu­
pation name. Nobody seems to mind it up there, a pleasant mosaic of
tiny and perfect seashells, thousands of them set in plaster, purple, pink
and brown, replacing a huge section of roof (the old tiles still lie in a
heap beside the Casino), put up two years ago as recreational therapy
by a Messerschmitt squadron on furlough, in German typeface expan­
sive enough to be seen from the air, which is what they had in mind.
The sun now is still too low to touch the words into any more than some

184



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bare separation from their ground, so that they hang suppressed, no re­
lation any more to the men, the pain in their hands, the blisters that

grew black under the sun with infection and blood-only receding as
the party now walk down past sheets and pillowcases of the hotel,
spread to dry on the slope of the beach, fine wrinkles edged in blue that
will flow away as the sun climbs, six pairs of feet stirring debris never
combed for, an old gambling chip half bleached by the sun, translucent
bones of gulls, a drab singlet, Wehrmacht issue, torn and blotted with

bearing grease. . . . .
They move along the beach, Slothrop's amazing shirt, Tantivy's hand­

kerchief, girls' frocks, green bottles all dancing, everyone talking at
once, boy-and-girl lingua franca, the girls confiding quite a lot to each
other with side glances for their escorts. This ought to be good for a bit
of the, heh, heh, early paranoia here, a sort of pick-me-up to help face
what's sure to come later in the day. But it isn't. Much too good a morn­

ing for that. Little waves are rolling in, breaking piecrustwise along a
curve of dark shingle, farther off foaming among the black rocks that

poke up along the Cap. Out at sea wink twin slivers of a boat's sails

being sucked along in the sun and distance, over toward Antibes, the
craft tacking gradual, cockle-frail among low swells whose touch and

rowdy hiss along the chines Slothrop can feel this morning, reminded of

prewar Comets and Hamptons Sighted from the beach at Cape Cod,
among land odors, drying seaweed, summer-old cooking oil, the feel of
sand on sunburn, the sharp-pointed dune grass under bare feet....
Closer to shore a pedalo full of soldiers and girls moves along-they
dangle, splash, sprawl in green and white striped lounge chairs back aft.
At the edge of the water small kids are chasing, screaming, laughing in
that hoarse, helplessly tickled little-kid way. Up on the esplanade an old

couple sit on a bench, blue and white and a cream-colored parasol, a

morning habit, an anchor for the day....
They go as far as the first rocks, finding there an inlet partly secluded

from the rest of the beach, and from the looming Casino. Breakfast is
wine, bread, smiling, sun diffracting through the fine gratings of long
dancers' hair, swung, flipped, never still, a dazzle of violet, sorrel,
saffron, emerald. . . . For a moment you can let the world go, solid
forms gone a-fracturing, warm inside of bread waiting at your fingertips,
flowery wine in long, easy passage streaming downward around the root
of your tongue....

Bloat cuts in. "I say Slothrop, is she a friend of yours too?"
Hmm? what's happening ... she, what? Here sits Bloat, smug, ges­

turing over at the rocks and a tide pool nearby. . . .

�\\,



"You're getting 'the eye,' old man."
Well . . . she must have come out of the sea. At this distance, some

20 meters, she is only a dim figure in a black bombazine frock that
reaches to her knees, her bare legs long and straight, a short hood of
bright blonde hair keeping her face in shadow, coming up in guiches to
touch her cheeks. She's looking at Slothrop, all right. He smiles, sort of
waves. She only continues to stand, the breeze pushing at her sleeves.
He turns back to draw the cork from a wine bottle, and its pop arrives
as a grace note for a scream from one of the dancers. Tantivy's already
halfway to his feet, Bloat gaping out in the girl's direction, the dan­
seuses snapshot in defense reflexes, hair flying, frocks twisted, thighs
flashing-

Holy shit it's moving-an octopus? Yes it is the biggest fucking octo­
pus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies, Jackson, and it has just
risen up out of the water and squirmed halfway onto one of the black
rocks. Now, cocking a malignant eye at the girl, it reaches out, wraps
one long sucker-studded tentacle around her neck as everyone watches,
another around her waist and begins to drag her, struggling, back under
the sea.

Slothrop's up, bottle in hand, running down past Tantivy who's doing
a hesitant dance step, hands patting lounge-suit pockets for weapons
that aren't there, more and more of the octopus revealed the closer he
comes and wow it's a big one, holycow-skids to a halt alongside, one
foot in the tide pool, and commences belting the octopus in the head
with the wine bottle. Hermit crabs slide in death-struggle around his
foot. The girl, already half in the water, is trying to cry out, but the ten­
tacle, flowing and chilly, barely allows her windway enough to breathe.
She reaches out a hand, a soft-knuckled child's hand with a man's steel
ID bracelet on the wrist, and clutches at Slothrop's Hawaiian shirt, be­
gins tightening her own grip there, and who was to know that among
her last things would be vulgar-faced hula girls, ukuleles, and surfriders
all in comic-book colors . . . oh God God please, the bottle thudding
again and again wetly into octupus flesh, no fucking use, the octopus
gazes at Slothrop, triumphant, while he, in the presence of certain
death, can't quit staring at her hand, cloth furrowing in tangents to her
terror, a shirt button straining at a single last thread-he sees the name
on the bracelet, scratched silver letters each one clear but making no
sense to him before the slimy gray stranglehold that goes tightening, liq­
uid, stronger than he and she together, framing the poor hand its cruel
tetanus is separating from Earth-

"Slothrop!" Here's Bloat ten feet away offering him a large crab.
186



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"What th' fuck ...
"

Maybe if he broke the bottle on the rock,
stabbed the bastard between the eyes-

"It's hungry, it'll go for the crab. Don't kill it, Slothrop. Here,
for

God's sake-" and here it comes spinning through the air, legs cocked

centrifugally outward: dithering Slothrop drops the bottle just
before

the crab smacks against his other palm. Neat catch. Immediately,

through her fingers and his shirt, he can feel the reflex to
food.

"O.K." Shaking Slothrop waves the crab at the octopus. "Chow time,
fella." Another tentacle moves in. Its corrugated ooze touches his wrist.

Slothrop tosses the crab a few feet along the beach, and
what do you

know, that octopus goes for it all right: dragging along the girl and Slo­

throp staggering for a bit, then letting her go. Slothrop quickly
snatches

up the crab again, dangling it so the octopus
can see, and begins to

dance the creature away, down the beach, drool streaming
from its

beak, eyes held by the crab.
In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this

octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his
basis for com­

paring? But there is a mad exuberance, as with
inanimate objects which

fall off of tables when we are sensitive to noise and our own
clumsiness

and don't want them to fall, a sort of wham! ha-ha you hear that? here it

is again, WHAM! in the cephalopod's every movement,
which Slothrop

is glad to get away from as he finally scales the crab like
a discus, with

all his strength, out to sea, and the octopus, with an eager splash
and

gurgle, strikes out in pursuit, and is presently gone.
The frail girl lies on the beach, taking in great breaths of air,

sur­

rounded now by the others. One of the dancers is holding her
in her

arms and speaking, r's and nasals still French, in a language Slothrop,

moseying back into earshot, can't quite place.
Tantivy smiles and flips a small salute. "Good show!"

cheers Teddy
Bloat. "I wouldn't have wanted to try that myself!"

"Why not? You had that crab. Saaay-where'd you get
that crab?"

"Found it," replies Bloat with a straight face. Slothrop stares at
this

bird but can't get eye contact. What th' luck's going on?
"I better have some of that wine," Slothrop reckons. He drinks out of

the bottle. Air goes splashing upward in lopsided spheres
inside the

green glass. The girl watches him. He stops for breath
and smiles.

100 "Thank you, lieutenant." Not a
tremor in the voice, and the accent is

ll�' Teutonic. He can see her face now, soft nose
of a doe, eyes behind

� blonde lashes full of acid green. One of those thin-lipped European
mouths. "I had almost stopped breathing."

"Uh=-you'rc not German."

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Shaking her head no emphatically, "Dutch."
"And have you been here-"
Her eyes go elsewhere, she reaches, takes the bottle from his hand.

She is looking out to sea, after the octopus. "They are very optical,
aren't they. I hadn't known. It saw me. Me. I don't look like a crab."

"I guess not. You're a swell-looking young lady." In the background,
delighted Bloat nudges Tantivy. That recklessness transatlantic. Slo­
throp takes her wrist, finds no problem now reading that ID bracelet.
Sez KATJE BORGESIUS. He can feel her pulse booming. Does she know
him from someplace? strange. A mixture of recognition and sudden
shrewdnes in her face . . .

So it is here, grouped on the beach with strangers, that voices begin
to take on a touch of metal, each word a hard-edged clap, and the light,
though as bright as before, is less able to illuminate . . . it's a Puritan
reflex of seeking other orders behind the visible, also known as paranoia,
filtering in. Pale lines of force whir in the sea air ... pacts sworn to in
rooms since shelled back to their plan views, not quite by accident of
war, suggest themselves. Oh, that was no "found" crab, Ace-no ran­
dom octopus or girl, uh-uh. Structure and detail come later, but the
conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart.

They all stay a bit longer on the beach, finishing breakfast. But the
simple day, birds and sunlight, girls and wine, has sneaked away from
Slothrop. Tantivy is getting drunk, more relaxed and funnier as the bot­
tles empty. He's staked out not only the girl he first had his eye on, but
also the one Slothrop would be no doubt sweet-talking right now if that
octopus hadn't shown up. He is a messenger from Slothrop's innocent,
pre-octopus past. Bloat, on the other hand, sits perfectly sober, mus­
tache unruffled, regulation uniform, watching Slothrop closely. His com­
panion Ghislaine, tiny and slender, pin-up girl legs, long hair brushed
behind her ears falling all the way down her back, shifts her round bot­
tom in the sand, writing marginal commentaries around the text of
Bloat. Slothrop, who believes that women, like Martians, have antennas
men do not, keeps an eye on her. She looks over only once, and her eyes
grow wide and cryptic. He'd swear she knows something. On the way
back to the Casino, toting their empties, and the basket full of the de­
bris of the morning, he manages a word with her.

"Some picnic, nessay-pah?"
Dimples appear next to her mouth. "Did you know all the time about

the octopus? I thought so because it was so like a dance-all of you."
"No. Honestly, I didn't. You mean you thought it was just a practical

joke or something?"
188



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"Little Tyrone," she whispers suddenly, taking his arm
with a big

phony smile for the others. Little? He's
twice her size. "Please-be very

careful. . . ." That's all. He has Katje by the other hand, two imps,

contrary, either side. The beach is empty
now except for fifty gray gulls

sitting watching the water. White heaps of
cumulus pose out at sea,

hard-surfaced, cherub-blown-palm leaves stir, all down the esplanade.
Ghislaine drops away, back down the beach, to pick up prim

Bloat.

Katje squeezes Slothrop's arm and tells
him just what he wants to hear

about now: "Perhaps, after all, we were meant to meet. . .
."

001·

From out at sea, the Casino at this hour is a blazing bijou at the
horizon:

its foil of palms already shadows in the dwindling light. Deepening go
the yellowbrown of these small serrated mountains,

sea colored the soft

inside of a black olive, white villas, perched chateaux whole and ruined,

autumn greens of copses and solitary pines, all deepening
to the night­

scape latent across them
all day. Fires are lit on the beach. A faint

bab­

ble of English voices, and even occasional songs,
reaches across the

water to where Dr. Porkyevitch stands on deck. Below, Octopus
Gri­

gori, having stuffed himself with crab meat,
frisks happily in his special

enclosure. The reaching radius of the lighthouse on
the headland

sweeps by, as tiny fishing craft head out to sea. Grischa,
little friend, you

have performed your last trick for a while. . .
. Is there any hope for

further support from Pointsman, now
that Porkyevitch and His Fabu­

lous Octopus have done their part?
He gave up questioning orders long ago-even questioning

his exile.

The evidence linking him to the Bukharin conspiracy,
whose particulars

he has never heard, might somehow be true-the Trotskyite
Bloc might

have known of him, by reputation, used him in ways forever
secret . . .

forever secret: there are forms of innocence, he knows,
that cannot con­

ceive of what that means, much less accept it as he has.
For it might,

after all, be only another episode in some huge pathological
dream of

Stalin's. At least he had physiology, something outside the party
...

those who had nothing but the party, who had built
their whole lives

upon it, only to be purged, must go through something very
like death

. . . and never to know anything for certain, never to have the precision
of the laboratory . . . it's been his own sanity,

God knows, for twenty

years. At least they can never-

189

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No, no they wouldn't, there's never been a case . . . unless it's been
hushed up, you'd never read it in the journals of course­

Would Pointsman-
He might. Yes.
Grischa, Grischa! It's come true. On us so quickly: foreign cities, co­

medians in broken hats, cancan girls, fountains of fire, a noisy pit band
... Grischa, with the flags of all the nations curled in your arms ...
fresh shellfish, a warm pirozhok, hot glasses of tea in the evenings, be­
tween performances . . . learn to forget Russia, to take comfort from
what mean, falsified bits of her we wander across. . . .

Now, the sky stretches to admit a single first star. But Porkyevitch
makes no wish. Policy. Signs of arrival do not interest him, nor even
signs of departure. . . . As the boat's engine goes full ahead, their own
wake goes lifting, pink with sunset, to obscure the white Casino on
shore.

Electricity is on tonight, the Casino back in France's power grid.
Chandeliers shaggy with crystal needles flare overhead, and softer
lamps shine among the gardens outside. Going in to dinner with Tantivy
and the dancers, Slothrop is brought to a round-eyed halt by the sight of
Katje Borgesius, hair in one of those emerald tiaras, the rest of her
rigged out in a long Medici gown of sea-green velvet. Her escort's a
two-star general and a brigadier.

"RHIP," sings Tantivy, shuffling off sarcastic buffaloes along the car­
pet, "oh, RHIP indeed."

"You're trying to get my goat," Slothrop smiles, "but it's not work­
ing."

"I can tell." His own smile freezes. "Oh, no, Slothrop, please, no,
we're going in to dinner-"

"Well, I know we're going in to dinner-"
"No, this is very embarrassing, you've got to take it off."
"You like that? She's genuine hand-painted! Look! Nice tits, huh?"
"It's the Wormwood Scrubs School Tie."
In the main dining room they merge into a great coming and going of

waiters, officers and ladies. Slothrop, young dancer by the hand, caught
up in the eddying, manages at last to slide with her into a pair of seats
just vacated: to find who but Katje his left-hand partner. He puffs out
his cheeks, crosses his eyes, brushes his hair industriously with his hands
by which time the soup has showed up, which he goes at as if disarming
a bomb. Katje is ignoring him, talking earnestly instead across her gen­
eral with some bird colonel about his prewar profession, managing a
golf course in Cornwall. Holes and hazards. Gave one a feel for terrain.

190



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� .-..�"''';;-; _ "" ,. rI"';

THE BALLAD OF TANTIVY MUCKER-MAFFICK

But he did like most to be there at night, when the badgers came out of
their sets to play....

By the time the fish has come and gone, something funny
is happen­

ing. Katje's knee seems to be rubbing Slothrop's, velvet-warm,
under

the table.

Weeell, opines Slothrop, watch this: I will employ some of that sub­

terfuge, I mean I'm in that Europe, aren't I? He raises his wineglass
and

announces,
"

'The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick.'
"

Cheers go up,

bashful Tantivy tries not to smile. It's a song everyone knows: one of
the

Scotsmen goes dashing down the room to the grand piano, Cesar
Flebo­

torno, twirling his slick mustache in a saber-point, nips behind a palm
in

a tub to turn the lights up a notch, sticks his head back out winking, and
hisses for his maitre d'h6tel. Wine is gargled, throats are cleared and a

good number of the company commence singing

Oh Italian gin is a mother's curse,
And the beer of France is septic,
Drinking Bourbon in Spain is the lonely domain
Of the saint and the epileptic.
White lightning has fueled up many a hearse
In the mountains where ridge-runners dwell­
It's a brew begot in a poison pot,
And mulled with the hammers of Hell!

(Refrain): Oh-Tantivy' s been drunk in many a place,
From here to the Uttermost Isle,
And if he should refuse any chance at the booze,

May I die with an hoary-eyed smile!

He's been ossified in oceans of grog,
In the haunts of the wobbly whale-

hl:
There are what sound like a hundred-but most likely only two­

Welshmen singing, tenor from the south and bass from the
north of the

country, you see, so that all conversation sub
rosa or not is effectively

drowned out. Exactly what Slothrop wants. He leans in Katje's direc­
tion.

"Meet me in my room," she whispers, "306, after midnight."
"Cotcha." And Slothrop is upright in time to join in again right on

bar one:

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He's been half-seas over from Durban to Dover,
Wiv four shaky sheets to the gale.
For in London fog or Sahara's sun,
Or the icebound steeps of Zermatt,
Loaded up for a lark to 'is Plimsoll mark
He's been game to go off on a bat!

Yes, Tantivy's been drunk in many a place . . . &c.

After dinner Slothrop gives Tantivy the high-sign. Their dancers go
off arm in arm to the marble lounges where the toilet stalls are equipped
with a network of brass voice-tubes, all acoustic, to make stall-to-stall
conversation easier. Slothrop and Tantivy head for the nearest bar.

"Listen," Slothrop talking into his highball glass, bouncing words off
of ice cubes so they'll have a proper chill, "either I'm coming down with
a little psychosis here, or something funny is going on, right?"

Tantivy, who is feigning a relaxed air, breaks off humming "You Can
Do a Lot of Things at the Sea-side That You Can't Do in Town" to in­
quire, "Ah, yes, do you really think so?"

"Come on, that octopus."
"The devilfish is found quite commonly on Mediterranean shores.

Though usually not so large-is it the size that bothers you? Don't
Americans like-"

"Tantivy, it was no accident. Did you hear that Bloat? 'Don't kill it!'
He had a crab with him, m-maybe inside that musette bag, all set to lure
that critter away with. And where'd he go tonight, anyhow?"

"I think he's out on the beach. There's a lot of drinking."
"He drinks a lot?"
"No."

"Look, you're his friend-"
Tantivy moans. "God, Slothrop, I don't know. I'm your friend too,

but there's always, you know, an element of Slothropian paranoia to
contend with. . . ."

"Paranoia's ass. Something's up, a-and you know it!"
Tantivy chews ice, sights along a glass stirring rod, rips up a small

napkin into a snowstorm, all sorts of bar business, he's an old hand. But
at last, in a soft voice, "Well, he's receiving messages in code."

"Ha!"
"I saw one in his kit this afternoon. Just a glimpse. I didn't try to look

closer. He is with Supreme Headquarters, after all-1 suppose that
could be it."

192



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"No, that's not it. Now what about this-" and Slothrop tells about
his midnight date with Katje. For a moment they might almost be back
in the bureau at ACHTUNG, and the rockets falling, and tea in paper
cups, and everything right again. . . .

"Are you going?"
"Shouldn't I? You think she's dangerous?"
"I think she's delightful. If I hadn't Francoise, not to mention Yvonne

to worry about, I'd be racing you to her door."
"But?"
But the clock over the bar only clicks once, then presently again,

ratcheting time minutewise into their past.
"Either what you've got is contagious," Tantivy begins, "or else

they've an eye on me too."
They look at each other. Slothrop remembers that except for Tantivy

he's all alone here. "Tell me."

, "I wish I could. He's changed-but I couldn't give you a single bit of
evidence. It's been since ... I don't know. Autumn. He doesn't talk

politics any more. God, we used to get into these- He
won't discuss his

plans after he's demobbed either, it's something he
used to do all the

time. I thought the Blitz might have got him rattled . . . but
after yes­

terday, I think it must be more. Damn it, it makes me
sad."

"What happened?"
"Oh. A sort of-not a threat. Or not a serious one. I mentioned, only

joking, that I was keen on your Katje. And Bloat became very cold,
and

said, Td stay clear of that one if I were you.' Tried to cover it with
a

laugh, as if he had his eye on her too. But that wasn't it.
I-I don't have

his confidence any more. I'm- I feel I'm only useful to him in a way I
can't see. Being tolerated for as long as he can use me. The old

Univer­

sity connection. I don't know if you ever felt it at
Harvard ... from

time to time back in Oxford, I came to sense a peculiar structure that no
one admitted to-that extended far beyond Turl Street, past Corn­
market into covenants, procuring, accounts due ... one never knew

who it would be, or when, or how they'd try to collect it . . . but I

thought it only idle, only at the fringes of what I was really up
there for,

you know....
"

"Sure. In that America, it's the first thing they tell you. Harvard's
there for other reasons. The 'educating' part of it is just sort of a front."

"We're so very innocent here, you see."

"Some of you, maybe. I'm sorry about Bloat."
"I still hope it's something else."
"I guess so. But what do we do right now?"

193

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"Oh I'd say-keep your date, be careful. Keep me posted. Perhaps
tomorrow I'll have an adventure or two to tell you about, for a change.
And if you need help," teeth flashing, face reddening a bit, "well, I'll
help you."

'Thanks, Tantivy." Jesus, a British ally. Yvonne and Francoise peek
in, beckoning them outside. On to the Himmler-Spielsaal and chemin­
de-fer till midnight. Slothrop breaks even, Tantivy loses, and the girls
win. No sign of Bloat, though dozens of officers go drifting in and out,
brown and distant as rotogravure, through the evening. Nor any Sight of
his girl Ghislaine. Slothrop asks. Yvonne shrugs: '(Out with your friend?
Who knows?" Chislaine's long hair and tanned arms, her six-year-old
face in a smile. . . . If it turns out she does know something, is she safe?

At 11:59 Slothrop turns to Tantivy, nods at the two girls, tries to
chuckle lewdly, and gives his friend a quick, affectionate punch in the
shoulder. Once, back in prep school, just before sending him into a
game, young Slothrop's football coach socked him the same way, giving
him confidence for at least fifty seconds, till being trampled flat on his
ass by a number of red-dogging Choate boys, each with the instincts
and mass of a killer rhino.

"Good luck," says Tantivy, meaning it, hand already reaching for
Yvonne's sweet chiffon bottom. Minutes of doubt, yes yes ... Slothrop
ascending flights of red-carpeted stairway (Welcome Mister Slothrop
Welcome To Our Structure w« Hope You Will Enjoy Your Visit Here),
malachite nymphs and satyrs paralyzed in chase, evergreen, at the silent
landings, upward toward a single staring bulb at the top. . . .

At her door he pauses long enough to comb his hair. Now she wears a
white pelisse, with sequins all over, padded shoulders, jagged white os­
trich plumes at the neckline and wrists. The tiara is gone: in the elec­
tricity her hair is new snowfall. But inside a Single scented candle burns,
and the suite is washed in moonlight. She pours brandy in old flint snif­
ters, and as he reaches, their fingers touch. "Didn't know you were so
daffy about that golf!" Suave, romantic Slothrop.

"He was pleasant. I was being pleasant to him," one eye kind of
squinched up, forehead wrinkled. Slothrop wonders if his fly's open.

"And ignore me. Why?" Clever pounce there, Slothrop--but she only
evaporates before the question, re-forms in another part of the
room....

"Am I ignoring you?" She's at her window, the sea below and behind
her, the midnight sea, its individual waveflows impossible at this dis­
tance to follow, all integrated into the hung stillness of an old painting
seen across the deserted gallery where you wait in the shadow, for-

194



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getting why you are here, frightened by the level of illumination,
which

is from the same blanched scar of moon that wipes the sea tonight.
"I don't know. But you're fooling around a lot."

"Perhaps I'm supposed to be."
"As 'Perhaps we were meant to meet'?"
"Oh, you think I'm more than I am," gliding to a couch, tucking

one

leg under.
"I know. You're only a Dutch milkmaid or something. Closet full 0'

those starched aprons a-and wooden shoes, right?"
"Go and look." Spice odors from the candle reach like nerves through

the room.

"O.K., I will!" He opens her closet, and in moonlight reflected from

the mirror finds a crowded maze of satins, taffetas, lawn, and pongee,
dark fur collars and trimming, buttons, sashes, passementerie, soft, con­

fusing, womanly tunnel-systems that must stretch
back for miles-he

could be lost inside of half a minute . . . lace glimmers, eyelets wink, a

crepe scarf brushes his face
. . . Aha! wait a minute, the operational

scent in here is carbon tet, Jackson, and this wardrobe here's mostly

props. "Well. Pretty snazzy."
"If that's a compliment, thank you."
Let Them thank me, babe. "An Americanism."

"You're the first American I've met."

"Hmm, You must've got out by way of that Amhem, then, right?"
"My, you're quick," her tone warning him not to go after

it. He sighs,
ringing the snifter with his fingernail. In the dark room,

with the para­

lyzed and silent sea at his back, he tries singing:

195

Too SOON TO KNOW (FOX-TROT)

It's still too soon,
It's not as if we'd kissed and kindled,
Or chased the moon

Through midnight's hush, as dancing dwindled
Into quiet dawns,
Over secret lawns

Too soon to know

If all that breathless conversation

A sigh ago
Was more than casual flirtation

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Doomed to drift away
Into misty gray . .

How can we tell,
What can we see?
Love works its spells in hiding,
Quite past our own deciding .
So who's to say
If joyful love is just beginning,
Or if its day
Just turned to night, as Earth went spinning?
Darling, maybe so-
lt's TOO SOON TO KNOW.

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Knowing what is expected of her, she waits with a vapid look till he's
done, mellow close-harmony reeds humming a moment in the air, then
reaches out a hand, melting toward him as he topples in slow-motion to­
ward her mouth, feathers sliding, sleeves furling, ascending bare arms
finely moongrained slipping around and up his back, her tacky tongue
nervous as a moth, his hands rasping over sequins . . . then her breasts
flatten against him as her forearms and hands go away folding up behind
her to find a zipper, bring it snarling down her spineline....

Katje's skin is whiter than the white garment she rises from. Born
again . . . out the window he can almost see the spot where the dev­
ilfish crawled in from the rocks. She walks like a ballerina on her toes,
thighs long and curving, Slothrop undoing belt, buttons, shoelaces hop­
ping one foot at a time, oboy oboy, but the moonlight only whitens her
back, and there is still a dark side, her ventral side, her face, that he can
no longer see, a terrible beastlike change coming over muzzle and lower
jaw, black pupils growing to cover the entire eye space till whites are
gone and there's only the red animal reflection when the light comes to
strike no telling when the light-

She has sunk to the deep bed, pulling him along, into down, satin, se­
raphic and floral embroidery, turning immediately to take his erection
into her stretched fork, into a single vibration on which the night is tun­
ing . . . as they fuck she quakes, body strobing miles beneath him in
cream and night-blue, all sound suppressed, eyes in crescents behind
the gold lashes, jet earrings, long, octahedral, flying without a sound,
beating against her cheeks, black sleet, his face above her unmoved, full
of careful technique-is it for her? or wired into the Slothropian Run­
together they briefed her on-she will move him, she will not be

196



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mounted by a plastic shell . . . her breathing has grown
more hoarse,

over a threshold into sound . . . thinking she might be close to coming
he reaches a hand into her hair, tries to still her head, needing to see her

face: this is suddenly a struggle, vicious and real-she will not
surrender

her face-and out of nowhere she does begin to come, and so does Slo­

throp.
For some reason now, she who never laughs has become the top sur­

face of a deep, rising balloon of laughter. Later as she's about
to go to

sleep, she will also whisper, "Laughing," laughing again.
He will want to say, "Oh, They let you," but then again maybe They

don't. But the Katje he's talking to is already gone, and presently
his

own eyes have closed.

Like a rocket whose valves, under remote control, open and close at

prearranged moments, Slothrop, at a certain level
of his re-entry into

sleep, stops breathing through his nose
and commences breathing

through his mouth. This soon grows to snores
that have been known to

rattle storm windows, set shutters to swinging and chandeliers into vio­

lent tintinnabulation, yes indee-eed. . . . At the
first of these tonight,

Katje wakes up belts him in the head
with a pillow.

"None of that."

197

"Hmm."

"I'm a light sleeper. Every time you snore, you get
hit with this,"

waving the pillow.
No kidding, either. The routine of snore, get belted

with pillow, wake

up, say hmm, fall back to sleep, goes on well
into the morning. "Come

on," finally, "cut it out."
"Mouth-breather!" she yells. He grabs his own pillow and swings it at

her. She ducks, rolls, hits the deck feinting with her pillow, backing to­

ward the sideboard where the booze is. He doesn't see what
she has in

mind till she throws her pillow and picks up the Seltzer bottle.
The what, The Seltzer Bottle? What shit is this, now?

What other in­

teresting props have They thought to plant, and
what other American

reflexes are They after? Where's those banana cream pies,
eh?

He dangles two pillows and watches her. "One
more step," she gig­

gles. Slothrop dives in goes to hit her across the
ass whereupon she lets

him have it with the Seltzer bottle, natch. The pillow bursts against one

marble hip, moonlight in the room is choked with
feathers and down

and soon with hanging spray from jets of Seltzer. Slothrop keeps trying
to grab the bottle. Slippery girl squirms away, gets

behind a chair. Slo­

throp takes the brandy decanter off of the sideboard, unstoppers
it, and

flings a clear, amber, pseudopodded glob across
the room twice in and

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out of moonlight to splash around her neck, between her black-tipped
breasts, down her flanks. "Bastard," hitting him with the Seltzer again.
Settling feathers cling to their skins as they chase around the bedroom,
her dappled body always retreating, often in this light, even at close
range, impossible to see. Slothrop keeps falling over the furniture. "Boy,
when I get my hands on you!" At which point she opens the door to the
sitting room, skips through, slams it again so Slothrop runs right into it,
bounces off, sez shit, opens the door to find her waving a big red damask
tablecloth at him.

"What's this," inquires Slothrop.
"Magic!" she cries, and tosses the tablecloth over him, precisely wrin­

kling folds propagating swift as crystal faults, redly through the air.
"Watch closely, while I make one American lieutenant disappear."

"Quit fooling," Slothrop flailing around trying to reach the outside
again. "How can I watch closely when I'm in here." He can't find an
edge anyplace and feels a little panicky.

'That's the idea," suddenly inside, next to him, lips at his nipples,
hands fluttering among the hairs at the back of his neck, pulling him
slowly to deep carpeting, "My little chickadee."

"Where'd you see that one, hey? Remember when he gets in bed
w-with that goat?

"Oh, don't ask ... " This time it is a good-natured coordinated
quickie, both kind of drowsy, covered with sticky feathers . . . after
coming they lie close together, too liquefied to move, mm, damask and
pile, it's so cozy and just as red as a womb in here. . . . Curled holding
her feet in his, cock nestled in the warm cusp between her buttocks,
Slothrop trying earnestly to breathe through his nose, they drop off to
sleep.

Slothrop wakes to morning sunlight off of that Mediterranean, filtered
through a palm outside the window, then red through the tablecloth,
birds, water running upstairs. For a minute he lies coming awake, no
hangover, still belonging Slothropless to some teeming cycle of depar­
ture and return. Katje lies, quick and warm, S'd against the S of himself,
beginning to stir.

From the next room he hears the unmistakable sound of an Army belt
buckle. "Somebody," he observes, catching on quickly, "must be rob­
bing my pants." Feet patter by on the carpet, close to his head. Slothrop
can hear his own small change jingling in his pockets. "Thief!" he yells,which wakes up Katje, turning to put her arms around him. Slothrop,
managing now to locate the hem he couldn't find last night, scoots from
under the tablecloth just in time to see a large foot in a two-tone shoe,

198



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coffee and indigo, vanish out the door. He runs into the bedroom,
finds

everything else he had on is gone too, down to shoes and
skivvies.

"My clothes!" running back out past Katje now emerging
from the

damask and making a grab for his feet. Slothrop flings open the door,
runs out in the hall, recollects that he is naked here, spots a laundry cart

and grabs a purple satin bedsheet off of it, drapes it around
him in a sort

of toga. From the stairway comes a snicker and
the pad-pad of crepe

soles. "Aha!" cries Slothrop charging down the hall. The slippery sheet
will not stay on. It flaps, slides off, gets underfoot. Up the stairs two at

a

time, only to find at the top another corridor, just as empty.
Where is

everybody?
From way down the hall, a tiny head appears

around a corner, a tiny
hand comes out and gives Slothrop the tiny finger. Unpleasant laughter
reaches him a split second later, by which time he's sprinting toward

it.

At the stairs, he hears footsteps heading down. The Great Purple Kite

races cursing down three flights, out a door and onto a little terrace, just
in time to see somebody hop over a stone balustrade and vanish into the

upper half of a thick tree, growing up
from somewhere below. "Treed

at last!" cries Slothrop.
First you have to get into the tree, then you

can climb it easy as a lad­

der. Once inside, surrounded by pungent leaflight, Slothrop can't see
farther than a couple of limbs. The tree is shaking though, so he

reckons

that that thief is in here someplace. Industriously he climbs on, sheet

catching and tearing, skin stuck by needles, scraped by
bark. His feet

hurt. He's soon out of breath. Gradually the cone of green light narrows,

grows brighter. Close to the top, Slothrop notes a
saw-cut or something

partway through the trunk, but doesn't stop to ponder
what it might

mean till he's reached the very top of the tree and clings swaying, enjoy­

ing the fine view of the harbor and headland, paint-blue sea, whitecaps,
storm gathering off at the horizon, the tops of people's

heads moving
around far below. Gee. Down the trunk he hears the sound of wood

be­

ginning to crack, and feels vibration here in his
slender perch.

"Aw, hey ...
"

That sneak. He climbed down the tree, not up! He's
down there now, watching! They knew Slothrop would choose up, not

down-they were counting on that damned American
reflex all right,

bad guy in a chase always heads up-why up? and they
sawed the trunk

nearly through, a-and now-
They? They?
"Well," opines Slothrop, "I had better, uh ...

"

About then the

point of the tree cracks through, and with a great
rustle and whoosh, a

whirl of dark branches and needles breaking him up into a few thousand

199

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sharp falling pieces, down topples Slothrop, bouncing from limb to
limb, trying to hold the purple sheet over his head for a parachute. Oof.
Nnhh. About halfway to the ground, terrace-level or so, he happens to
10 k down, and there observes many senior officers in uniform and
plump ladies in white batiste frocks and flowered hats. They are playing
croquet. It appears Slothrop will land somewhere in their midst. He
closes his eyes and tries to imagine a tropical island, a secure room,
where this cannot be happening. He opens them about the time he hits
the ground. In the silence, before he can even register pain, comes the
loud thock of wood hitting wood. A bright-yellow striped ball comes
rolling past an inch from Slothrop's nose and on out of sight, followed a
second later by a burst of congratulations, ladies enthusiastic, footfalls
heading his way. Seems he's, unnhh, wrenched his back a little, but
doesn't much feel like moving anyhow. Presently the sky is obscured by
faces of some General and Teddy Bloat, gazing curiously down.

"It's Slothrop," sez Bloat, "and he's wearing a purple sheet."
"What's this my lad," inquires the General, "costume theatricals,

eh?" He is joined by a pair of ladies beaming at, or perhaps through,
Slothrop.

"Whom are you talking to, General?"
"That blighter in the toga," replies the General, "who is lying be­

tween me and my next wicket."

"Why how extraordinary, Rowena," turning to her companion, "do
you see a 'blighter in a toga'?"

"Goodness no, Jewel," replies blithe Rowena. "1 believe the General
has been drinking." The ladies begin to giggle.

"If the General made all his decisions in this state," Jewel gasping for
breath, "why there'd, there'd be sauerkraut in the Strand!" The two of
them shriek, very loudly, for an unpleasant length of time.

"And your name would be Brunhilde," the two faces now a strangled
rose, "instead of-of Jewel!" They are clutching each other for dear life.
Slothrop glares up at this spectacle, augmented now by a cast of dozens.

"We-e-c-ell, you see, somebody SWiped all my clothes, and I was just
on my way to complain to the management-"

"But decided to put on a purple bedsheet and climb a tree instead,"
nods the General. "Well-I dare say we can fix you up with something.
Bloat, you're nearly this man's size, aren't you?"

"Oh," croquet mallet over his shoulder, posed like an advertising dis­
play for Kilgour or Curtis, smirking down at Slothrop, "I've a spare uni­
form somewhere. Come along, Slothrop, you're all right, aren't you.
Didn't break anything."

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"Yaagghh." Wrapped in his tattered sheet, helped to his feet by solic­
itous croqueteers, Slothrop goes limping after Bloat, off the turf and into
the Casino. They stop first at Slothrop's room. He finds it newly
cleaned, perfectly empty, ready for new guests. "Hey ...

"

Yanking
out drawers empty as drums: every stitch of clothing he owns is gone,
including his Hawaiian shirt. What the fuck. Groaning, he rummages in
the desk. Empty. Closets empty. Leave papers, ID, everything, taken.
His back muscles throb with pain. "What is this, Ace?" going to check

out the number on the door again, everything now for form's sake. He
knows. Hogan's shirt bothers him most of all.

"First put on something respectable," Bloat's tone full of headmas­
terish revulsion. Two subalterns come crashing in carrying their valises.

They halt goggling at Slothrop. "Here mate, you're in the wrong
theatre

of operations," cries one. "Show a bit of respect," the other haw-haws,
"it's Lawrence of Arabia!"

"Shit," sez Slothrop. Can't even lift his arm, much less swing it. They
proceed to Bloat's room, where they put together a uniform.

"Say," it occurs to Slothrop, "whore's that Mucker-Maffick this morn­
.

?"mg.
"I've no idea, really. Off with his girl. Or girls. Where've you been?"
But Slothrop's looking around, tightening rectal fear belatedly taking

hold now, neck and face beading in a surge of sweat, trying to find in
this room Tantivy shares with Bloat some trace of his friend. Bristly
Norfolk jacket, pinstripe suit, anything. . . .

Nothing. "Did that Tantivy move out, or what?"
"He may have moved in, with Francoise or

What's-her-name. Even

gone back to London early, I don't keep a file on him, I'm not
the miss­

ing-persons bureau."
"You' re his friend. . . ." Bloat, with an insolent shrug, for the very

first time since they met, now looks Slothrop in the eyes. "Aren't you?
What are you?"

The answer's in Bloat's stare, the dim room become rationalized,

nothing to it of holiday, only Savile Row uniforms, silver
hairbrushes

and razor arranged at right angles, a shiny spike on an octagonal base

impaling half an inch of pastel Himsies, all edges neatly squared . .
. a

piece of Whitehall on the Riviera.

Slothrop drops his eyes away. "See if I can find him," he mumbles,
re­

treating out the door, uniform ballooning at the ass and too tight
at the

waist. Live wi' the way it feels mate, you'll be in it for a while. . . .
He begins at the bar they talked in last night. It is empty except

for a

colonel with a great twisted mustache, with his hat on, sitting stiffly in

201

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front of something large, fizzing, opaque, and garnished with a white
chrysanthemum. "Didn't they teach you at Sandhurst to salute?" this
officer screams. Slothrop, hesitating only a moment, salutes. "Damned
O.C.T.D. must be full of Nazis." No bartender in sight. Can't remember
what- "Well?"

"Actually, what I am is, uh, is an American, I only borrowed the uni­
form, and well I was looking for a Lieutenant, or actually Leftenant,
Mucker- Maffick. . . ."

"You're a what?" roars the colonel, pulling leaves from the chrysan­
themum with his teeth. "What kind of Nazi foolishness is that, eh?"

"Well, thank you," Slothrop backing out of the room, saluting again.
"This is incredible!" the echo following him down the corridors to the

Himmler-Spielsaal. "It's Nazi!"
Deserted in noon's lull, here are resonant reaches of mahogany, green

baize, hanging loops of maroon. velvet. Long-handled wood money rakes
lie fanned out on the tables. Little silver bells with ebony handles are
turned mouth-down on the russet veneer. Around the tables, Empire
chairs are lined up precise and playerless. But soine are taller than the
rest. These are no longer quite outward and visible signs of a game of
chance. There is another enterprise here, more real than that, less mer­
ciful, and systematically hidden from the likes of Slothrop. Who sits in
the taller chairs? Do They have names? What lies on Their smooth
baize surfaces?

Brass-colored light seeps in from overhead. Murals line the great
room: pneumatic gods and goddesses, pastel swains and shepherdesses,
misty foliage, fluttering scarves. . . . Everywhere curlicued gilt fes­
toonery drips-from moldings, chandeliers, pillars, window frames . . .
scarred parquetry gleams under the skylight ... From the ceiling, to
within a few feet of the tabletops, hang long chains, with hooks at the
ends. What hangs from these hooks?

For a minute here, Slothrop, in his English uniform, is alone with the
paraphernalia of an order whose presence among the ordinary debris of
waking he has only lately begun to suspect.

There may, for a moment, have been some golden, vaguely rootlike or
manlike figure beginning to form among the brown and bright cream
shadows and light here. But Slothrop isn't to be let off quite so easy.
Shortly, unpleasantly so, it will come to him that everything in this room
is really being used for something different. Meaning things to Them it
has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical

. but, but

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Oh, THE WORLD OVER THERE, it's
So hard to explain!
Just-like, a dream's-got, lost in yer brain!
Dancin' like a fool through that Forbid-den Wing,
Waitin' fer th' light to start shiver-ing-well,
Who ev-ver said ya couldn't move that way,
Who ev-ver said ya couldn't try?
If-ya find-there's-a-lit-tle-pain,
Ya can al-ways-go-back-a-gain, cause
Ya don't-ev-er-real-ly-say, good-by!

Why here? Why should the rainbow edges of what is almost on him
be rippling most intense here in this amply coded room? say why should

walking in here be almost the same as entering the Forbidden itself­
here are the same long rooms, rooms of old paralysis and evil distillery,
of condensations and residues you are afraid to smell from forgotten
corruptions, rooms full of upright gray-feathered statues with wings
spread, indistinct faces in dust-rooms full of dust that

will cloud the

shapes of inhabitants around the corners or deeper inside, that
will set­

tle on their black formal lapels, that will soften to sugar the white faces,
white shirt fronts, gems and gowns, white hands that move too quickly
to be seen ... what game do They deal? What passes are these, so

blurred, so old and perfect?
"Fuck you," whispers Slothrop. It's the only spell he knows, and a

pretty good all-purpose one at that. His whisper is baffled by the
thou­

sands of tiny rococo surfaces. Maybe he'll sneak in tonight-no not at

night-but sometime, with a bucket and brush, paint FUCK YOU in a
bal­

loon coming out the mouth of one of those little pink shepherdesses
there....

He steps back out, backward out the door, as if half, his
ventral half,

were being struck in kingly radiance: retreating from yet facing the
Presence feared and wanted.

Outside, he heads down toward the quay, among funseekers, swoop­

ing white birds, an incessant splat of seagull shit. As I walk along
the

Bwa-deboolong with an independent air . . . Saluting everybody in uni­

form, getting it to a reflex, don't ask for extra trouble, try for
invisible

... bringing his arm each time a bit more stupidly to his side. Clouds
now are coming up fast, out of the sea. No sign of Tantivy out here,

ei­

ther.
Ghosts of fishermen, glassworkers, fur traders, renegade preachers,

hilltop patriarchs and valley politicians go avalanching back from
Slo-

203

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throp here, back to 1630 when Governor Winthrop came over to Amer­
ica on the Arbella, flagship of a great Puritan flotilla that year, on which
the first American Slothrop had been a mess cook or something-there
go that Arbella and its whole fleet, sailing backward in formation, the
wind sucking them east again, the creatures leaning from the margins of
the unknown sucking in their cheeks, growing crosseyed with the effort,
in to black deep hollows at the mercy of teeth no longer the milky mo­
lars of cherubs, as the old ships zoom out of Boston Harbor, back across
an Atlantic whose currents and swells go flowing and heaving in reverse
. . . a redemption of every mess cook who ever slipped and fell when
the deck made an unexpected move, the night's stew collecting itself up
out of the planks and off the indignant shoes of the more elect, slitheringin a fountain back into the pewter kettle as the servant himself staggers
upright again and the vomit he slipped on goes gushing back into the
mouth that spilled it ... Presto change-ol Tyrone Slothrop's English
againl But it doesn't seem to be redemption exactly that this They have
in mind....

He's on a broad cobbled esplanade, lined with palms shifting now to
coarse-grained black as clouds begin to come over the sun. Tantivy isn't
out on the beach, either-nor are any of the girls. Slothrop sits on a low
wall, feet swinging, watching the front, slate, muddy purple, advancingfrom the sea in sheets, in drifts. Around him the air is cooling. He shiv­
ers. What are They doing?

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as
honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him
to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will
explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be jug­
gled into any kind of sense at day's end. He just runs. Rain grows in wetcrescendo. His footfalls send up fine flowers of water, each hanging asecond behind his flight. It is flight. He comes in speckled, pied with
rain, begins a frantic search through the great inert Casino, starting
again with the same smoky, hooch-fumed bar, proceeding through thelittle theatre, where tonight will play an abbreviated version of L 'lnutil
Precauzione (that imaginary opera with which Rosina seeks to delude
her guardian in The Barber of Seville), into its green room where girls, asilkenness of girls, but not the three Slothrop wants most to see, tease
hair, arrange garters, glue on eyelashes, smile at Slothrop. No one has
seen Ghislaine, Francoise, Yvonne. From another room the orchestra re­
hearses a lively Rossini tarantella. The reeds are all something like a half
tone flat. At once Slothrop understands that he is surrounded by womenwho have lived a good fraction of their lives at war and under occupa-

204

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tion, and for whom people have been dropping out of sight every day
... yes, in one or two pairs of eyes he finds an old and European pity,

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innocence and be­

comes one of them. . . .

So he drifts, through the bright and milling gaming rooms, the dining
hall and its smaller private satellites, busting up tete-a-totes, colliding
with waiters, finding only strangers wherever he looks. And if you need

help, well, I'll help you. . . . Voices, music, the shuffling of
cards all

grow louder, more oppressive, till he stands looking into
the Himmler­

Spielsaal again, crowded now, jewels flashing, leather gleaming,
roulette

spokes whirling blurring-it's here that saturation hits him,
it's all this

playing games, too much of it, too many games: the nasal,
obsessive

voice of a croupier he can't see-messieurs, mesdames, les jeux
sont

faits-is suddenly speaking out of the Forbidden Wing directly to him,
and about what Slothrop has been playing against the invisible House,

perhaps after all for his soul, all day-terrified he turns,
turns out into

the rain again where the electric lights of the Casino,
in full holocaust,

are glaring off the glazed cobbles. Collar up, Bloat's hat
down over his

ears, saying shit every few minutes, shivering, his
back aching from that

fall out of that tree, he goes stumbling along in the rain. He thinks he

might begin to cry. How did this all turn against him so
fast? His friends

old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting
him to

what he's been, have just, fucking, vanished. How can he meet this with

any kind of grace? Only much later, worn out, snuffling,
cold and

wretched in his prison of soggy Army wool, does he think of Katje.
He gets back to the Casino near midnight, her hour, tramping up­

stairs leaving wet footprints behind, loud as a washing machine-stops
at her door, rain pattering onto the carpet, afraid even to

knock. Has

she been taken too? Who's waiting behind the door and what machin­

ery have They brought with Them? But she's heard him,
and opens with

a dimpled, chiding smile for being so wet. "Tyrone, I
missed you."

He shrugs, convulsive, helpless, showering both of
them. "It's the

only place I knew to come." Her smile slowly unpurses. Gingerly
he

steps across the sill then, not sure
if it's door or high window, into her

deep room.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

Good mornings of good old lust, early shutters open to the sea,
winds

205

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coming in with the heavy brushing of palm leaves, the wheezing break
to surface and sun of porpoises out in the harbor.

"Oh," Katje groans, somewhere under a pile of their batistes and bro­
cade, "Slothrop, you pig."

"Oink, oink, oink," sez Slothrop cheerfully. Seaglare dances up on the
ceiling, smoke curls from black-market cigarettes. Given the precisions
of light these mornings, there are forms of grace to be found in the ris­
ing of the smoke, meander, furl, delicate fade to clarity....

At certain hours the harbor blue will be reflected up on the white­
washed sea-facade, and the tall windows will be shuttered again. Wave
images will flicker there in a luminous net. By then Slothrop will be up,
in British uniform, gobbling down croissants and coffee, already busy at
a refresher course in technical German, or trying to dope out the theory
of arrow-stable trajectories, or tracing nearly with the end of his nose
some German circuit schematic whose resistors look like coils, and the
coils like resistors-"What bizarre shit," once he got hep to it, "why
would they go and switch it around like that? Trying to camouflage it,
or what?"

"Recall your ancient German runes," suggests Sir Stephen Dodson­
Truck, who is from the Foreign Office P.I.D. and speaks 33 languages
including English with a strong Oxonian blither to it.

"My what?"
"Oh," lips compressing, some kind of brain nausea here, "that coil

symbol there happens to be very like the Old Norse rune for'S,' sol,
which means 'sun.' The Old High German name for it is sigil."

"Funny way to draw that sun," it seems to Slothrop.
"Indeed. The Goths, much earlier, had used a circle with a dot in the

center. This broken line evidently dates from a time of discontinuities,
tribal fragmenting perhaps, alienation-whatever's analogous, in a so­
cial sense, to the development of an independent ego by the very young
child, you see. . . ."

Well, no, Slothrop doesn't see, not exactly. He hears this sort of thing
from Dodson-Truck nearly every time they get together. The man just
materialized one day, out on the beach in a black suit, shoulders starred
with dandruff from thinning carrot hair, coming into view against the
white face of the Casino, which trembled over him as he approached.
Slothrop was reading a Plasticman comic. Katje was dozing in the sun,
face-up. But when his footpads reached her hearing, she turned on one
elbow to wave hello. The peer flung himself at full length, Attitude 8.11,
Torpor, Undergraduate. "So this is Lieutenant Slothrop."

Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner
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and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist's
lab, out of whose faucet Plas's head now, blank carapaced eyes and un­

plastic jaw, is just emerging. "Yeah. Who're you, Ace?"
Sir Stephen introduces himself, freckles roused by the sun, eying the

comic book curiously. "I gather this isn't a study period."
"Is he cleared?"
"He's cleared," Katje smiling/shrugging at Dodson-Truck.

"Taking a break from that Telefunken radio control. That 'Hawaii I.'
You know anything about that?"

"Only enough to wonder where they got the name from."
"The name?"
"There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry ... it suggests Haverie­

average, you know-certainly you have the two lobes, don't you, sym­
metrical about the rocket's intended azimuth . . . hauen, too-smash­

ing someone with a hoe or a club . . ." off on a voyage of his own here,

smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expres­
sion ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy
dating back to the ancient Greeks. . . . Slothrop's first impulse is to get
back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite ob­
vious membership in the plot, keeps him listening ... an innocence,
maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing
what engages and runs him, a love for the Word.

"Well, it might be just Axis propaganda. Something to do with that
Pearl Harbor."

Sir Stephen considers this, seeming pleased. Did They choose him be­
cause of all those word-smitten Puritans dangling off of Slothrop's fam­

ily tree? Were They trying to seduce his brain now, his reading eye too?
There are times when Slothrop actually can find a clutch mechanism
between him and Their iron-cased engine far away up a power train

whose shape and design he has to guess at, a clutch he can disengage,
feeling then all his inertia of motion, his real helplessness . . . it is not

exactly unpleasant, either. Odd thing. He is almost sure that whatever

They want, it won't mean risking his life, or even too much of his com­
fort. But he can't fit any of it into a pattern, there's no way to connect

somebody like Dodson-Truck with somebody like Katje. . . .
Seductress-and-patsy, all right, that's not so bad a game. There's very

little pretending. He doesn't blame her: the real enemy's somewhere
back in that London, and this is her job. She can be versatile, gay, and
kind, and he'd rather be warm here with her than freezing back under
the Blitz. But now and then ... too insubstantial to get a fix on, there'll

be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him,

207

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that he's even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest
fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too. As
much a victim as he is-an unlucky, an unaccountably futureless
look. ...

One gray afternoon in where but the Himmler-Spielsaal, where else,
he surprises her alone by a roulette wheel. She's standing, head bent,
gracefully hipshot, playing croupier. An employee of the House. She
wears a white peasant blouse and a rainbow-striped dirndl skirt of satin,
which shimmers underneath the skylight. The ball's tattoo, against the
moving spokes, gathers a long, scratchy resonance here in the muraled
space. She doesn't turn till Slothrop is beside her. To her breathing
there is a grave slow-beating tremor: she nudges at the shutters of his
heart, opening to him brief flashes of an autumn country he has only
suspected, only feared, outside him, inside her....

"Hey Katje . . ." Making a long arm, hooking a finger on a spoke to
stop the wheel. The ball drops in a compartment whose number they
never see. Seeing the number is supposed to be the point. But in the
game behind the game, it is not the point.

She shakes her head. He understands that it's something back in Hol­
land, before Arnhem-an impedance permanently wired into the cir­
cuit of themselves. How many ears smelling of Palmolive and Camay
has he crooned songs into, outside-the-bowling-alley songs, behind-the­
Moxie-billboard songs, Saturday-night open-me-another-quart songs, all
saying, honey, it don't matter where you've been, let's not live in the
past, right now's all there is. . . .

Fine for back there. But not in here, tapping on her bare shoulder,
peering in at her European darkness, bewildered with it, himself with
his straight hair barely combable and shaven face without a wrinkle
such a chaste intrusion in the Himmler-Spielsaal all crowded with Ger­
man-Baroque perplexities of shape (a sacrament of hands in every last
turn each hand must produce, because of what the hand was, had to be­
come, to make it all come out exactly this way . . . all the cold, the
trauma, the departing flesh that has ever touched it. . . .) In the
twisted gilt playing-room his secret motions clarify for him, some. The
odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds
were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed. It's the past
that makes demands here. It whispers, and reaches after, and, sneering
disagreeably, gooses its victims.

When They chose numbers, red, black, odd, even, what did They
mean by it? What Wheel did They set in motion?

Back in a room, early in Slothrop's life, a room forbidden to him now,
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is something very bad. Something was done to him, and it may be that
Katje knows what. Hasn't he, in her "futureless look," found some link
to his own past, something that connects them closely as lovers? He sees
her standing at the end of a passage in her life, without any next step to
take-all her bets are in, she has only the tedium now of being knocked
from one room to the next, a sequence of numbered rooms whose num­

bers do not matter, till inertia brings her to the last. That's all.
Naive Slothrop never thought anybody's life could end like that.

Nothing so bleak. But by now it's grown much less strange to him-he's
been snuggling up, masturbatorily scared-elated, to the disagreeable
chance that exactly such Control might already have been put over him.

The Forbidden Wing. Oh, the hand of a terrible croupier is that
touch on the sleeves of his dreams: all in his life of what has looked free

or random, is discovered to've been under some Control, all the time,
the same as a fixed roulette wheel-where only destinations are impor­
tant, attention is to long-term statistics, not individuals: and where the
House always does, of course, keep turning a profit....

"You were in London," she will presently whisper, turning back to
her wheel and spinning it again, face averted, womanly twisting the

night-streaked yarn of her past, "while they were coming down. I was in
's Gravenhage"-fricatives sighing, the name spoken with exile's linger­
ing-"while they were going up. Between you and me is not only a
rocket trajectory, but also a life. You will come to understand that be­
tween the two points, in the five minutes, .it lives an entire life. You
haven't even learned the data on our side of the flight profile, the visible
or trackable. Beyond them there's so much more, so much none of us
know....

"

But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola.
They must have guessed, once or twice-guessed and refused to be­
lieve-that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward
that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second
chances, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its
own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the Rainbow, and

they its children. . . .
As the War's front moves away from them, and the Casino becomes

more and more a rear area, as the water grows more polluted and the

prices rise, so the personnel coming down on leave get noisier and more
dedicated to pure assholery-none of Tantivy's style about them, his
habit of soft-shoe dancing when drunk, his make-believe foppishness
and shy, decent impulses to conspire, however marginally, whenever

possible, against power and indifference. . . . There hasn't been a word

209

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about him. Slothrop misses him, not just as an ally, but as a presence, a
kindness. He continues to believe, here on his French leave, and at his
ease, that the interference is temporary and paper, a matter of messages
routed and orders cut, an annoyance that will end when the War ends,
so well have They busted the sod prairies of his brain, tilled and sown
there, and subsidized him not to grow anything of his own. . . .

No letters from London, not even news of ACHTUNG. All gone.
Teddy Bloat one day just vanished: other conspirators, like a chorus
line, will show up off and on behind Katje and Sir Stephen, dancing in,
all with identical Corporate Smiles, the multiplication of whose glitter­
ing choppers is to dazzle him, they think, distract him from what they're
taking away, his ID, his service dossier, his past. Well, fuck ... you
know. He lets it happen. He's more interested, and sometimes a little
anxious, about what they seem to be adding on. At some point, appar­
ently on a whim, though how can a fellow be sure, Slothrop decides to
raise a mustache. Last mustache he had was at age 13, he sent away to
that Johnson Smith for a whole Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes from
Fu Manchu to Groucho Marx. They were made 'of black cardboard,
with hooks that fit into your nose. After a while snot would soak into
these hooks, and they'd grow limp, and the mustache would fall off.

"What kind?" Katje wants to know, soon as this one is visible.
"Bad-guy," sez Slothrop. Meaning, he explains, trimmed, narrow, and

villainous.
"No, that'll give you a negative attitude. Why not raise a good-guy

mustache instead?"
"But good guys don't have-"
"Oh no? What about Wyatt Earp?"
To which one might've advanced the objection that Wyatt wasn't all

that good. But this is still back in the Stuart Lake era here, before the
revisionists moved in, and Slothrop believes in that Wyatt, all right. One
day a General Wivern, of SHAEF Technical Staff, comes in and sees it.
"The ends droop down," he observes.

"So did that Wyatt's," explains Slothrop.
"So did John Wilkes Booth's," replies the general. "Eh?"
Slothrop ponders. "He was a bad guy."
"Precisely. Why don't you twist the ends up?"
"You mean English style. Well, I tried that. It must be the weather or

something, the old duster just keeps droopin' down again, a-and I need
to bite those ends off. It's really annoying."

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you some wax for it. They make it with a bitter taste to discourage, ah,
end-chewers, you know."

So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache. Every day
there's something new like this. Katje's always there, slipped by Them
into his bed like nickels under the pillow for his deciduous American­
ism, innocent incisors 'n' Momworshiping molars just left in a clattering
trail back down these days at the Casino. For some odd reason he finds
himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that's peculiar.
There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily trans­
lated from the German-brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged
by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at
Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss . . . or memorizing con­
version factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestarke,

drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of
fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide and permanganate lines, valves, vents,
chambers-what's sexy about that? still he emerges from each

lesson

with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside . . . some of that tempo­

rary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk
his back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones. . . .

During the lessons he will often look over and catch ·Sir Stephen Dod­
son-Truck consulting a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers. He won­
ders what that's all about. Never occurs to him it might have to do with
these mysterious erections. The man's personality was chosen--or de­

Signed-to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather
speed. Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs
out of press, wet and sandy because he's up every morning at six to walk

along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise,
if

not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop knows he's an agron­
omist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist-in that London you

sawall

levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses. But
as with Katje, there hangs about Dodson-Truck' s well-informed zeal an
unmistakable aura of the employee and loser. . . .

One day Slothrop gets a chance to check this out. Seems Dodson­
Truck is a chess fanatic. Down in the bar one afternoon he gets around

to asking Slothrop if he plays.
"Nope," lying, "not even checkers."
"Damn. I've hardly had time till now for a good game."
"I do know a game," has something of Tantivy been sheltering inside

all this time? "a drinking game, it's called Prince, maybe the English
even invented it, cause you have those princes, right? and we don't, not

211

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that that's wrong understand, but everybody takes a number, a-and you
start off the Prince of Wales has lost his tails, no offense now, the num­
bers going clockwise around the table, and number two has found them,
clockwise from that Prince, or whatever number he wants to call out ac­
tually, he, that's the Prince, six or anything, see, you pick a Prince first,
he starts it off, then that number two, or whoever that Prince called,
sez, but first he goes, the Prince does, Wales, tails, two sir, after sayingthat about how that Prince of Wales has lost his tails, and number two
answers, not I, sir-"

"Yes yes but-" giving Slothrop a most odd look, "I mean I'm not
quite sure I really see, you know, the point to it all. How does one win?"

Ha! How does one win, indeed. "One doesn't win," easing into it,
thinking of Tantivy, one small impromptu counter-conspiracy here,"one loses. One by one. Whoever's left is the winner."

"It sounds rather negative."
"Careen." Drinks here are always on the house for Slothrop-They

are springing for it, he imagines. "Some of that champagne! Wantcha to
just keep it coming, and any time we run out, go get more, compren­dez?" Any number of slack-jawed subalterns, hearing the magic word,drift over and take seats while Slothrop explains the rules.

''I'm not sure-" Dodson-Truck begins.
"Baloney. Come on, do you good to get outa that chess rut."
"Right, right," agree the others.
Dodson-Truck stays in his seat, a bit tense.
"Bigger glasses," Slothrop hollers at the waiter. "How about those

beer mugs over there! Yeah! They'd be just fine." The waiter unblasts a
jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut, and fills everybody up.

"Well, the Prince 0' Wales," Slothrop commences, "has lost his tails,and number three has found them. Wales, tails, three sir!"
"Not I, sir," replies Dodson-Truck, kind of defensive about it.
"Who, sir?"
"Five, sir."
"Say what?" inquires Five, a Highlander in parade trews, with a slylook.
"You fucked up," commands princely Slothrop, "so you got to drink

up. All the way now, 'n' no stopping to breathe or anything."On it goes. Slothrop loses Prince position to Four, and all the num­
bers change. The Scot is first to drop, making mistakes at first deliberate
but soon inevitable. Jeroboams come and go, fat, green, tattered grayfoil at the necks giving back the bar's electric radiance. Corks growstraighter, less mushroomy, dates of degorgement move further into the

212

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war years as the company gets drunker. The Scot has rolled chuckling
from his chair, remaining ambulatory for some ten feet, where he goes
to sleep against a potted palm. At once another junior officer slides
beaming into his place. The word has osmosed out into the Casino, and
there is presently a throng of kibitzers gathered around the table, wait­
ing for casualties. Ice is being hauled in by the giant block, fern-faulted
inside, breathing white off of its faces, to be sledged and chipped into a
great wet tub for the procession of bottles being run up from the cellar
now in relays. It soon becomes necessary for the harassed waiters to
stack empty tankards in pyramids and pour fountain-style from the top,
the bubble-shot cascades provoking cheers from the crowd. Some joker
is sure to reach in and grab one of the mugs on the bottom, sending the
whole arrangement swaying, everybody else jumping to salvage what

they can before it all comes down, crashing, soaking uniforms and
shoes-so that it can be set up all over again. The game has switched to

Rotating Prince, where each number called out immediately becomes
Prince, and all the numbers shift accordingly. By this time it is impossi­
ble to tell who's making mistakes and who isn't. Arguments arise. Half
the room are singing a vulgar song:

VULGAR SONG

Last night I poked the Queen of Transylvan-ia,
Tonight I'll poke the Queen of Burgundee­
I'm bordering on the State of Schizophren-ia,
But Queenie is so very nice to me. . . .
It's pink champagne and caviar for break-fast,
A spot of Chateaubriand wiv me tea-

Ten-shilling panatelas now are all that I can smoke,
I laugh so much you'd think the world was just a

silly joke,
So call me what you will, m' lads, but make way

for the bloke
That's poked the love-ly lit-tle Queen of Transyl-vaayn-yaa!

Slothrop's head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizon­
tally, constantly across the room, whilst staying in one place. Each brain
cell has become a bubble: he's been transmuted to black Epernay
grapes, cool shadows, noble cuvees, He looks across at Sir Stephen Dod­
son-Truck, who is still miraculously upright though with a glaze about
the eyes. Aha, right, s'posed to be counter-conspiring here, yes yes uh,

213

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now . . . he gets involved watching another pyramidal fountain, this
time of sweet Taittinger with no date on the label. Waiters and off-duty
dealers sit like birds along the bar, staring. Noise in the place is incredi­
ble. A Welshman with an accordion stands on a table playing "Lady of
Spain," in C, just zooming up and down that wheezebox like a maniac.
Smoke hangs thick and swirling. Pipes glow in the murk. At least three
fist-fights are in progress. The Prince game is difficult to locate any
more. Girls crowd at the door, giggling and poin�ing. The light in the
room has gone bear-brown with swarming uniforms. Slothrop, clutching
his tankard, struggles to his feet, spins around once, falls with a crash
into a floating crown-and-anchor game. Grace, he warns himself: grace.
. . . Roisterers pick him up by the armpits and back pockets, and fling
him in the direction of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. He makes his way on
under a table, a lieutenant or two falling over him on route, through the
odd pond of spilled bubbly, the odd slough of vomit, till he finds what
he imagines to be Dodson-Truck's sand-filled cuffs.

"Hey," getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his
head up to locate Dodson-Truck's face, haloed by a hanging fringe­
shaded lamp. "Can you walk?"

Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, "Not sure, actually,
that I can stand....

"

They spend some time at the business of untan­
gling Slothrop from the chair, then standing up, which is not without its
complications-locating the door, aiming for it. . . . Staggering, prop­
ping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, un­
buttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among
the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a
decompression lock for the outside.

"Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a
19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approxi­
mated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody
ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the
presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over
the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in
yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be
polluted . . . of course Empire took its way westward, what other way
was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

But out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who
are these visitors standing . . . these robed figures-perhaps, at this dis­
tance, hundreds of miles tall-their faces, serene, unattached, like the
Buddha's, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that
stood over Lubeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither

214

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to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It
was the next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that
liaison that would bring her at length to the eruption and scarring of the
wasting pox noted on Roger Mexico's map, latent in this love she shares
with the night-going rake Lord Death ... because sending the RAF to
make a terror raid against civilian Lubeck was the unmistakable long
look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and
screaming, the Ais, which were to've been fired anyway, a bit sooner
instead....

What have the watchmen of world's edge come tonight to look for?
deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag, toward
ash the color the night will stabilize at, tonight . . . what is there gran­
diose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering
along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall
trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows
are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach.
There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whis­
pering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered
because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside.

Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one
knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of de­

spair held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that
even Slothrop can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes of pain for
the effort it is clearly costing the man. . . .

"Oh yes, yes you know, I, I, I can't. No. I assumed that you knew­

but then why should they tell you? They all know. I'm an office joke.
The people even know. Nora's been the sweetheart of the psychic
crowd for years and years. That's always good for some bit of copy in
the News of the World-"

"Ohl Yeah! Nora-that's that dame that was caught that time with
that kid who-who can change his color, right? Wow! Sure, that Nora
Dodson-Truck! I knew your name was familiar-"

But Sir Stephen has gone on: ". . . had a son, yes we came complete
with sensitive son, boy about your age. Frank . . . I think they sent him
to Indo-China. They're very polite when I ask, very polite but, they
won't let me find out where he is. . .. They're good chaps at Fitzmau­
rice House, Slothrop. They mean well. It's been, most of it's been my
fault.... I did love Nora. I did. But there were other things....

Important things. I believed they were. I still do. I must. As she got
along, you know . . . they do get that way. You know how they are, de­

manding, always trying to-to drag you into bed. I couldn't," shaking his

215

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head, his hair now incandescent orange in this twilight, "I couldn't. I'd
climbed too far. Another branch. Couldn't climb back down to her.
She-she might even have been happy with a, even a touch now and
then. . . . Listen Slothrop, your girl, your Katje, sh-she's very lovely,
you know."

"I know."

"Th-they think I don't care, any more. 'You can observe without pas­
sion.' Bastards ... No I didn't mean that.... Slothrop, we're all such
mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That's all we are. Listen-how do you
think I feel? When you're off with her after every lesson. I'm an impo­
tent man-all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to
write ...

"

"Hey, Ace-"
"Don't get angry. I'm harmless. Go ahead hit me, I'll only fall over

and bounce right up again. Watch." He demonstrates. "I care about
you, both of you. I do care, believe me, Slothrop."

"O.K. Tell me what's going on."
"I care!"
"Fine, fine . . ."
"My 'function' is to observe you. That's my function. You like my

function? You like it? Your 'function' . . . is, learn the rocket, inch by
inch. I have . . . to send in a daily log of your progress. And that's all I
know."

But that's not all. He's holding something back, something deep, and
fool Slothrop is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. "Me and
Katje too? You looking through the keyhole?"

Sniffling, "What difference's it make? I'm the perfect man for it. Per­
fect. I can't even masturbate half the time ... no nasty jissom gettingall over their reports, you know. Wouldn't want that. Just a neuter, just
a recording eye.... They're so cruel. I don't think they even know, re-
ally They aren't even sadists.... There's just no passion atall ."

Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and
bunches over the warm bone beneath it. He doesn't know what to say,what to do: himself, he feels empty, and wants to sleep. . . . But Sir Ste­
phen is on his knees, just about, quaking at the edge of it, to tell Slo­
throp a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:

THE PENIS HE THOUGHT WAS HIS OWN

(lead tenor): 'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own­
Just a big playful boy of a bone ...

216

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But They came through the hole in the night,
And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight­
Out of sight . . .
Now he sighs all alone,
With a heartbroken moan,
For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn!

(inner voices) : Was, his, own!
The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more

windy and remote as the light goes cold and out. . . . They are so
difficult to reach across to-difficult to grasp. Carroll Eventyr, trying to
confirm the Lubeck angel, learned how difficult-he and his control
Peter Sachsa both, floundering in the swamp between the worlds. Later
on, in London, came the visit from that most ubiquitous of double

agents, Sammy Hilbert-Spaess, whom everyone had thought in Stock­
holm, or was it Paraguay?

"Here then," the kindly scombroid face scanning Eventyr, quick as a
fire-control dish antenna and even less mercy, "I thought I'd-"

"You thought you'd just check in."
"Telepathic too, Cod he's amazing i'n't he." But the fishy eyes will

not let up. It is a rather bare room, the address behind Callaho
Mews

ordinarily reserved for cash transactions. They have summoned Eventyr
up from "The White Visitation." They know in London how to draw

pentacles too, and cry conjurations, how to bring in exactly the ones
they want. . . . The tabletop is crowded with glasses, smudged, whitish,
emptied or with residues of deep brown and red drinks, with ashtrays
and with debris from artificial flowers which old Sammy here has been

plucking, unpeeling, twisting into mysterious curves and knots. Train­
smoke blows in a partly opened window. One wall of the room, though
blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives, as cer­
tain mirrors in public eating-places have been by the images of custom­
ers: a surface gathering character, like an old face. . . .

-

"But then you don't actually talk to him," ah, Sammy's so good at
this, softly-softly, "I mean it's none of your telegraphers in the middle of
the night having a bit of a chat sort of thing. . . ."

"No. No." Eventyr understanding now that they've been seeing tran­

scripts of everything that comes through from Peter Sachsa-that what

(inner voices):
(bass):
(inner voices):
(tenor):

217

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Eventyr himself gets to read is already censored. And that it may have
been this way for a while now.... So relax, grow passive, watch for a
shape to develop out of Sammy's talking, a shape that really Eventyr
knows already, as we do working out acrostics-he's called up to Lon­
don, but they aren't asking to be put in touch with anyone, so it's Sachsa
himself they're interested in, and the purpose of this meeting is not to
commission Eventyr, but to warn him. To put a part of his own hidden
life under interdiction. Bits, tones of voice, choices of phrasing now
come flying together: ". . . must've been quite a shock to find himself roncre
over there . . . had a Zaxa or two of me own to worry about . . . keep �Ier a
you out of the street at least ... see how you're holding up, old Zaxa I�Jlea
too of course, need to filter out personalities you see from the data, eas- ij@el,
ier for us that way....

"

��1�,
Out of the street? Everyone knows how Sachsa died. But no one llieiIru

knows why he was out there that day, what led up to it. And what wnere
Sammy is telling Eventyr here is: Don't ask.

Then will they try to get to Nora too? If there are analogies here, if
Eventyr does, somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dod­
son-Truck become the woman Sachsa loved, Leni Pokler? Will the in-
terdiction extend to Nora's smoky voice and steady hands, and is Ev- drellio
entyr to be kept, for the duration, perhaps for his life, under some very trlfu�
sophisticated form of house arrest, for crimes that will never be told i�IJI 0
Wm? �

Nora still carries on her Adventure, her "Ideology of the Zero," firm Ilte j
among the stoneswept hair of the last white guardians at the last stepoff no�el
into the black, into the radiant.... But where will Leni be now? rroml
Where will she have wandered off to, carrying her child, and her littln�
dreams that will not grow up? Either we didn't mean to lose her-either 'm�1el
it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us will even swear is our ilie �u
love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept se- �QI
cret, and Sachsa's death is part of it too. She has swept with her wings l�mit
another life-not husband Franz, who dreamed of, prayed for exactly �!��
such a taking but instead is being kept for something quite different- Inen
Peter Sachsa, who was passive in a different way ... is there some mis- mi�nt
take? Do They never make mistakes, or ... why is he here rushing with "Yo
her toward her own end (as indeed Eventyr has been sucked along in ner:"
Nora's furious wake) her body blocking from his Sight everything that "T
lies ahead, the slender girl strangely grown oaken, broad, maternal . . . willi
all he has to go by is the debris of their time sweeping in behind from ei- it�!nc
ther side, looping away in long helices, into the dusty invisible where a ilia!'!
last bit of sunlight lies on the stones of the road. . . . Yes: however ri- �cem

218

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diculously, he is acting out Franz Pokier's fantasy for him, here
crouched on her back, very small, being taken: taken forward into an
aether-wind whose smell ... no not that smell last encountered just be­
fore his birth ... the void long before he ought to be remembering ...
which means, if it's here again . . . then . . . then . . .

They are being pushed backward by a line of police. Peter Sachsa is

jammed inside it, trying to keep his footing, no escape possible ...
Leni's face moving, restless, against the window of the Hamburg Flyer,
concrete roads, pedestals, industrial towers of the Mark flying away at
over a hundred miles an hour the perfect background, brown, blurred,
any least mistake, in the points, in the roadbed at this speed and they're
done for . . . her skirt is pulled up in back, the bare bottoms of her

thighs, marked red from the train seat, turn toward him . . . yes . . . in
the imminence of disaster, yes, whoever's watching yes. . . . "Leni,
where are you?" She was at his elbow not ten seconds ago. They'd
agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are two sorts of
movement out here-as often as the chance displacements of strangers,
across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people
who'll remain that way for a time, in love that can even

make the op­

pression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can be
taken cen­

trifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words spoken
idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she's there, already last
words-"Will Walter be bringing wine tonight? I forgot to-" it's a pri­
vate joke, his forgetting, going around in some adolescent confusion,
hopelessly in love too by now with the little girl, Ilse. She is his refuge
from society, parties, clients ... often she is his sanity. He's taken

to

sitting for a little while each night beside her bed, late at night,
watch­

ing her sleep, with her bottom up in the air and face in the pillow .
. .

the purity, the rightness of it . . . But her mother, in her own sleep,
grinds her teeth often these nights, frowns, talks in a tongue he

cannot

admit he might, some time or place, know and speak fluently. Just in
this past week . . . what does he know of politics? but he can see

that

she has crossed a threshold, found a branching of the time, where he

might not be able to follow-
"You're her mother . . . what if they arrest you, what happens to

her?"
"That's what they-Peter can't you see, they want a great swollen tit

with some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere
in

its shadows. How can I be human for her? Not her mother. 'Mother,'

that's a civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They're the po­
licemen of the soul ...

"

her face darkened, Judaized by the words she

219

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speaks, not because it's out loud but because she means it, and she's
right. Against her faith, Sachsa can see the shallows of his own life, the
bathtub stagnancy of those soirees where for years not even the faces
changed . . . too many tepid years. . . .

"But I love you . . ." she brushes hair back from his sweating fore­
head, they lie beneath a window through which street- and advertising­
light blow constantly, lapping at their skins, at their roundings and
shadows, with spectra colder than those of the astrologers' Moon. . . .
"You don't have to be anything you aren't, Peter. I wouldn't be here if I
didn't love who you are. . . ."

Did she goad him into the street, was she the death of him? In his
view from the other side, no. In love, words can be taken too many
ways, that's all. But he does feel he was sent across, for some particular
reason....

And Ilse, vamping him with her dark eyes. She can say his name, but
often, to flirt with him, she won't, or she'll call him Mama.

"No-no, that's Mama. I'm Peter. Remember? Peter."
"Mama."
Leni only gazes, a smile held between her lips almost, he must say,

smug, allowing the mix-up in names to fall, to set up male reverbera­
tions she can't be ignorant of. If she doesn't want him out in the street,
why does she only keep her silence at such moments?

"I was only glad she wasn't calling me Mama," Leni thought she'd ex­
plain. But that's too close to ideology, it's nothing he can be comfortable
with yet. He doesn't know how to listen to talk like that as more than
slogans strung together: hasn't learned to hear with the revolutionary
heart, won't ever, in fact, be given enough time to gather a revolution­
ary heart from the bleak comradely love of the others, no, no time for it
now, or for anything but one more breath, the rough breath of a man
growing afraid in the street, not even enough time to lose his fear in the
time-honored way, no, because here comes Schutzmann joche, trun­
cheon already in backswing, the section of Communist head moving
into view for him stupidly, so unaware of him and his power . . . the
Schutzmann's first clear shot all day ... oh, his timing is perfect, he
feels it in arm and out the club no longer flabby at his side but tensed
back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of his swing, peak of
potential energy . . . far below that gray vein in the man's temple, frail
as parchment, standing out so clear, twitching already with its next to
last pulsebeat . . . and, SHIT! Oh-how-

How beautiful!
During the night, Sir Stephen vanishes from the Casino.

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But not before telling Slothrop that his erections are of high interest
to Fitzmaurice House.

Then in the morning Katje comes storming in madder than a wet hen,
to tell Slothrop that Sir Stephen's gone. Suddenly everybody is telling
Slothrop things, and he's barely awake. Rain rattles at the shutters and
windows. Monday mornings, upset stomachs, good-bys . . . he blinks
out at the misted sea, the horizon mantled in gray, palms gleaming in
the rain, heavy and wet and very green. It may be that the champagne
is still with him-for ten extraordinary seconds there's nothing in his
field but simple love for what he's seeing.

Then, perversely aware of it, he turns away, back into the room. Time
to play with Katje, now. . . .

Her face is as pale as her hair. A rain-witch. Her hat brim makes a
chic creamy green halo around her face.

"Well, he's gone then." Keenness of this order might work to provoke
her. "It's too bad. Then again-maybe it's good."

"Never mind him. How much do you know, Slothrop?"
"What's that mean, never mind him? What do you do, just throw

people away?"
"Do you want to find out?"
He stands twisting his mustache. "Tell me about it."
"You bastard. You've sabotaged the whole thing, with your clever lit-

tle collegiate drinking game."
"What whole thing, Katje?"
"What did he tell you?" She moves a step closer. Slothrop watches

her hands, thinking of army judo instructors he's seen. It occurs to him
he's naked and also, hmm, seems to be getting a hardon here, look out,

Slothrop. And nobody here to note it, or speculate why....
"Sure didn't tell me you knew any of that judo. Must of taught you it

in that Holland, huh? Sure-little things," singing in descending childish
thirds, "give you away, you know....

"

"Aahh-" exasperated she rushes in, aims a chop at his head which
he's able to dodge-goes diving in under her arm, lifts her in a fireman's

carry, throws her against the bed and comes after her. She
kicks a sharp

heel at his cock, which is what she should've done in the first place. Her

timing, in fact, is drastically off all through this, else she would likely
be

handing Slothrop's ass to him . . . it may be that she wants her foot
to

miss, only scraping Slothrop along the leg as he swerves now, grabs
her

by the hair and twists an arm behind her, pushing her, face-down,
on

the bed. Her skirt is up over her ass, her thighs squirming underneath
him, his penis in terrific erection.

221

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"Listen, cunt, don't make me lose my temper with you, got no prob­
lems at all hitting women, I'm the Cagney of the French Riviera, so look
out."

''I'll kill you-"
"What-and sabotage the whole thing?"
Katje turns her head and sinks her teeth in his forearm, up near the

elbow where the Pentothal needles used to go in. "Ow, shit-" he lets
go the arm he's been twisting, pulls down underwear, takes her by one
hip and penetrates her from behind, reaching under to pinch nipples,
paw at her clitoris, rake his nails along inside her thighs, Mister Tech­
nique here, not that it matters, they're both ready to come-Katje first,
screaming into the pillow, Slothrop a second or two later. He lies on top
of her, sweating, taking great breaths, watching her face turned % away,
not even a profile, but the terrible Face That Is No Face, gone too ab­
stract, unreachable: the notch of eye socket, but never the labile eye,
only the anonymous curve of cheek, convexity of mouth, a noseless
mask of the Other Order of Being, of Katje's being-the lifeless non­
face that is the only face of hers he really knows, or will ever remember.

"Hey, Katje," 's all he sez.
"Mm." But here's only her old residual bitterness again, and they are

not, after all, to be lovers in parachutes of sunlit voile, lapsing gently,
hand in hand, down to anything meadowed or calm. Surprised?

She has moved away, releasing his cock into the cold room. "What's
it like in London, Slothrop? When the rockets come down?"

"What?" After fucking he usually likes to lie around, just smoke a cig­
arette, think about food, "Uh, you don't know it's there till it's there.
Gee, till after it's there. If it doesn't hit you, then you're O.K. till the
next one. If you hear the explosion, you know you must be alive."

"That's how you know you're alive."
"Right." She sits up, pulling underpants back up and skirt back

down, goes to the mirror, starts rearranging her hair. "Let's hear the
boundary-layer temperatures. While you're getting dressed."

"Boundary-layer temperature T sub e, what is this? rises expo­
nentially till Brennschluss, around 70 miles range, a-and then there's a
sharp cusp, 1200 degrees, then it drops a little, minimum of 1050, till
you get out of the atmosphere, then there's another cusp at 1080 de­
grees. Stays pretty steady till re-entry," blablabla. The bridge music
here, bright with xylophones, is based on some old favorite that will
comment, ironically but gently, on what is transpiring-a tune such as
"School Days, School Days," or "Come, Josephine, in My Flying Ma-

nine," �
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chine," or even "There'll Be a HOT TIME in the Old Town Tonite!"

take your pick-slowing and fading to a glassed-in porch downstairs,
Slothrop and Katje tete-a-tete, alone except for a number of musicians
in the corner groaning and shaking their heads, plotting how to get
Cesar Fleb6tomo to pay them for a change. Bad gig, bad gig. . . . Rain
bats against the glass, lemon and myrtle trees outside shake in the wind.
Over croissants, strawberry jam, real butter, real coffee, she has him

running through the flight profile in terms of wall temperature and Nus­
selt heart-transfer coefficients, computing in his head from Reynolds
numbers she flashes him . . . equations of motion, damping, restoring
moments . . . methods of computing Brennschluss by IG and radio
methods . . . equations, transformations . . .

"Now jet expansion angles. I'll give you an altitude, you tell me the

angle."
"Katje, why don't you tell me the angle?"
She was pleased, once, to think of a peacock, courting, fanning his tail

. . . she saw it in the colors that moved in the flame as it rose off the

platform, scarlet, orange, iridescent green . . . there were Germans,
even SS troops, who called the rocket Der Pfau. 'Pfau Zwei.' Ascending,
programmed in a ritual of love . . . at Brennschluss it is done-the
Rocket's purely feminine counterpart, the zero point at the center of its

target, has submitted. All the rest will happen according to laws
of bal­

listics. The Rocket is helpless in it. Something else has taken over. Some­

thing beyond what was designed in.
Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to

certain

secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her­
over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm
... which is certainly nothing she can tell Slothrop.

They sit listening to gusts of rain that's nearly sleet. Winter gathers,
breathes, deepens. A roulette ball goes rattling, somewhere back in an­
other room. She's running. Why? Has he come too close again? He tries
to remember if she always needed to talk this way, in draw-shots, re­

bounding first before she could touch him. Fine time to start asking.
He's counter-conspiring in the dark, jimmying doors at random, no

tell­

ing what'll come out. . . .
Dark basalt pushes up out of the sea. A vaporous scrim hangs across

the headland and its chateaux, turning it all to a grainy antique post­
card. He touches her hand, moves his fingers up her bare arm, reach­

ing....
"Hm?"

223

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"Come on upstairs," sez Slothrop.
She may have hesitated, but so briefly that he didn't notice: "What

have we been talking about all this time?"
"That A4 rocket."
She looks at him for a long time. At first he thinks she's about to laugh

at him. Then it looks like she'll cry. He doesn't understand. "Oh, Slo­
throp. No. You don't want me. What they're after may, but you don't.
No more than A4 wants London. But I don't think they know ...
about other selves ... yours or the Rocket's ... no. No more than
you do. If you can't understand it now, at least remember. That's all I
can do for you."

They go back up to her room again: cock, cunt, the Monday rain at
the windows.... Slothrop spends the rest of the morning and early aft­
ernoon studying Professors Schiller on regenerative cooling, Wagner on
combustion equations, Pauer and Beck on exhaust gases and burning
efficiency. And a pornography of blueprints. At noon the rain stops.
Katje is off on chores of her own. Slothrop passes a few hours downstairs
in the bar, waiters who catch his eye smiling, holding up bottles of
champagne, wiggling them invitingly-"No, merci, non....

"

He's
trying to memorize the organization charts at that Peenemiinde.

As light begins to spill from the overcast sky, he and Katje are out
taking a walk, an end-of-the-day stroll along the esplanade. Her hand is
gloveless and icy in his, her narrow black coat making her taller, her
long silences helping to thin her for him nearly to fog. . . . They stop,
lean against a railing, he watching the midwinter sea, she the blind and
chilly Casino poised behind them. Colorless clouds slide by, endlessly,
in the sky.

"I was thinking of the time I came in on you. That afternoon." He
can't quite bring himself to get specific out loud, but she knows he
means the Himmler-Spielsaal.

She has looked around sharply. "So was 1."
Their breaths are torn into phantoms out to sea. She has her hair

combed high today in a pompadour, her fair eyebrows, plucked to
wings, darkened, eyes rimmed in black, only the outboard few lashes
missed and left blonde. Cloudlight comes slanting down across her face,
taking away color, leaving little more than a formal snapshot, the kind
that might appear on a passport....

"A-and you were so far away then . . . I couldn't reach you....
"

Then. Something like pity comes into her face and goes again. But her
whisper is lethal and bright as sudden wire: "Maybe you'll find out.
Maybe in one of their bombed-out cities, beside one of their rivers or

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forests, even one day in the rain, it will come to you. You'll remember
the Himmler-Spielsaal, and the skirt I was wearing ... memory will
dance for you, and you can even make it my voice saying what I
couldn't say then. Or now." Oh what is it she smiles here to him, only
for that second? already gone. Back to the mask of no luck, no future­
her face's rest state, preferred, easiest. . . .

They are standing among black curly skeletons of iron benches, on
the empty curve of this esplanade, banked much more steeply than the

waking will ever need: vertiginous, trying to spill them into the sea and
be rid of this. The day has grown colder. Neither of them can stay bal­
anced for long, every few seconds one or the other must find a new foot­

ing. He reaches and turns up the collar of her coat, holds her
cheeks

then in his palms . . . is he trying to bring back the color of flesh? He
looks down, trying to see into her eyes, and is puzzled to find tears com­

ing up to fill each one, soaking in among her lashes, mascara bleeding
out in fine black swirls ... translucent stones, trembling in their sock­
ets....

Waves crash and drag at the stones of the beach. The harbor has bro­
ken out in whitecaps, so brilliant they can't be gathering their light from
this drab sky. Here it is again, that identical-looking Other World-is he

gonna have this to worry about, now? What th'
-lookit these trees-each

long frond hanging, stung, dizzying, in laborious drypoint against
the

sky, each so perfectly placed....
She has moved her thighs and the points of her hips up to touch him,

through her coat-it might still, after all, be to help bring him
back­

her breath a white scarf, her tear-trails, winter-lit, ice. She feels warm.

But it's not enough. Never was-nope, he understands all right, she's
been meaning to go for a long time. Braced for the wind the whitecaps
imply, or for the tilt of the pavement, they hold each other. He

kisses

her eyes, feels his cock again begin to swell with good old, bad old-old,
anyhow-lust.

Out at sea a single clarinet begins to play, a droll melody joined in on
after a few bars by guitars and mandolins. Birds huddle bright-eyed on
the beach. Katje's heart lightens, a little, at the sound. Slothrop doesn't

yet have the European reflexes to clarinets, he still thinks
of Benny

Goodman and not of clowns or circuses-but wait ... aren't these ka­

zoos coming? Yeah, a latta kazoos! A Kazoo Band!
Late that night, back in her room, she wears a red gown of heavy silk.

Two tall candles burn an indefinite distance behind her. He feels the

change. After making love she lies propped on an elbow watching him,

breathing deep, dark nipples riding with the swell, as buoys ride
on the

225

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white sea. But a patina has formed on her eyes: he can't even see her ac­
customed retreat, this last time, dimmed, graceful, to the corner of some
inner room ....

"Katje."
"Sshh," raking dreamy fingernails down the morning, over the Cote

d'Azur toward Italy. Slothrop wants to sing, decides to, but then can't
think of anything that'd work. He reaches an arm, without wetting his
fingers snuffs the candles. She kisses the pain. It hurts even more. He
falls asleep in her arms. When he wakes she is gone, completely, most of
her never-worn clothes still in the closet, blisters and a little wax on his
fingers, and one cigarette, stubbed out before its time in an exasperated
fishhook. ... She never wasted cigarettes. She must have sat, smoking,
watching him while he slept ... until something, he'll never be asking
her what, triggered her, made it impossible to stay till cigarette's end.
He straightens it out, finishes it, no point wasting smokes is there, with a
war on....

o 0 0 0 DOD

"Ordinarily in our behavior, we react not singly, but complexly, to fit
the ever present contents of our environment. In old people," Pavlov
was lecturing at the age of 83, "the matter is altogether different. Con­
centrating on one stimulus we exclude by negative induction other col­
lateral and simultaneous stimuli because they often do not suit the cir­
cumstances, are not complementary reactions in the given setting."

Thus [Pointsman never shows these excursions of his to
anyone], reaching for some flower on my table,

I know the cool mosaic of my room
Begin its slow, inhibitory dissolve
Around the bloom, the stimulus, the need
That brighter burns, as brightness, quickly sucked
From objects all around, now concentrates
(Yet less than blinding), focuses to flame.
Whilst there yet, in the room's hypnotic evening,
The others lurk-the books, the instruments,
The old man's clothes, an old gorodki stick,
Glazed now but with their presences. Their spirits,
Or memories I kept of where they were,
Are canceled, for this moment, by the flame:

226

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The reach toward the frail and waiting flower
And so, one of them-pen, or empty glass-
Is knocked from where it was, perhaps to roll
Beyond the blank frontiers of memory . . .
Yet this, be clear, is no "senile distraction,"
But concentrating, such as younger men
Can easily and laughing dodge, their world
Presenting too much more than one mean loss­
And out here, eighty-three, the cortex slack,
Excitatory processes eased to cinders
By Inhibition's tweaking, callused fingers,
Each time my room begins its blur I feel
I've looked in on some city's practice blackout
(Such as must come, should Germany keep on
That road of madness). Each light, winking out
Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom
The Wardens cannot quench. Or not this time.

227

The weekly briefings at "The White Visitation" are all but aban­
doned. Hardly anyone sees the old Brigadier about these days. There is
evidence of a budgetary insecurity begun to filter in among the cherub­
crusted halls and nooks of the PISCES facility.

"The old man's funking," cries Myron Grunton, none too stable him­
self these days. The Slothrop group are gathered for their regular meet­
ing in the ARF wing. "He'll shoot down the whole scheme, all it'll take
is one bad night. . . ."

A degree of well-bred panic can be observed among those present. In
the background, laboratory assistants move about cleaning up dog shit
and calibrating instruments. Rats and mice, white and black and a few
shades of gray, run clattering on their wheels in a hundred cages.

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears un­
ruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Sa­
vile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather
rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes
affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, sooth­
ing: "There's no danger."

"No danger?" screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off
again muttering and growling.

"Slothrop's knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!"
"The whole thing's falling apart, Pointsman!"
"Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of

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the scheme, and thereve been embarrassing inquiries down from Dun­
can Sandys-"

"That's the P.M.'s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!"
"We've already begun to run into a deficit->-"
"Funding," IF you can keep your head, "is available, and will be

coming in before long ... certainly before we run into any serious
trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being 'knocked out,' is quite happily at
work in Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you
wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active on the program, and Mr.
Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we
are budgeted well into fiscal '46 before anything like a deficit begins to
rear its head."

"Your Interested Parties again?" sez Rollo Groast.
"Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted

with you day before yesterday," Edwin Treacle mentions now. "Clive
and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Man­
chester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?"

"No," smoothly, "Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street
these days. I'm afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of
routine coordination over this Schwarzkommando business."

"The hell you were. I happen to know Clive's at ICI, managing some
sort of polymer research."

They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all
of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By
facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit
of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is
nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes
down, as it must, to the desires of individual men. Oh, and women too
of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having
strong enough desires-on knowing the System better than the other
chap, and how to use it. It's work, that's all it is, and there's no room for
any extrahuman anxieties-they only weaken, effeminize the will: a
man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. "I do wish leI
would finance part of this," Pointsman smiles.

"Lame, lame," mutters the younger Dr. Groast.
"What's it matter?" cries Aaron Throwster. "If the old man gets

moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang."
"Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,"

Pointsman very steady, calm, "we have made arrangements with him.
The details aren't important."

They never are, in these meetings of his. Treacle has been comforta-
228

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bly sidetracked onto the Mossmoon Issue, Rollo Groast's carping asides
never get as far as serious opposition, and are useful in presenting the

appearance of open discussion, as are Throwster's episodes of hysteria
for distracting the others.... So the gathering breaks up, the conspira­
tors head off for coffee, wives, whisky, sleep, indifference. Webley Sil­
vernail stays behind to secure his audiovisual gear and loot the ashtrays.
Dog Vanya, back for the moment in an ordinary state of mind if not of

kidneys (which are vulnerable after a while to bromide therapy), has
been allowed a short break from the test stand, and he goes sniffing now
over to the cage of Rat Ilya. Ilya puts his muzzle against the galvanized
wire, and the two pause this way, nose to nose, life and life.... Silver­

nail, puffing on a hook-shaped stub, lugging a 16 mm projector, leaves
ARF by way of a long row of cages, exercise wheels strobing under the
fluorescent lights. Careful youse guys, here comes da screw. Aw he's
O.K. Looie, he's a regular guy. The others laugh. Den what's he doin' in
here, huh? The long white lights buzz overhead. Gray-smocked as­
sistants chat, smoke, linger at various routines. Look out, Lefty, dey're
comin' fer you dis time. Watch dis, chuckles Mouse Alexei, when he

picks me up I'm gonna shit, right'n his hand! Better not hey, ya know
what happened ta Slug, don'tcha? Dey fried him when he did dat, man,
da foist time he fucked up runnin' dat maze. A hundrit volts. Dey said it
wuz a "accident." Yeah ... sure it wuz!

From overhead, from a German camera-angle, it occurs to Webley
Silvernail, this lab here is also a maze, i'n't it now ... behaviorists run

these aisles of tables and consoles just like rats 'n' mice. Reinforcement
for them is not a pellet of food, but a successful experiment. But who
watches from above, who notes their responses? Who hears the small
animals in the cages as they mate, or nurse, or communicate through the

gray quadrilles, or, as now, begin to sing ... come out of their enclo­
sures, in fact, grown to Webley Silvernail-size (though none of the lab

people seem to be noticing) to dance him down the long aisles and
metal apparatus, with conga drums and a peppy tropical orchestra tak­

ing up the very popular beat and melody of:

229

PAVLOVIA (BEGUINE)

mlortJ'

It was spring in Pavlovia-a-a,
I was lost, in a maze . . .

Lysol breezes perfumed the air,
I'd been searching for days.
I found you, in a cul-de-sac,

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As bewildered as 1-
We touched noses, and suddenly
My heart learned how to fly!
So, together, we found our way,
Shared a pellet, or two . . .
Like an evening in some cafe,
Wanting nothing, but you . . .
Autumn's come, to Pavlovia-a-a,
Once again, I'm alone­
Finding sorrow by millivolts,
Back to neurons and bone.
And I think of our moments then,
N ever knowing your name­
Nothing's left in Pavlovia,
But the maze, and the game.

They dance in flowing skeins. The rats and mice form circles, curl
their tails in and out to make chrysanthemum and sunburst patterns,
eventually all form into the shape of a single giant mouse, at whose eye
Silvernail poses with a smile, arms up in a V, sustaining the last note of
the song, along with the giant rodent-chorus and orchestra. One of
PWD's classic propaganda leaflets these days urges the Volksgrenadier:
SETZT V-2 EIN!, with a footnote, explaining that "V-2" means to raise
both arms in "honorable surrender"-more gallows-humor-and telling
how to say, phonetically, "ei ssorrender." Is Webley's V here for vic­
tory, or ssorrender?

They have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a
guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of
death-death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowl­
edge that it will die. . . . "I would set you free, if I knew how. But it
isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other
kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve
an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least
free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday­that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's
elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy
to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level-and be like you in­
stead, simply here, simply alive. . . ." The guest star retires down the
corridors.

Lights, all but a sprinkling, are out at "The White Visitation." The
230

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sky tonight is deep blue, blue as a Navy greatcoat, and the clouds in it
are amazingly white. The wind is keen and cold. Old Brigadier Pudding,
trembling, slips from his quarters down the back stairs, by a route only
he knows, through the vacant orangery in the starlight, along a gallery
hung to lace dandies, horses, ladies with hard-boiled eggs for eyes, out a
small entresol (point of maximum danger . . .) and into a lumber-room,
whose stacks of junk and random blacknesses, even this far from his
childhood, are good for a chill, out again and down a set of metal steps,
singing, he hopes quietly, for courage:

Wash me in the water
That you wash your dirty daughter,
And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall.

at last to D Wing, where the madmen of the '30S persist. The night at­
tendant is asleep under the Daily Herald. He is a coarse-looking fellow,
and has been reading the leader. Is it an indication of things to come,
next election? Oh, dear . . .

But orders are to let the Brigadier pass. The old man tiptoes by,
breathing fast. Mucus rattles back in his throat. He's at the age where
mucus is a daily companion, a culture of mucus among the old, mucus
in a thousand manifestations, appearing in clots by total surprise on a
friend's tablecloth, rimming his breath-passages at night in hard venturi,
enough to darken the outlines of dreams and send him awake,
pleading....

A voice from some cell too distant for us to locate intones: "I am

blessed Metatron. I am keeper of the Secret. I am guardian of the
Throne. . . ." In here, the more disturbing Whig excesses have been
chiseled away or painted over. No point disturbing the inmates. All is
neutral tones, soft draperies, Impressionist prints on the walls. Only the
marble floor has been left, and under the bulbs it gleams like water. Old
Pudding must negotiate half a dozen offices or anterooms before reach­
ing his destination. It hasn't yet been a fortnight, but there is already
something of ritual to this, of iteration. Each room will hold a single un­
pleasantness for him: a test he must pass. He wonders if Pointsman
hasn't set these up too. Of course, of course he must . . . how did the

young bastard ever find out? Have I been talking in rn' sleep? Have they
been slipping in at night with their truth serums to-and just at the
clear emergence of the thought, here is his first test tonight. In the first
room: a hypodermic outfit has been left lying on a table. Very clear and
shining, with the rest of the room slightly out of focus. Yes mornings I

231

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felt terribly groggy, couldn't wake, after dreaming-were they dreams?
I was talking. . . . But it's all he remembers, talking while someone else
was there listening. . . . He is shivering with fear, and his face is whiter
than whitewash.

In the second antechamber is an empty red tin that held coffee. The
brand name is Savarino He understands that it means to say "Severin."
Oh, the filthy, the mocking scoundrel. . . . But these are not malignant
puns against an intended sufferer so much as a sympathetic magic, a
repetition high and low of some prevailing form (as, for instance, no
sane demolition man at his evening dishwater will wash a spoon be­
tween two cups, or even between a glass and a plate, for fear of the
Trembler it implies ... because it's a trembler-tongue he really holds,
poised between its two fatal contacts, in fingers aching with having
been so suddenly reminded) .... In the third, a file drawer is left ajar, a
stack of case histories partly visible, and an open copy of Krafft - Ebing.
In the fourth, a human skull. His excitement grows. In the fifth, a Ma­
lacca cane. I've been in more wars for England than I can remember
... haven't I paid enough? Risked it all for them, time after time....
Why must they torment an old man? In the sixth chamber, hanging
from the overhead, is a tattered tommy up on White Sheet Ridge, field
uniform burned in Maxim holes black-rimmed as the eyes of Cleo de
Merode, his own left eye shot away, the corpse beginning to stink ...
no ... no! an overcoat, someone's old coat that's all, left on a hook in
the wall . . . but couldn't he smell it? Now mustard gas comes washing
in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don't want
them, or when we are suffocating. A machine-gun on the German side
sings dum diddy da da, an English weapon answers dum dum, and the
night tightens coiling around his body, just before H-Hour. . . .

At the seventh cell, his knuckles feeble against the dark oak, he
knocks. The lock, remotely, electrically commanded, slams open with
an edge of echo trailing. He enters, and closes the door behind him. The
cell is in semidarkness, with only a scented candle burning back in a
corner that seems miles away. She waits for him in a tall Adam chair,
white body and black uniform-of-the-night. He drops to his knees.

"Domina Nocturna ... shining mother and last love ... your serv­
ant Ernest Pudding, reporting as ordered."

In these war years, the focus of a woman's face is her mouth. Lip­
stick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood.
Eyes have been left to weather and to tears: these days, with so much
death hidden in the sky, out under the sea, among the blobs and smears
of recco photographs, most women's eyes are only functional. But Pud-

232

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ding comes out of a different time, and Pointsman has considered this
detail too. The Brigadier's lady has spent an hour at her vanity mirror
with mascara, liner, shadow, and pencil, lotions and rouges, brushes and
tweezers, consulting from time to time a looseleaf album filled with
photographs of the reigning beauties of thirty and forty years ago, so
that her reign these nights may be authentic if not-it is for her state of
mind as well as his-legitimate. Her blonde hair is tucked and pinned
beneath a thick black wig. When she sits with her head down, for­

getting the regal posture, the hair comes forward, over her shoulders,
below her breasts. She is naked now, except for a long sable cape and
black boots with court heels. Her only jewelry is a silver ring with an
artificial ruby not cut to facets but still in the original boule, an arrogant
gout of blood, extended now, waiting his kiss.

His clipped mustache bristles, trembling, across her fingers. She has
filed her nails to long points and polished them the same red as her

ruby. Their ruby. In this light the nails are almost black. "That's
enough. Get ready."

She watches him undress, medals faintly jingling, starch shirt rattling.
She wants a cigarette desperately, but her instructions are not to smoke.
She tries to keep her hands still. "What are you thinking, Pudding?"

"Of the night we first met." The mud stank. The Archies were chug­
ging in the darkness. His men, his poor sheep, had taken gas that morn­

ing. He was alone. Through the periscope, underneath a star shell that

hung in the sky, he saw her ... and though he was hidden, she saw

Pudding. Her face was pale, she was dressed all in black, she stood in
No-man's Land, the machine guns raked their patterns all around her,
but she needed no protection. "They knew you, Mistress. They were

your own."
"And so were you."
"You called to me, you said, 'I shall never leave you. You belong to

me. We shall be together, again and again, though it may be years be­
tween. And you will always be at my service.'

"

He is on his knees again, bare as a baby. His old man's flesh creeps
coarse-grained in the light from the candle. Old scars and new welts

group here and there over his skin. His penis stands at present arms. She
smiles. At her command, he crawls forward to kiss her boots. He smells

wax and leather, and can feel her toes flexing beneath his tongue,
through the black skin. From the corner of his eye, on a little table, he
can see the remains of her early evening meal, the edge of a plate, the

tops of two bottles, mineral water, French wine....

233

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"Time for pain now, Brigadier. You shall have twelve of the best, if
your offering tonight pleases me."

Here is his worst moment. She has refused him before. His memories
of the Salient do not interest her. She doesn't seem to care for mass
slaughter as much as for myth, and personal terror ... but please ...
please let her accept. . . .

"At Badajoz," whispering humbly, "during the war in Spain . . . a
bandera of Franco's Legion advanced on the city, singing their regimen­
tal hymn. They sang of the bride they had taken. It was you, Mistress:
they-they were proclaiming you as their bride.... "

She's silent for a bit, making him wait. At last, eyes holding his, she
smiles, the component of evil in it she has found he needs taking care of
itself as usual: "Yes. . . . Many of them did become my bridegrooms
that day," she whispers, flexing the bright cane. There seems to be a
winter wind in the room. Her image threatens to shake apart into sepa­
rate flakes of snow. He loves to listen to her speak, hers is the voice that
found him from the broken rooms of the Flemish villages, he knows, he
can tell from the accent, the girls who grew old in the Low Countries,
whose voices went corrupted from young to old, gay to indifferent, as
that war drew out, season into ever more bitter season.... "I took
their brown Spanish bodies to mine. They were the color of the dust,
and the twilight, and of meats roasted to a perfect texture ... most of
them were so very young. A summer day, a day of love: one of the most
poignant 1 ever knew. Thank you. You shall have your pain tonight."It's a part of her routine she can enjoy, at least. Though she has never
read any classic British pornography, she does feel herself, sure as a fish,
well in the local mainstream. Six on the buttocks, six more across the
nipples. Whack where's that Gourd Surprise now? Eh? She likes the
way the blood leaps to cross last night's welts. Often it's all she can do
to keep from moaning herself at each of his grunts of pain, two voices in
a dissonance which would be much less accidental than it sounded. . . .
Some nights she's gagged him with a ceremonial sash, bound him with a
gold-tasseled fourragerc or his own Sam Browne. But tonight he lies
humped on the floor at her feet, his withered ass elevated for the cane,
bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something
pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They havestuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this
truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet ... no it's
not guilt here, not so much as amazement-that he could have listened
to so many years of ministers, scientists, doctors each with his special­ized lies to tell, when she was here all the time, sure in her ownership of

234

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his failing body, his true body: undisguised by uniform, uncluttered by
drugs to keep from him her communiques of vertigo, nausea and pain .

. . .
Above all, pain. The clearest poetry, the endearment of greatest

worth....

He struggles to his knees to kiss the instrument. She stands over him

now, legs astride, pelvis cocked forward, fur cape held apart on her

hips. He dares to gaze up at her cunt, that fearful vortex. Her pubic
hair

has been dyed black for the occasion. He sighs, and lets escape a small
shameful groan.

"Ah . . . yes, I know." She laughs. "Poor mortal Brigadier, I know. It
is my last mystery," stroking with fingernails her labia, "you

cannot ask

a woman to reveal her last mystery, now, can you?"
"Please ...

"

"No. Not tonight. Kneel here and take what I give you."
Despite himself-already a reflex-he glances quickly

over at the

bottles on the table, the plates, soiled with juices of meat, Hollandaise,
bits of gristle and bone. . . . Her shadow covers his face and upper
torso, her leather boots creak softly as thigh and abdominal muscles

move, and then in a rush she begins to piss. He opens his mouth to catch
the stream, choking, trying to keep swallowing, feeling warm urine

drib­

ble out the corners of his mouth and down his neck and shoulders, sub­

merged in the hissing storm. When she's done he licks the
last few drops

from his lips. More cling, golden clear, to the glossy hairs of
her quim.

Her face, looming between her bare breasts, is smooth as steel.
She turns. "Hold up my fur." He obeys. "Be careful. Don't touch my

skin." Earlier in this game she was nervous, constipated, wondering
if

this was anything like male impotence. But thoughtful Pointsman,
antic­

ipating this, has been sending laxative pills with her meals.
Now her in­

testines whine softly, and she feels shit begin to slide down and out.
He

kneels with his arms up holding the rich cape. A dark turd appears
out

the crevice, out of the absolute darkness between her white
buttocks.

He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the
leather of her

boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking
on it tenderly, licking along its lower side ... he is thinking,

he's sorry,

he can't help it, thinking of a Negro's penis, yes he knows it abrogates
part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied,

the image of a brute

African who will make him behave. . . . The stink of shit floods his

nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele,
of the

Salient. Mixed with the mud, and the putrefaction of corpses, it was the

sovereign smell of their first meeting, and her
emblem. The turd slides

into his mouth, down to his gullet. He gags, but bravely clamps his teeth

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shut. Bread that would only have floated in porcelain waters some­
where, unseen, untasted-risen now and baked in the bitter intestinal
Oven to bread we know, bread that's light as domestic comfort, secret
as death in bed ... Spasms in his throat continue. The pain is terrible.
With his tongue he mashes shit against the roof of his mouth and begins
to chew, thickly now, the only sound in the room....

There are two more turds, smaller ones, and when he has eaten these,
residual shit to lick out of her anus. He prays that she'll let him drop the
cape over himself, to be allowed, in the silk-lined darkness, to stay a
while longer with his submissive tongue straining upward into her ass­
hole. But she moves away. The fur evaporates from his hands. She or­
ders him to masturbate for her. She has watched Captain Blicero with
Gottfried, and has learned the proper style.

The Brigadier comes quickly. The rich smell of semen fills the room
like smoke.

"Now go." He wants to cry. But he has pleaded before, offered her­
absurdly-his life. Tears well and slide from his eyes. He can't look into
hers. "You have shit all over your mouth now. Perhaps I'll take a photo­
graph of you like that. In case you ever get tired of me."

"No. No, I'm only tired of that," jerking his head back out of D Wing
to encompass the rest of "The White Visitation." "So bloodytired.... "

"Get dressed. Remember to wipe your mouth off. I'll send for youwhen I want you again."
Dismissed. Back in uniform, he closes the cell door and retraces his

way in. The night attendant is still asleep. Cold air hits Pudding like ablow. He sobs, bent, alone, cheek resting a moment against the rough
stone walls of the Palladian house. His regular quarters have become a
place of exile, and his real home is with the Mistress of the Night, withher soft boots and hard foreign voice. He has nothing to look forward to
but a late-night cup of broth, routine papers to sign, a dose of penicillinthat Pointsman has ordered him to take, to combat the effects of E. coli.
Perhaps, though, tomorrow night . . . perhaps then. He can't see how
he can hold out much longer. But perhaps, in the hours just beforedawn ...

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The great cusp-green equinox and turning, dreaming fishes to young
ram, watersleep to firewaking, bears down on us. Across the Western

236

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Front, up in the Harz in Bleicherodc,
Wernher von Braun, lately

wrecked arm in a plaster cast, prepares to celebrate his 33rd birthday.
Artillery thunders through the afternoon. Russian tanks raise dust phan­
toms far away over the German leas. The

storks are home, and the first

violets have appeared.
At "The White Visitation," days along the chalk piece of seacoast

now are fine and clear. The office girls are bundling into fewer sweaters,
and breasts peaking through into visibility again. March has come in like

a lamb. Lloyd George is dying. Stray visitors are observed now along the
still-forbidden beach, sitting among obsolescent networks of steel rod

and cable, trousers rolled to the knee or hair unsnooded, chilly gray toes

stirring the shingle. Just offshore, underwater, run
miles of secret piping,

oil ready at a valve-twist to be released and roast German
invaders who

belong back in dreams already old . . . fuel waiting hypergolic ignition
that will not come unless now as some junior-bureaucratic rag or May

uprising of the spirit, to Bavarian tunesmith Carl
Orff's lively

eroom

237

0,0,0,
To-tus flore-o!

lam amore virginali
Totus ardeo . . .

for}oo all this fortress coast alight, Portsmouth to Dungeness, blazing for the
love of spring. Plots to this effect hatch daily among the

livelier heads at

"The White Visitation"-the winter of dogs, of black snowfalls of issue­

less words, is ending. Soon it will be behind us. But once there,
behind

us-will it still go on emanating its hooded cold, however
the fires burn

at sea?
At the Casino Hermann Goering, a new regime has been taking over.

General Wivern's is now the only familiar face, though he seems to've
been downgraded. Slothrop's own image of the plot against

him has

grown. Earlier the conspiracy was monolithic, all-potent, nothing
he

could ever touch. Until that drinking game, and that scene with that

Katje, and both the sudden good-bys. But now-
Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master,

but you can tickle his creatures.

And then, well, he is lately beginning to find his way into one particu­
lar state of consciousness, not a dream certainly, perhaps what used to

be called a "reverie," though one where the colors are more primaries
than pastels . . . and at such times it seems he has touched,

and stayed

touching, for a while, a soul we know, a voice that
has more than once

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spoken through research-facility medium Carroll Eventyr: the late Ro­
land Feldspath again, long-co-opted expert on control systems, guid­
ance equations, feedback situations for this Aeronautical Establishment
and that. Seems that, for personal reasons, Roland has remained hov­
ering over this Slothropian space, through sunlight whose energy he
barely feels and through storms that tickled his back with static electric­
ity has Roland been whispering from eight kilometers, the savage
height, stationed as he has been along one of the Last Parabolas-flight
paths that must never be taken-working as one of the invisible Inter­
dictors of the stratosphere now, bureaucratized hopelessly on that side
as ever on this, he keeps his astral meathooks in as well as can be ex­
pected, curled in the "sky" so tense with all the frustrations of trying to
reach across, with the impotence of certain dreamers who try to wake
or talk and cannot, who struggle against weights and probes of cranial
pain that it seems could not be borne waking, he waits, not necessarily
for the aimless entrances of boobs like Slothrop here-

Roland shivers. Is this the one? This? to be figurehead for the latest
passage? Oh, dear. God have mercy: what storms, what monsters of the
Aether could this Slothrop ever charm away for anyone?

Well, Roland must make the best of it, that's all. If they get this far,
he has to show them what he knows about Control. That's one of his
death's secret missions. His cryptic utterances that night at Snoxall's
about economic systems are merely the folksy everyday backgroundchatter over here, a given condition of being. Ask the Germans espe­
cially. Oh, it is a real sad story, how shoddily their Schwarmerei for
Control was used by the folks in power. Paranoid Systems of History
(PSH), a short-lived periodical of the 1920S whose plates have all myste­
riously vanished, natch, has even suggested, in more than one editorial,
that the whole German Inflation was created deliberately, simply todrive young enthusiasts of the Cybernetic Tradition into Control work:
after all, an economy inflating, upward bound as a balloon, its own
definition of Earth's surface drifting upward in value, uncontrolled,
drifting with the days, the feedback system expected to maintain the
value of the mark constant having, humiliatingly, failed. . . . Unity gainaround the loop, unity gain, zero change, and hush, that way, forever,these were the secret rhymes of the childhood of the Discipline of Con­
trol-secret and terrible, as the scarlet histories say. Diverging oscilla­
tions of any kind were nearly the Worst Threat. You could not pumpthe swings of these playgrounds higher than a certain angle from the
vertical. Fights broke up quickly, with a smoothness that had not been
long in coming. Rainy days never had much lightning or thunder to

238

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te �� them, only a haughty glass grayness collecting in the lower parts, a mon-
�. ochrome overlook of valleys crammed with mossy deadfalls jabbing

hm1[1 roots at heaven not entirely in malign playfulness (as some white SUf-
n�r. prise for the elitists up there paying no mind, no ... ), valleys thick

�' � with autumn, and in the rain a withering, spinsterish brown behind the
ectn[. gold of it . . . very selectively blighted rainfall teasing you across the
1a\'�tL lots and into the back streets, which grow ever more mysterious and

ru�: badly paved and more deeply platted, lot giving way to crooked lot
Inler. seven times and often more, around angles of hedge, across freaks of the
I��� optical daytime until we have passed, fevered, silent, out of the region

of streets itself and into the countryside, into the quilted dark fields and

in�il the wood, the beginning of the true forest, where a bit of
the ordeal

W�t' ahead starts to show, and our hearts to feel afraid ... but just as no

swing could ever be thrust above a certain height, so, beyond a certain
radius, the forest could be penetrated no further. A limit was always
there to be brought to. It was so easy to grow up under that dispensa-

idtN tion. All was just as wholesome as could be. Edges were hardly ever
Of�f glimpsed, much less flirted at or with. Destruction, oh, and demons­

yes, including Maxwell's-were there, deep in the woods, with other
beasts vaulting among the earthworks of your safety. . . .

So was the Rocket's terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois
terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy
and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which
describes motion under the aspect of yaw control:

preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the
whole way to Brennschluss. If any of the young engineers saw corre­

spondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds
of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it

got lost, or disguised-none of them made the connection, at least not
while alive: it took death to show it to Roland Feldspath, death with its

very good chances for being Too Late, and a host of other souls feeling
themselves, even now, Rocketlike, driving out toward the stone-blue

lights of the Vacuum under a Control they cannot quite name . . . the
illumination out here is surprisingly mild, mild as heavenly robes, a feel­

ing of population and invisible force, fragments of "voices," glimpses
into another order of being. . . .

Afterward, Slothrop would be left not so much with any clear symbol

239

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or scheme to it as with some alkaline aftertaste of lament, an irreducible
strangeness, a self-sufficiency nothing could get inside. . . .

Yes, sort of German, these episodes here. Well, these days Slothrop is
even dreaming in the language. Folks have been teaching him dialects,
Plattdeutsch for the zone the British plan to occupy, Thuringian if the
Russians happen not to drive as far as Nordhausen, where the central
rocket works is located. Along with the language teachers come experts
in ordnance, electronics, and aerodynamics, and a fellow from Shell In­
ternational Petroleum named Hilary Bounce, who is going to teach him
about propulsion.

It seems that early in 1941, the British Ministry of Supply let a
£10,000 research contract to Shell-wanted Shell to develop a rocket
engine that would run on something besides cordite, which was being
used in those days to blow up various sorts of people at the rate of
oodles 'n' oodles of tons an hour, and couldn't be spared for rockets. A
team ramrodded by one Isaac Lubbock set up a static-test facility at
Langhurst near Horsham, and began to experiment with liquid oxygen
and aviation fuel, running their first successful test in August of '42. En­
gineer Lubbock was a double first at Cambridge and the Father of Brit­
ish Liquid Oxygen Research, and what he didn't know about the sour
stuff wasn't worth knowing. His chief assistant these days is Mr. Geof­
frey Gollin, and it is to Gollin that Hilary Bounce reports.

"Well, I'm an Esso man myself," Slothrop thinks he ought to men­
tion. "Myoid short was a gasgobbler all right, but a gourmet. Any time
it used that Shell I had to drop a whole bottle of that Bromo in the tank
just to settle that poor fucking Terraplane's plumbing down."

"Actually," the eyebrows of Captain Bounce, a 110% company man,
going up and down earnestly to help him out, "we handled only the
transport and storage end of things then. In those days, before the J aps
and the Nazis you know, production and refining were up to the Dutch
office, in The Hague."

Slothrop, poor sap, is remembering Katje, lost Katje, saying the name
of her city, whispering Dutch love-words as they moved down sea­
mornings now another age, another dispensation. . . . Wait a minute.
"That's Bataafsche Petroleum Maatschappij, N.V.?"

"Right."
It's also the negative of a recco photograph of the city, darkbrown,

festooned with water-spots, never enough time to let these dry out com­
pletely-

"Are you blokes aware," they're trying to teach him English English
too, heaven knows why, and it keeps coming out like Cary Grant, "that

240

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Jerry-old Jerry, you know-has been in that The Hague there, shoot­

ing his bloody rockets at that London, a-and using, the ... Royal
Dutch Shell headquarters building, at the Josef Israelplein if I remem­
ber correctly, for a radio guidance transmitter? What bizarre shit is
that, old man?"

Bounce stares at him, jingling his gastric jewelry, not knowing what
to make of Slothrop, exactly.

"I mean," Slothrop now working himself into a fuss over something
that only disturbs him, dimly, nothing to kick up a row over, is it?
"doesn't it strike you as just a bit odd, you Shell chaps working on your
liquid engine your side of the Channel you know, and their chaps firing
their bloody things at you with your own . . . blasted . . . Shell trans­
mitter tower, you see."

"No, I can't see that it makes-what are you getting at? Surely they'd
simply have picked the tallest building they could find that's in a direct
line from their firing sites to London."

"Yes, and at the right distance too, don't forget that-exactly twelve
kilometers from the firing site. Hey? That's exactly what I mean." Wait,
oh wait. Is that what he means?

"Well, I'd never thought of it that way."
Neither have I, Jackson. Oh, me neither folks.
Hilary Bounce and his Puzzled Smile. Another innocent, a low-key

enthusiast like Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. But:
Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse

proportion to the immorality of the Master.
"I hope I haven't said anything wrong."
"Whyzat?"
"You look-" Bounce aspirating what he means to be a warm little

laugh, "worried."
Worried, all right. By the jaws and teeth of some Creature, some

Presence so large that nobody else can see it-there! that's that monster
I was telling you about. -That's no monster, stupid, that's clouds!
-No, can't you see? It's his feet- Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in
the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and
other plausibilities . . . or else everyone has agreed to call them other
names when Slothrop is listening. . . .

"It's only a 'wild coincidence,' Slothrop."
He will learn to hear quote marks in the speech of others. It is a book­

ish kind of reflex, maybe he's genetically predisposed-all those earlier

Slothrops packing Bibles around the blue hilltops as part of their gear,
memorizing chapter and verse the structures of Arks, Temples, Vision-

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ary Thrones-all the materials and dimensions. Data behind which al­
ways, nearer or farther, was the numinous certainty of God.

Well, what more appropriate way for Tyrone to Get It one cold
morning than this:

It's a blueprint of a German parts list, reproduced so crummy he can
hardly read the words-"Vorrichtung fur die Isolierung, 0011-
5565/43," now what's this? He knows the number by heart, it's the orig­
inal contract number for the A4 rocket as a whole. What's an "insula­
tion device" doing with the Aggregat's contract number? And a DE rat­
ing too, the highest Nazi priority there is? Not good. Either a clerk at
OKW fucked up, which is not unheard-of, or else he just didn't know
the number, and put the rocket's in as the next best thing. Claim, partand work numbers all have the same flagnote, which directs Slothrop to
a Document SG-l. Flagnote on the flagnote sez "Geheime Kommando­
sache! This is a state secret, in the meaning of § 35 R513B."

"Say," he greets General Wivern nipping in through the door, "like
to get ahold of a copy of that Document SG-l."

"Haw, haw," replies the General. "So would our chaps, I imagine."
"Quit fooling." Every piece of Allied intelligence on the A4, however

classified, gets stuffed into a secret funnel back in London and all comes
out in Slothrop's fancy cell at the Casino. So far they've held back noth­
ing.

"Slothrop, there are no 'SG' documents."
First impulse is to rattle the parts list in the man's face, but today he

is the shrewd Yankee foxing the redcoats. "Oh. Well, maybe I read it
wrong," making believe look around the paper-littered room, "maybe it
was a '56' or something, jeepers it was just here.... "

The General goes away again. Leaving Slothrop with a puzzle, kindof a, well not an obsession really . . . not yet . . . Opposite the parts
listing, over in the Materials column now, here's "Imipolex G." Oh re­
ally. Insulation device made of Imipolex G eh? He kicks around the
room looking for his handbook of German trade names. Nothing evenclose to it there . . . he locates next a master materials list for the A4and all its support equipment, and there's sure no Imipolex G in that ei­
ther. Scales and claws, and footfalls no one else seems to hear. ...

"Something wrong?" Hilary Bounce again, with his nose in the door­
way.

"It's about this liquid oxygen, need some more of that specific im­
pulse data, there."

"Specific ... do you mean specific thrust?"

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"Oops, thrust, thrust," English English to the rescue, Bounce di­
verted:

"For LOX and alcohol it's about 200. What more do you need to

know?"
"But didn't you chaps use petrol at Langhurst?"
"Among other things, yes."
"Well it's about those other things. Don't you know there's a war on?

You can't be proprietary about stuff like that."
"But all our company reports are back in London. Perhaps my next

time out-"

"Shit, this red tape. I need it now, Cap'n!" He goes around assuming
they've assigned him a limitless Need To Know, and Bounce confirms it:

"I could send back by teletype, I suppose. . . ."
"Now yer talkin'!" Teletype? Yes, Hilary Bounce has his own, private,

Shell International Network Teletype Rig or Terminal, just what Slo­

throp was hoping for, right in his hotel room, back in the closet behind a
rack of Alkit uniforms and stiff shirts. Slothrop finesses his way in with
the help of his friend Michele, whom he's noticed Bounce has an eye on.

"Howdy babe," up in a brown stocking-hung garret where the dancing
girls sleep, "how'd you like to get fixed up with a big oilman tonight?"
Some language problem here, she's thinking of getting connected

through metal fittings to a gross man dripping somehow with crude oil,
a sex angle she's not sure she'd enjoy, but they get that one straightened
out, and presently Michele is raring to go sweet-talk the man away from
his teletype long enough for Slothrop to get on to London and ask about

Imipolex G. Indeed, she has noted Captain Bounce now and then

among her nightly admirers, noted in particular an item of belly-brass
that Slothrop's seen too: a gold benzene ring with a formee cross in the
center-the IG Farben Award for Meritorious Contributions to Syn­
thetics Research. Bounce got that one back in '32. The industrial liaison

-

it suggests was indeed dozing at the bottom of Slothrop's mind when
the Rocket Guidance Transmitter Question arose. It has even, in a way,
inspired the present teletype plot. Who'd know better than an outfit
like Shell, with no real country, no side in any war, no specific face or

heritage: tapping instead out of that global stratum, most deeply laid,
from which all the appearances of corporate ownership really spring?

Okay. Now there is a party tonight over on the Cap, chez Raoul de la
Perlimpinpin, young madcap heir of the Limoges fireworks magnate
Georges ("Poudre") de la Perlimpinpin-if "party" is the word for

something that's been going on nonstop ever since this piece of France

243

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was liberated. Slothrop is allowed-under the usual surveillance-to
drop in to Raoul's whenever the mood strikes him. It's a giddy, shiftless
crowd out there-they drift in from all corners of Allied Europe, linked
by some network of family, venery and a history of other such parties
whose complexity his head's never quite been able to fit around. Here
and there faces will go by, old American faces from Harvard or from
SHAEF, names he's lost-they are revenants, maybe accidental,
maybe ...

It is to this party that Michele has seduced Hilary Bounce, and for
which Slothrop, soon as his reply from London has come nattering
through, in clear, on Bounce's machine, now proceeds to dude himself
up for. He'll read the information through later. Singing,

With my face shined up-like a microphone
And uh Sta-Comb on my hair,
I'm just as suave-as, an ice-cream cone, say,
I'm Mis-ter Debo-nair. . . .

and turned out in a green French suit of wicked cut with a subtle pur­
ple check in it, broad flowered tie won at the trente-et-quarante table,
brown and white wingtip shoes with golf cleats, and white socks, Slo­
throp tops off now with a midnight-blue snap-brim fedora and is away,
clickety clack out the foyer of the Casino Hermann Goering, looking
sharp. As he exits, a wiry civilian, disguised as the Secret Service's no­
tion of an Apache, eases away from a niche in the porte-cochere, andfollows Slothrop's cab out the winding dark road to Raoul's party.

o 0 DOD 0 0

Turns out that some merrymaker has earlier put a hundred grams ofhashish in the Hollandaise. Word of this has got around. There has been
a big run on broccoli. Roasts lie growing cold on the room-long buffettables. A third of the company are already asleep, mostly on the floor. It
is necessary to thread one's way among bodies to get to where any­
thing's happening.

What's happening is not clear. There are the usual tight little groupsout in the gardens, dealing. Not much spectacle tonight. A homosexual
triangle has fizzed over into pinches and recriminations, so as to block
the door to the bathroom. Young officers are outside vomiting amongthe zinnias. Couples are wandering. Girls abound, velvet-bowed, voile-

244

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sleeved, underfed, broad-shouldered and permed, talking in half a
dozen languages, sometimes brown from the sun here, others pale as
Death's Vicar from more eastern parts of the War. Eager young chaps
with patent-leather hair rush about trying to vamp the ladies, while
older heads with no hair at all prefer to wait, putting out only minimal
effort, eyes and mouths across the rooms, talking business in the mean­
time. One end of the salon is occupied by a dance band and an emaci­
ated crooner with wavy hair and very red eyes, who is singing:

245

JULIA (FOX-TROT)

Ju-lia,
Would you think me pe-cul-iar,
If I should fool ya,
In-to givin' me-just-a-little-kiss?

Jool-yaaahh,
No one else could love you tru-lier,
How I'd worship and bejewel ya,
If you'd on-ly give-me just-a-little-kiss!
Ahh lool-yaaahhhh-
My poor heart grows un-ru-lier,
Noone oolier or droolier,
Could I be longing for­
What's more-

Ju-lia,
I would shout hallelujah,
To have my Jool-yaaahh,
In-my-arms forevermore.

Saxophony and Park Lane kind of tune, perfect for certain states of
mind. Slothrop sees Hilary Bounce, clearly a victim of the hallucino­

genic Hollandaise, nodded out on a great pouf with Michele, who's
been fondling his IG Farben trinket for the past two or three hours. Slo­

throp waves, but neither one notices him.
Dopers and drinkers struggle together without shame at the

buffet

and in the kitchens, ransacking the closets, licking out the bottoms of
casseroles. A nude bathing party passes through on the way down the

sea-steps to the beach. Our host, that Raoul, is roaming
around in a ten­

gallon hat, Tom Mix shirt and brace of sixguns with a Percheron
horse

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by the bridle. The horse is leaving turds on the Bokhara rug, also on the
odd supine guest. It is all out of shape, no focus to it until a sarcastic
flourish from the band, and here comes the meanest customer Slothrophas seen outside of a Frankenstein movie-wearing a white zoot suit
with reet pleats and a long gold keychain that swings in flashing loops ashe crosses the room with a scowl for everybody, in something of a hurrybut taking the time to scan faces and bodies, head going side to side,
methodical, a little ominous. He stops at last in front of Slothrop, who's
putting together a Shirley Temple for himself.

"You." A finger the size of a corncob, an inch from Slothrop's nose."You bet," Slothrop dropping a maraschino cherry on the rug then
squashing it as he takes a step backward, "I'm the man all right. Sure.What is it? Anything."

"Come on." They proceed outside to a eucalyptus grove, where Jean­Claude Gongue, notorious white slaver of Marseilles, is busy white-slav­
ing. "Hey you," hollering into the trees, "you wanna be a white slave,
huh?" "Shit no," answers some invisible girl, "I wanna be a greenslave!" "Magenta!" yells somebody from up in an olive tree. "Vermil­
ion!" "Think I'll take up dealing dope," sez Jean-Claude.

"Look," Slothrop's friend producing a kraft-paper envelope that even
in the gloom Slothrop can tell is fat with American Army yellow-seal
scrip, "I want you to hold this for me, till I ask for it back. It looks like
Italo is going to get here before Tamara, and I'm not sure which one-"

"At this rate, Tamara's gonna get here before tonight," Slothrop in­
terjects in a Groucho Marx voice.

"Don't try to undermine my confidence in you," advises the LargeOne. "You're the man."
"Right," Slothrop tucking envelope inside pocket. "Say, where'd you

get that zoot you're wearing, there?"
"What's your size?"
"42, medium."
"You shall have one," and so saying he rumbles off back inside.
"A-and a sharp keychain!" Slothrop calls after. What th' heck's goingon? He wanders around asking a question or two. The fella turns out to

be Blodgett Waxwing, well-known escapee from the Caserne Martier in
Paris, the worst stockade in the ETO. Waxwing's specialty is phonyingdocuments of various sorts-PX ration cards, passports, Soldbiicher­whilst dealing in Army hardware also as a sideline. He has been AWOL
off and on since the Battle of the Bulge, and with a death rap for that
over his head he still goes into U.S. Army bases at night to the canteens
to watch the movies-provided they're westerns, he loves those shit-

246



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kickers, the sound of hoofbeats through a metal speaker across a hun­
dred yards of oildrums and deuce 'n' a half ruts in the foreign earth
makes his heart stir as if a breeze blew there, he's got some of his many
contacts to run him off a master schedule of every movie playing in
every occupation town in the Theatre, and he's been known to hot-wire
a general's jeep just to travel up to that Poitiers for the evening to see a
good old Bob Steele or Johnny Mack Brown. His picture may hang
prominently in all the guardrooms and be engraved in thousands of
snowdrops' brains, but he has seen The Return of lack Slade twenty­
seven times.

The story here tonight is a typical WW II romantic intrigue, just an­
other evening at Raoul's place, involving a future opium shipment's
being used by Tamara as security against a loan from Italo, who in turn
owes Waxwing for a Sherman tank his friend Theophile is trying to

smuggle into Palestine but must raise a few thousand pounds for pur­
poses of bribing across the border, and so has put the tank up as collat­
eral to borrow from Tamara, who is using part of her loan from Italo to

pay him. But meantime the opium deal doesn't look like it's going to
come through, because the middleman hasn't been heard from in sev­
eral weeks, along with the money Tamara fronted him, which she got
from Raoul de la Perlimpinpin through Waxwing, who is now being
pressured by Raoul for the money because Italo, deciding the tank

belongs to Tamara now, showed up last night and took it away to an
Undisclosed Location as payment on his loan, thus causing Raoul to

panic. Something like that.
Slothrop's tail is being made indecent propositions by two of the ho­

mosexuals who've been fighting in the bathroom. Bounce and Michele
are nowhere in sight, and neither's that Waxwing. Raoul is talking ear­

nestly to his horse. Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a pre­
war Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel's Alice, same forehead,

nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarl­

ing, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyp­
tus trees and into the house and right behind them what comes crashing
now into the pallid lights of the garden but-why the Sherman Tank it­
self! headlights burning like the eyes of King Kong, treads spewing grass
and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes to a halt. Its
75 mm cannon swivels until it's pointing through the French windows

right down into the room. "Antoine!" a young lady focusing in on the gi­
gantic muzzle, "for heaven's sake, not now....

"

A hatch flies open
and Tamara-Slothrop guesses: wasn't Italo supposed to have the

tank?-uh-emerges shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing, Italo,

247

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Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal. "But now," she
screams, "I have you all! One coup de foudre!" The hatch drops-oh,
Jesus-there's the sound of a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech.
Girls start to scream and make for the exits. Dopers are looking around,
blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways. Raoul tries to mount
his horse and make his escape, but misses the saddle and slides all the
way over, falling into a tub of black-market Jell-o, raspberry flavor, with
whipped cream on top. "Aw, no ...

"

Slothrop having about decided
to make a flanking run for the tank when YYYBLAAANNNGGG! the
cannon lets loose an enormous roar, flame shooting three feet into the
room, shock wave driving eardrums in to middle of brain, blowing
everybody against the far walls.

A drape has caught fire. Slothrop, tripping over partygoers, can't hear
anything, knows his head hurts, keeps running through the smoke at the
tank-leaps on, goes to undog the hatch and is nearly knocked off by
Tamara popping up to holler at everybody again. After a struggle which
shouldn't be without its erotic moments, for Tamara is a swell enough
looking twist with some fine moves, Slothrop manages to get her in a
come-along and drag her down off of the tank. But loud noise and all,
look-he doesn't seem to have an erection. Hmm. This is a datum Lon­
don never got, because nobody was looking.

Turns out the projectile, a dud, has only torn holes in several walls,
and demolished a large allegorical painting of Virtue and Vice in an un­
natural act. Virtue had one of those dim faraway smiles. Vice was
scratching his shaggy head, a little bewildered. The burning drape'sbeen put out with champagne. Raoul is in tears, thankful for his life,
wringing Slothrop's hands and kissing his cheeks, leaving trails of [ell-owherever he touches. Tamara is escorted away by Raoul's bodyguards.
Slothrop has just disengaged himself and is wiping the Jell-o off of his
suit when there is a heavy touch on his shoulder.

"You were right. You are the man."
"That's nothing." Errol Flynn frisks his mustache. "I saved a dame

from an octopus not so long ago, how about that?"
"With one difference," sez Blodgett Waxwing. "This really happened

tonight. But that octopus didn't."
"How do you know?"
"I know a lot. Not everything, but a few things you don't. Listen Slo­

throp-you'll be needing a friend, and sooner than you think. Don't
come here to the ':'illa-it may be too hot by then-but if you can make
it as far as Nice-" he hands over a business card, embossed with a
chess knight and an address on Rue Rossini. "I'll take the envelope

248

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," she back. Here's your suit. Thanks, brother." He's gone. His talent is just to
5-oh) fade when he wants to. The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple rib-
reecho bon. Keychain's there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live

in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutierrez. During the Zoot Suit Riots
mOunt of 1943, young Gutierrez was set upon by a carload of Anglo vigilantes

sillilil from Whittier, beaten up while the L.A. police watched and called out
or) Willi advice, then arrested for disturbing the peace. The judge was allowing
decidl� zoot-suiters to choose between jail and the Army. Gutierrez joined up,
CC! ili1 was wounded on Saipan, developed gangrene, had to have his arm am-
intoili1 putated, is home now, married to a girl who works in the kitchen at a

blo\\in� taco place in San Gabriel, can't find any work himself, drinks a lot dur-
ing the day. . . . But his old zoot, and those of thousands of others

n'tne� busted that summer, hanging empty on the backs of all the Mexican
eatlli1 L.A. doors, got bought up and have found their way over here, into the

off 01' market, no harm turning a little profit, is there, they'd only have hung
there in the fat smoke and the baby smell, in the rooms with shades

pulled down against the white sun beating, day after day, on the dried
palm trees and muddy culverts, inside these fly-ridden and empty
rooms....

Imipolex G has proved to be nothing more-or less-sinister than a new
plastic, an aromatic heterocyclic polymer, developed in 1939, years be­
fore its time, by one L. Jamf for IG Farben. It is stable at high tempera­
tures, like up to 900°C., it combines good strength with a low power­
loss factor. Structurally, it's a stiffened chain of aromatic rings, hexagons
like the gold one that slides and taps above Hilary Bounce's navel, alter­
nating here and there with what are known as heterocyclic rings.

The origins of Imipolex G are traceable back to early research done

damt at du Pont. Plasticity has its grand tradition and
main stream, which

happens to flow by way of du Pont and their famous employee Caroth­
ers, known as The Great Synthesist. His classic study of large molecules
spanned the decade of the twenties and brought us directly to nylon,
which not only is a delight to the fetishist and a convenience to the
armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and well within the System,
an announcement of Plasticity's central canon: that chemists were no

longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could decide now what prop­
erties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go ahead and build it.
At du Pont, the next step after nylon was to introduce aromatic rings

D D D D D D D

249

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into the polyamide chain. Pretty soon a whole family of "aromatic po­
lymers" had arisen: aromatic polyamides, polycarbonates, polyethers,
polysulfanes. The target property most often seemed to be strength­
first among Plasticity's virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and White­
ness (Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weifl e: how often these were taken for
Nazi graffiti, and indeed how indistinguishable they commonly were on
the rain-brightened walls, as the busses clashed gears in the next street
over, and the trams creaked of metal, and the people were mostly silent
in the rain, with the early evening darkened to the texture of smoke
from a pipe, and the arms of young passersby not in the sleeves of their
coats but inside somewhere, as if sheltering midgets, or ecstatically
drifted away from the timetable into a tactile affair with linings more se­
ductive even than the new nylon ... ). L. Jamf, among others, then
proposed, logically, dialectically, taking the parental polyamide sections
of the new chain, and looping them around into rings too, giant "hetero­
cyclic" rings, to alternate with the aromatic rings. This principle was
easily extended to other precursor molecules. A desired monomer of
high molecular weight could be synthesized to order, bent into its heter­
ocyclic ring, clasped, and strung in a chain along with the more "natu­
ral" benzene or aromatic rings. Such chains would be known as "aro­
matic heterocyclic polymers." One hypothetical chain that Jamf came
up with, just before the war, was later modified into Imipolex G.

J amf at the time was working for a Swiss outfit called Psychochemie
AG, originally known as the Crossli Chemical Corporation, a spinoff
from Sandoz (where, as every schoolchild knows, the legendary Dr.
Hofmann made his important discovery). In the early '20S, Sandoz,
Ciba, and Geigy had got together in a Swiss chemical cartel. Shortly
after, Jamf's firm was also absorbed. Apparently, most of Crossli's con­
tracts had been with Sandoz, anyway. As early as 1926 there were oral
agreements between the Swiss cartel and IG Farben. When the Ger­
mans set up their cover company in Switzerland, IG Chemie, two years
later, a majority of the Crossli stock was sold to them, and the company
reconstituted as Psychochemie AG. The patent for Imipolex G was thus
cross-filed for both the IG and for Psychochemie. Shell Oil got into it
through an agreement with Imperial Chemicals dated 1939. For some
curious reason, Slothrop will discover, no agreements between ICI and
the IG seem to be dated any later than'39. In this Imipolex agreement,
Icy Eye could market the new plastic inside the Commonwealth in ex­
change for one pound and other good and valuable consideration.
That's nice. Psychochemie AG is still around, still doing business at the
same old address in the Schokoladestrasse, in that Zurich, Switzerland.

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Slothrop swings the long keychain of his zoot, in some agitation. A
few things are immediately obvious. There is even more being zeroed in
on him from out there than he'd thought, even in his most paranoid
spells. Imipolex G shows up on a mysterious "insulation device" on a
rocket being fired with the help of a transmitter on the roof of the head­
quarters of Dutch Shell, who is co-licensee for marketing the Imipolex
-a rocket whose propulsion system bears an uncanny resemblance to
one developed by British Shell at around the same time . . . and oh, oh
boy, it just occurs to Slothrop now where all the rocket intelligence is

being gathered-into the office of who but Mr. Duncan Sandys,
Churchill's own son-in-law, who works out of the Ministry of Supply lo­
cated where but at Shell Mex House, for Christ's sake. . . .

Here Slothrop stages a brilliant Commando raid, along with faithful
companion Blodgett Waxwing, on Shell Mex House itself-right into
the heart of the Rocket's own branch office in London. Mowing down

platoons of heavy security with his little Sten, kicking aside nubile and
screaming WRAC secretaries (how else is there to react, even in play?),
savagely looting files, throwing Molotov cocktails, the Zootsuit Zanies at
last crashing into the final sanctum with their trousers up around their

armpits, smelling of singed hair, spilled blood, to find not Mr. Duncan

Sandys cowering before their righteousness, nor open window, gypsy
flight, scattered fortune cards, nor even a test of wills with the great
Consortium itself-but only a rather dull room, business machines ar­

rayed around the walls calmly blinking, files of cards pierced frail as

sugar faces, frail as the last German walls standing without support after
the bombs have been and now twisting high above, threatening to fold
down out of the sky from the force of the wind that has blown the
smoke away.... The smell of firearms is in the air, and

there's not an

office dame in sight. The machines chatter and ring to each other. It's
time to snap down your brims, share a postviolence cigarette and think
about escape . . . do you remember the way in, all the

twists and turns?

No. You weren't looking. Any of these doors might open you to safety,
but there may not be time. . . .

But Duncan Sandys is only a name, a function in this, "How high
does it go?" is not even the right kind of question to be asking, because
the organization charts have all been set up by Them, the titles and
names filled in by Them, because

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong ques­
tions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Slothrop finds he has paused in front of the blue parts list that started
all this. How high does it go . . . ahhhh. The treacherous question is not

251

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meant to apply to people after all, but to the hardware! Squinting, mov­
ing a finger carefully down the columns, Slothrop finds that Vorrichtung
fur die Isolierung's Next Higher Assembly.

«S-Gerat, 11/00000."
If this number is the serial number of a rocket, as its form indicates, it

must be a special model-Slothrop hasn't even heard of any with four
zeroes, let alone five ... nor an S-Gerat either, there's an 1- and a J­
Cerat, they're in the guidance ... well, Document SG-l, which isn't
supposed to exist, must cover that. . . .

Out of the room: going noplace special, moving to a slow drumbeat in
his stomach muscles see what happens, be ready. . . . In the Casino res­
taurant, not the slightest impedance at all to getting in, no drop in tem­
perature perceptible to his skin, Slothrop sits down at a table where
somebody has left last Tuesday's London Times. Hmmm. Hasn't seen
one of them in a while. . . . Leafing through, dum, dum, de-doo, yeah,the War's still on, Allies closing in east and west on Berlin, powdered
eggs still going one and three a dozen, «Fallen Officers," MacGregor,
Mucker-Maffick, White street, Personal Tributes ... Meet Me in St.
Louis showing at the Empire Cinema (recalls doing the penis-in-the­
popcorn-box routine there with one Madelyn, who was less than-)-

Tantivy . . . Oh shit no, no wait-
«True charm ... humble-mindedness ... strength of character

. . fundamental Christian cleanness and goodness . . . we all loved
Oliver . . . his courage, kindness of heart and unfailing good humour
were an inspiration to all of us ... died bravely in battle leading a gal­lant attempt to rescue members of his unit who were pinned down byGerman artillery . . ." And signed by his most devoted comrade in
arms, Theodore Bloat. Major Theodore Bloat now-

Staring out the window, staring at nothing, gripping a table knife so
hard maybe some bones of his hand will break. It 'happens sometimes to
lepers. Failure of feedback to the brain-no way to know how fiercelythey may be making a fist. You know these lepers. Well-

Ten minutes later, back up in his room, he's lying face-down on the
bed, feeling empty. Can't cry. Can't do anything.

They did it. Took his friend out to some deathtrap, probably let himfake an «honourable" death . . . and then just closed up his file. . . .It will occur to him later that maybe the whole story was a lie. Theycould've planted it easy enough in that London Times, couldn't they?Left the paper for Slothrop to find? But by the time he figures that one
out, there'll be no turning around.

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At noon Hilary Bounce comes in rubbing his eyes wearing a shit-eat­

ing grin. "How was your evening? Mine was remarkable."
"Glad to hear it." Slothrop is smiling. You're on my list too, pal. This

smile asks from him more grace than anything in his languid American
life ever has, up till now. Grace he always imagined himself short on.
But it's working. He's surprised, and so grateful that he almost starts

crying then. The best part of all is not that Bounce appears fooled by
the smile, but that Slothrop knows now that it will work for him

again....
So he does make it to Nice, after a fast escape down the Corniche

through the mountains fishtailing and rubber softly screeching at the
sun-warmed abysses, tails all shaken back on the beach where he was

thoughtful enough to lend his buddy Claude the assistant chef, about
the same height and build, his own brand-new pseudo-Tahitian bathing
trunks, and while they're all watching that Claude, find a black Citroen
with the keys left in, nothing to it, folks-rolling into town in his white
zoot, dark glasses, and a flopping Sydney Greenstreet Panama hat. He's
not exactly inconspicuous among the crowds of military and the mam­
zelles already shifted into summer dresses, but he ditches the car off
Place Garibaldi, heads for a bistro on the old-Nice side of La Porte

Fausse and takes time to nab a roll and coffee before setting out to find

the address Waxwing gave him. It turns out to be an ancient four-story
hotel with early drunks lying in the hallways, eyelids like tiny loaves
brushed with a last glaze of setting sun, and summertime dust in stately
evolutions through the taupe light, summertime ease to the streets out­
side, April summertime as the great vortex of redeployment from Eu­

rope to Asia hoots past leaving many souls each night to cling
a bit

longer to the tranquillities here, this close to the drain-hole
of Mar­

seilles, this next-to-last stop on the paper cyclone that sweeps them
back from Germany, down the river-valleys, beginning to drag some
from Antwerp and the northern ports too now as the vortex grows

more

sure, as preferential paths are set up. . . . Just for the knife-edge, here
in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a

foreign city can bring: just where the sky's light balances the
electric

lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise
of events

without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his
life has been able to find up till now.

Too impatient to wait for the first star, Slothrop enters the
hotel. The

carpets are dusty, the place smells of alcohol and bleach.
Sailors and

girls come ambling through, together and separate, as Slothrop para-

253

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noids from door to door looking for one that might have something totell him. Radios play in the heavy wood rooms. The stairwell doesn't ap­
pear to be plumb, but tilted at some peculiar angle, and the light run­
ning down the walls is of only two colors: earth and leaf. Up on the topfloor Slothrop finally spots an old motherly femme de chambre on the
way into a room carrying a change of linen, very white in the gloom.

"Why did you leave," the sad whisper ringing as if through a tele­
phone receiver from someplace far away, "they wanted to help you.
They wouldn't have done anything bad....

"

Her hair is rolled up,
George Washington style, all the way around. She gazes at 450 to Slo­
throp, a patient, parkbench chessplayer's gaze, very large, arching
kindly nose and bright eyes: she is starch, sure-boned, the toes of her
leather shoes turn up slightly, she's wearing red-and-white striped socks
on enormous feet that give her the look of a helpful critter from one of
the other worlds, the sort of elf who'd not only make shoes while you
slept but also sweep up a little, have the pot on when you awoke, and
maybe a fresh flower by the window-

"I beg your pardon?"
"There's still time."
"You don't understand. They've killed a friend of mine." But seeing itin the Times that way, so public ... how could any of that be real, real

enough to convince him Tantivy won't just come popping in the door
some day, howdyfoax and a bashful smile ... hey, Tantivy. Where
were you?

"Where was I, Slothrop? That's a good one." His smile lighting thetime again, and the world all free. . . .
He flashes Waxwing's card. The old woman breaks into an amazingsmile, the two teeth left in her head beam under the night's new bulbs.She thumbs him upstairs and then gives him either the V-for-victorysign or some spell from distant countryside against the evil eye that

sours the milk. Whichever it is, she is chuckling sarcastically.
Upstairs is a roof, a kind of penthouse in the middle. Three youngmen with Apache sideburns and a young woman packing a braidedleather sap are sitting in front of the entrance smoking a thin cigaretteof ambiguous odor. "You are lost, mon ami."
"Uh, well," out with Waxwing's card again.
"Ah, bien.... " They roll aside, and he passes into a bickering of ca­nary-yellow Borsalini, corksoled comicbook shoes with enormous round

toes, lotta that saddle-stitching in contrasting colors (such as orange onblue, and the perennial favorite, green on magenta), workaday groans ofcomforted annoyance commonly heard in public toilets, telephone

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255

traffic inside clouds of cigar smoke. Waxwing isn't in, but a colleague in­
terrupts some loud dealing soon as he sees the card.

"What do you need?"
"Carte d'identite, passage to Zurich, Switzerland."
"Tomorrow.

"

"Place to sleep."
The man hands over a key to one of the rooms downstairs. "Do you

have any money?"
"Not much. 1 don't know when 1 could-"

Count, squint, riffle, "Here."
"Uh ...

"

"It's all right, it's not a loan. It comes out of overhead. Now, don't go
outside, don't get drunk, stay away from the girls who work here."

"Aw ...
"

"See you tomorrow." Back to business.

Slothrop's night passes uncomfortably. There is no position he can
manage to sleep in for more than ten minutes. The bugs sally out onto
his body in skirmish parties not uncoordinated with his level of wakeful­
ness. Drunks come to the door, drunks and revenants.

"

'Rone, you've gotta let me in, it's Dumpster, Dumpster Villard."
"What's 'at-"
"It's really bad tonight. I'm sorry. 1 shouldn't impose this way, I'm

more trouble than I'm worth. . . listen. . . I'm cold . . . I've been a

long way....
"

A sharp knock. "Dumpster-"
"No, no, it's Murray Smile, 1 was next to you in basic, company 84,

remember? Our serial numbers are only two digits apart."
"I had to let . . . let Dumpster in . . . where'd he go? Was 1 asleep?"
"Don't tell them 1 was here. 1 just came to tell you you don't have to

go back."

"Really? Did they say it was all right?"
"It's all right."
"Yeah, but did they say it was?" Silence. "Hey? Murray?" Silence.
The wind is blowing in the ironwork very strong, and down in the

street a vegetable crate bounces end over end, wooden, empty, dark. It
must be four in the morning. "Got to get back, shit I'm late....

"

"No." Only a whisper. ... But it was her "no" that stayed with him.
"Whozat, Jenny? That you, Jenny?"
"Yes it's me. Oh love I'm so glad 1 found you."
"But 1 have to . . ." Would They ever let her live with him at the

Casino ... ?

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"No. I can't." But what's wrong with her voice?
"Jenny, I heard your block was hit, somebody told me, the day after

New Year's . . . a rocket . . . and I meant to go back and see if you
were all right, but . . . I just didn't . . . and then They took me to that
Casino....

"

"It's all right."
"But not if I didn't-"
"Just don't go back to them."
And somewhere, dark fish hiding past angles of refraction in the flow

tonight, are Katje and Tantivy, the two visitors he wants most to see. He
tries to bend the voices that come to the door, bend them like notes on a
harmonica, but it won't work. What he wants lies too deep. . . .

Just before dawn knocking comes very loud, hard as steel. Slothrophas the sense this time to keep quiet.
"Come on, open up."
"MPs, open up."
American voices, country voices, high-pitched and without mercy.He lies freezing, wondering if the bedsprings will give him away. For

possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non­
American. Later he will recall that what surprised him most was the fa­
naticism, the reliance not just on flat force but on the rightness of what
they planned to do . . . he'd been told long ago to expect this sort of
thing from Nazis, and especially from J aps-we were the ones who al­
ways played fair-but this pair outside the door now are as demoral­
izing as a close-up of John Wayne (the angle emphasizing how slantedhis eyes are, funny you never noticed before) screaming "BANZAI!""Wait a minute Ray, there he goes-"

"Hopper! You asshole, come back here-"
"You'll never get me in a strait jacket agaaaaain. . . ." Hopper'svoice goes fading around the corner as the MPs take off in pursuit.It dawns on Slothrop, literally, through the yellowbrown windowshade, that this is his first day Outside. His first free morning. He doesn'thave to go back. Free? What's free? He falls asleep at last. A little be­fore noon a young woman lets herself in with a passkey and leaves himthe papers. He is now an English war correspondent named Ian

Scuffling.
"This is the address of one of our people in Zurich. Waxwing wishes

you good luck and asks what kept you so long."
"You mean he wants an answer?"
"He said you'd have to think about it."

256

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A week later he's in Zurich, after a long passage by train. While the
metal creatures in their solitude, days of snug and stable fog, pass the
hours at mime, at playing molecules, imitating industrial synthesis as
they are broken up, put together, coupled and recoupled, he dozes in
and out of a hallucination of Alps, fogs, abysses, tunnels, bone-deep la­
borings up impossible grades, cowbells in the darkness, in the morning
green banks, smells of wet pasture, always out the windows an un­
shaven work crew on the way to repair some stretch of track, long waits
in marshaling-yards whose rails run like layers of an onion cut end to
end, gray and desolate places, nights of whistles, coupling, crashes, sid­
ings, staring cows on the evening hillsides, army convoys waiting at the

crossings as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality any­
where, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged
landscape, in which "neutral Switzerland" is a rather stuffy convention,
observed but with as much sarcasm as "liberated France" or "totalitar­

ian Germany," "Fascist Spain," and others. . . .
The War has been reconfiguring time and space into its own image.

The track runs in different networks now. What appears to be destruc­

tion is really the shaping of railroad spaces to other purposes, intentions
he can only, riding through it for the first time, begin to feel the leading
edges of....

He checks in to the Hotel Nimbus, in an obscure street in the Nieder­
dorf or cabaret section of Zurich. The room's in an attic, and is reached

by ladder. There's also a ladder outside the window, so he reckons it'll
be O.K. When night comes down he goes out looking for the local Wax­

wing rep, finds him farther up the Limmatquai, under a bridge, in

"Sa-a-a-ay." It's just occurred to him. "Why are all you folks helping
me like this? For free and all?"

"Who knows? We have to play the patterns. There must be a pattern
you're in, right now."

"Uh ...
"

But she's already left. Slothrop looks around the place: in the daylight
it's mean and anonymous. Even the roaches must be uncomfortable

here. . . . Is he off so quickly, like Katje on her wheel, off on a ratchet
of rooms like this, to be in each one only long enough to gather wind or
despair enough to move on to the next, but no way backward now, ever
again? No time even to get to know the Rue Rossini, which faces holler
from the windows, whore's a good place to eat, what's the name of the
song everybody's whistling these premature summer days. . . .

257

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rooms full of Swiss watches, clocks and altimeters. He's a Russian
named Semyavin. Outside boats hoot on the river and the lake. Some­
body upstairs is practicing on a piano: stumbling, sweet lieder. Semya­
vin pours gentian brandy into cups of tea he's just brewed. "First thing
you have to understand is the way everything here is specialized. If it's
watches, you go to one cafe. If it's women, you go to another. Furs are
subdivided into Sable, Ermine, Mink, and Others. Same with dope:
Stimulants, Depressants, Psychomimetics.... What is it you're after?"

"Uh, information?" Gee, this stuff tastes like Moxie. . . .
"Oh. Another one." Giving Slothrop a sour look. "Life was simple be­

fore the first war. You wouldn't remember. Drugs, sex, luxury items.
Currency in those days was no more than a sideline, and the term 'in­
dustrial espionage' was unknown. But I've seen it change-oh, how it's
changed. The German inflation, that should've been my clue right
there, zeros strung end to end from here to Berlin. I would have stern
talks with myself. 'Semyavin, it's only a temporary lapse away from real­
ity. A small aberration, nothing to worry about. Act as you always have
-strength of character, good mental health. Courage, Semyavin! Soon
all will be back to normal.' But do you know what?"

"Let me guess."
A tragic sigh. "Information. What's wrong with dope and women? Is

it any wonder the world's gone insane, with information come to be the
only real medium of exchange?"

"I thought it was cigarettes."
"You dream." He brings out a list of Zurich cafes and gathering spots.Under Espionage, Industrial, Slothrop finds three. Ultra, Lichtspiel, and

Straggeli. They are on both banks of the Limmat, and widely spaced."Footwork," folding the list in an oversize zoot-suit pocket."It'll get easier. Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information
machines. You are the wave of the future."

Begins a period of shuttling among the three cafes, sitting a few hours
over coffee at each one, eating once a day, Zurich baloney and rosti atthe People's Kitchens . . . watching crowds of businessmen in blue
suits, sun-black skiers who've spent the duration schussing miles of gla­cier and snow hearing nothing of campaigns or politics, reading nothingbut thermometers and weathervanes, finding their atrocities in ava­
lanches or toppling seracs, their victories in layers of good powder ...ragged foreigners in oil-stained leather jackets and tattered fatigues,South Americans bundled in fur coats and shivering in the clear sun­
light, elderly hypochondriacs who were caught out lounging at some spawhen the War began and have been here since, women in long black

258

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dresses who don't smile, men in soiled overcoats who do . . . and the

mad, down from their fancy asylums on weekend furlough-oh, the
mental cases of Switzerland: Slothrop is known to them, all right,
among all the somber street faces and colors only he is wearing white,
shoes zoot 'n' hat, white as the cemetery mountains here.... He's also
the New Mark In Town. It's difficult for him to sort out the first wave of

corporate spies from the

LOONIES ON LEAVE!

(The Chorus line is divided not into the conventional Boys and Girls but into

Keepers and Nuts, without regard to sex, though all four possibilities are rep­
resented on stage. Many are wearing sunglasses with black lenses and white
rims, not so much to be fashionable as to suggest snow-blindness, the antisep­
tic white of the Clinic, perhaps even the darkness of the mind. But all seems
happy, relaxed, informal ... no sign of repression, not even a distinction in
costume so that at first there is some problem telling Nuts from Keepers as
they all burst in from the wings dancing and singing):

Here we come foax-ready or not!
Put your mask on, and plot your plot,
We're just laughin' and droolin', all-over

the sleigh,
Like a buncha happy midgets on a holiday!

Oh we're the LOONIES ON LEAVE, and
We haven't a care-
Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair,

Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues,
As daffy and sharp as-the taps on our shoes!
Hey, we're passin' the hat for-your frowns and

your tears,
And the fears you thought'd never go 'way-
ah take it from a loony, life's so dear and swoony,
So just hug it and kiss it to-day!
La-da-da, ya-ta ya-ta ta-ta &c ... (They go on

humming the tune behind what follows):

First Nut (or maybe Keeper): Got an amazing deal for you here, American? I

thought so, always tell a face from home, saaay, like your suit there, go
far

enough up the glacier 'n' nobody'd be able to see ya! Well yes now, I know
how you feel about these street-vendors keep coming by, it's the old three­
card monte on the sidewalk [trucks across the stage for a while, back and

forth, waving his finger in the air, singing "Three-card monte on-the side,
walk," over and over in the same obsessive monotone, for as many repetitions
as he can get away with] and you can spot right away what's wrong, every

259

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one promises ya somethin' fer nothin', right? yes now oddly enough, that's the
main objection engineers and scientists have always had to the idea of [lower­
ing his voice] perpetual motion or as we like to call it Entropy Management­
here, here's our card-well, sure, they've got a point. At least they had a
point. Up till now....

Second Nut or Keeper: Now you've heard about the two-hundred-mile-per­
gallon carburetor, the razor edge that never gets dull, the eternal bootsole,
the mange pill that's good to your glands, engine that'll run on sand, omithop­
ters and robobopsters-you heard me, got a little goatee made out of steel
wool-jivey, that's fine, but here's one for yo' mind! Are you ready? It's Light­
ning-Latch, The Door That Opens You!

Slothrop: Think I'll go take my nap now....
Third N. or K.: Transmogrify common air into diamonds through Cataclysmic
Carbon Dioxide Reducti-o-o-o-o-n-n-n ....

If he were sensitive about such things, it'd all be pretty insulting, this
first wave. It passes, gesturing, accusative, pleading. Slothrop manages
to stay calm. There is a pause-then on come the real ones, slowly at
first but gathering, gathering. Synthetic rubber or gasoline, electronic
calculators, aniline dyes, acrylics, perfumes (stolen essences in vials in
sample cases), sexual habits of a hundred selected board members,
layouts of plants, codebooks, connections and payoffs, ask for it, they
can get it.

At last, one day at the Straggeli, Slothrop eating on a bratwurst and
hunk of bread he's been toting around all morning in a paper bag, sud­
denly from noplace appears one Mario Schweitar in a green frogged
waistcoat, just popped out of the echoing cuckoo clock of Dubya DubyaTwo here, the endless dark corridors at his back, with a change of luckfor Slothrop. "Pssst, Joe," he begins, "hey, mister."

"Not me," replies Slothrop with his mouth full.
"You interested in some L.S.D.?"
"That stands for pounds, shillings, and pence. You got the wrongcafe, Ace."
"I think I've got the wrong country," Schweitar a little mournful.

''I'm from Sandoz."
"Aha, Sandoz!" cries Slothrop, and pulls out a chair for the fella.
Turns out Schweitar is very tight indeed with Psychochemie AG,

being one of those free-floating trouble-shooters around the Cartel,
working for them on a per diem basis and spying on the side.

"Well," Slothrop sez, "I'd sure like anything they got on L. Jamf,a-and on that Imipolex G."
260

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"Gaaah-"
"Pardon me?"
"That stuff. Forget it. It's not even our line. You ever try to develop a

polymer when there's nothing but indole people around? With our giant
parent to the north sending in ultimatums every day? Imipolex G is the
company albatross, Yank. They have vice-presidents whose only job is
to observe the ritual of going out every Sunday to spit on old Jamf' s
grave. You haven't spent much time with the indole crowd. They're
very elitist. They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic,
generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, com­
munity orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven't
known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years-keepers of a tradi­
tion, aristocrats-"

"Wait a minute....
"

Jamf dead? "You say Jamf's grave, now?" It
ought to be making more of a difference to him, except that the man
was never really alive so how can he be really-

"Up in the mountains, toward the Uetliberg."
"You ever-"
"What?"
"Did you ever meet him?"
"Before my time. But I know that there's a lot of data on him in the

classified files at Sandoz. It would be some job getting you what you
want....

"

"Uh . . ."
"Five hundred."
"Five hundred what?"
Swiss francs. Slothrop hasn't got 500 anything, unless it's worries. The

money from Nice is almost gone. He heads toward Semyavin's, across
the Cemiise-Briicke, deciding he'll walk everywhere from now on,
chewing his white sausage and wondering when he'll see another.

"First thing you want to do," Semyavin advises him, "is go to a pawn­
shop and raise a few francs on that, ah," pointing at the suit. Aw no, not
the suit. Semyavin goes rummaging in a back room, comes out with a
bundle of workmen's clothes. "You should start thinking more about
your visibility. Come back tomorrow, I'll see what else I can find."

White zoot in a bundle under his arm, a less visible Ian Scuffiing goes
back outside, down into the mediaeval afternoon of the Niederdorf,
stone walls now developing like baking bread in the failing sun, oboy
oboy he can see it now: gonna turn into another of them Tamara/Italo
drills here, 'n' then he'll be in so deep he'll just never get out....

At the entrance to his street, in the wells of shadow, he notes a black

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Rolls parked, motor idling, its glass tinted and afternoon so dark he
can't see inside. Nice car. First one he's seen in a while, should be no
more than a curiosity, except for

Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.
Zunnggg! diddilung, diddila-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta William Tell

Overture here, back in the shadows, hope nobody was looking throughthat one-way glass-zoom, zoom, dodging around corners, scootingdown alleys, no sound of pursuit but then it's the quietest engine on the
road except for the King Tiger tank. . . .

Forget that Hotel Nimbus, he reckons. His feet are already starting to
bother him. He gets to the Luisenstrasse and the hockshop just before
closing time, and manages to raise a little, baloney for a day or two
maybe, on the zoot. So long zoot.

This town sure closes up early. What does Slothrop do tonight for a
bed? He has a moment's relapse into optimism: ducks in a restaurant
and rings up the desk at the Hotel Nimbus. "Ah, yes," English English,"can you possibly tell me if the British chap who's been waiting in the
foyer is still there, you know . . ."

In a minute on comes a pleasant, awkward voice with an are-you­there. Oh, so seraphic. Slothrop funks, hangs up, stands looking at allthe people at dinner staring at him-blew it, blew it, now They knowhe's on to Them. There is the usual chance his paranoia's just out ofhand again, but the coincidences are running too close. Besides, he
knows the sound of Their calculated innocence by now, it's part ofTheir style. . . .

Out again in the city: precision banks, churches, Gothic doorwaysdrilling by ... he must avoid the hotel and the three cafes now, right,right. . . . The permanent Ziirchers in early-evening blue stroll by. Blue
as the city twilight, deepening blue.... The spies and dealers have all
gone indoors. Semyavin's place is out, the Waxwing circle have been
kind, no point bringing any heat down on them. How much weight dothe Visitors have in this town? Can Slothrop risk checking in to anotherhotel? Probably not. It's getting cold. A wind is coming in now off thelake.

He finds that he has drifted as far as the Odeon, one of the greatworld cafes, whose specialty is not listed anywhere-indeed has neverbeen pinned down. Lenin, Trotsky, James Joyce, Dr. Einstein all sat out
at these tables. Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever
they'd come to this vantage to score . . . perhaps it had to do with the
people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing ofneeds or desperations in one fateful piece of street . . . dialectics, mat-

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rices, archetypes all need to connect, once in a while, back to some of
that proletarian blood, to body odors and senseless screaming across a
table, to cheating and last hopes, or else all is dusty Dracularity, the
West's ancient curse....

Slothrop finds he has enough spare change for coffee. He goes sits in­
side, choosing a seat that'll face the entrance. Fifteen minutes and he's

getting the spy-sign from a swarthy, curly-headed alien in a green suit a

couple tables away. Another front-facer. On his table is an old newspa­
per that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political car­
toon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the

police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white ... no it's a baby,
with a label on its diaper sez LA REVOLUCION . . . oh, they're all claim­

ing the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like
a bunch of putative mothers, and somehow this cartoon here is sup­
posed to be some kind of a touchstone, this fella in the green suit, who
turns out to be an Argentine named Francisco Squalidozzi, is looking
for a reaction . . . the key passage is at the very end of the line where
the great Argentine poet Leopoldo Lugones is saying, "Now I'm going
to tell you, in verse, how I conceived her free

from the stain of Original
Sin....

"

It is the Uriburu revolution of 1930. The paper is fifteen

years old. There is no telling what Squalidozzi is expecting from
Slo­

throp, but what he gets is pure ignorance. This seems to be acceptable,
and presently the Argentine has loosened up enough to confide that he
and a dozen colleagues, among them the international eccentric Gra­
ciela Imago Portales, hijacked an early-vintage German U-boat in Mar
de Plata a few weeks ago, and have sailed it back across

the Atlantic

now, to seek political asylum in Germany, as soon as the War's over
there....

"You say Germany? You gone goofy? It's a mess there, Jackson!"
"Not nearly the mess we left back home," the sad Argentine replies.

Long lines have appeared next to his mouth, lines learned
from living

next to thousands of horses, watching too many doomed colts and sun­
sets south of Rivadavia, where the true South begins. . . . "It's been a
mess since the colonels took over. Now, with Peron on his way . . . our

last hope was Accion Argentina," what's he talking about, Jesus
I'm

hungry, ". . . suppressed it a month after the coup . .
. now every­

body waits. Attending the street actions out of habit.
No real hope. We

decided to move before Peron got another portfolio. War, most likely.
He already has the descamisados, this will give him the Army

too you

see ... it's only a matter of time ... we could have gone to Uruguay,
waited him out-it's a tradition. But perhaps he will be in for a long

263

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time. Montevideo is swarming with failed exiles, and failed
hopes....

"

"Yeah, but Germany-that's the last place you want to go."
"Pero che, no sos argentino. . . ." A long look away, down the en­

gineered scars of Swiss avenues, looking for the South he left. Not the
same Argentine, Slothrop, that that Bob Eberle's seen toasts to Tanger­
ine raised in ev-ry bar across, now.... Squalidozzi wants to say: We ofall magical precipitates out of Europe's groaning, clouded alembic, we
are the thinnest, the most dangerous, the handiest to secular uses....
We tried to exterminate our Indians, like you: we wanted the closed
white version of reality we got-but even into the smokiest labyrinths,the furthest stacked density of midday balcony or courtyard and gate,the land has never let us forget.... But what he asks aloud is: "Here­
you look hungry. Have you eaten? I was about to go to supper. Would
you do me the honor?"

In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is ta­
pering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop's starving.

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper.The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible, fence­
less. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But
Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses
about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside.Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national
tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there
was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on theblank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at
Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been
dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the war­
rens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track,
the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that
first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas andsky....

"

"But-but bobwire," Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, justgobblin' away, "that's progress-you, you can't have open range for­
ever, you can't just stand in the way of progress-" yes, he is actually
going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon westernmovies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who's
springing for his meal.

Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks
once or twice. "In ordinary times," he wants to explain, "the center al­
ways wins. Its power grows with time, and that can't be reversed, not

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by ordinary means. Decentralizing, back toward anarchism, needs ex­
traordinary times ... this War-this incredible War-just for the mo­
ment has wiped out the proliferation of little states that's prevailed in
Germany for a thousand years. Wiped it clean. Opened it."

"Sure. For how long?"
"It won't last. Of course not. But for a few months . . . perhaps

there'll be peace by the autumn-disculpeme, the spring, I still haven't
got used to your hemisphere-for a moment of spring, perhaps....

"

"Yeah but-what're you gonna do, take over land and try to hold it?

They'll run you right off, podner."
"No. Taking land is building more fences. We want to leave it open.

We want it to grow, to change. In the openness of the German Zone,
our hope is limitless." Then, as if struck on the forehead, a sudden fast
glance, not at the door, but up at the ceiling- "So is our danger."

The U-boat right now is cruising around somewhere off of Spain,
staying submerged for much of the day, spending nights on the surface
to charge batteries, sneaking in now and then to refuel. Squalidozzi
won't go into the fueling arrangements in much detail, but there are ap­
parently connections of many years' standing with the Republican un­
derground-a community of grace, a gift of persistence.... Squali­
dozzi is in Zurich now contacting governments that might be willing,
for any number of reasons, to assist his anarchism-in-exile. He must get
a message to Geneva by tomorrow: from there word is relayed to Spain
and the submarine. But there are Peronist agents here in Zurich. He is

being watched. He can't risk betraying the contact in Geneva.
"I can help you out," Slothrop licking off his fingers, "but I'm short of

cash and-"

Squalidozzi names a sum that will payoff Mario Schweitar and keep
Slothrop fed for months to come.

"Half in front and I'm on the way."
The Argentine hands over message, addresses, money, and springs for

the check. They arrange to meet at the Kronenhalle in three days.
"Good luck."

"You too."
A last sad look from Squalidozzi alone at his table. A toss of forelock,

a fading of light.
The plane is a battered DC-3, chosen for its affinity for moonlight, the

kind expression on its windowed face, its darkness inside and outside.
He wakes up curled among the cargo, metal darkness, engine vibration

through his bones ... red light filtering very faint back through a bulk­
head from up forward. He crawls to a tiny window -and looks out. Alps

265

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in the moonlight. Kind of small ones, though, not as spectacular as he
figured on. Oh, well.... He settles back down on a soft excelsior bed,
lighting up one of Squalidozzi's corktips thinking, J eepers, not bad, guys
just jump in the airplane, go where they want . . . why stop at Geneva?
Sure, what about-well, that Spain? no wait, they're Fascists. South Sea
Islands! hmm. Full of Japs and GIs. Well Africa's the Dark Continent,
nothing there but natives, elephants, 'n' that Spencer Tracy. . . .

"There's nowhere to go, Slothrop, nowhere." The figure is huddled
against a crate, and shivering. Slothrop squints through the weak red
light. It is the well-known frontispiece face of insouciant adventurer
Richard Halliburton: but strangely altered. Down both the man's
cheeks runs a terrible rash, palimpsested over older pockmarks, in
whose symmetry Slothrop, had he a medical eye, could have read drug
reaction. Richard Halliburton's jodhpurs are torn and soiled, his bright
hair greasy now and hanging. He appears to be weeping silently, bend­
ing, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the nightskiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifyingand perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his
own shining reason for being. No more. No more.

Slothrop reaches, puts the cigarette out on the deck. How easy these
angel-white wood shavings can go up. Lie here in this rattling and
wrenched airplane, lie still as you can, damn fool, yup they've conned
you-conned you again. Richard Halliburton, Lowell Thomas, Rover
and Motor Boys, jaundiced stacks of National Geographies up in Ho­
gan's room must've all lied to him, and there was no one then, not even
a colonial ghost in the attic, to tell him different. . . .

Bump, skid, slew, pancake landing, fucking washouts from kite-Hyingschool, gray Swiss dawn light through little windows and every joint,muscle, and bone in Slothrop is sore. It's time to punch back in.
He gets off of the plane without incident, mingling into a yawning,

sour Hock of early passengers, delivery agents, airfield workers. Cointrin
in the early morning. Shocking green hills one side, brown city on theother. Pavements are slick and wet. Clouds blow slowly in the sky.Mont Blanc sez hi, lake sez howdy too, Slothrop buys 20 cigarettes and
a local paper, asks directions, gets in a tram that comes and with cold
air through doors and windows to wake him up goes rolling into the
City of Peace.

He's to meet his Argentine contact at the Cafe l'Eclipse, well off the
trolley lines, down a cobblestone street and into a tiny square sur­rounded by vegetable and fruit stalls under beige awnings, shops, othercafes, window-boxes, clean hosed sidewalks. Dogs go running in and out

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of the alleys. Slothrop sits with coffee, croissants, and newspaper. Pres­
ently the overcast burns off. The sun throws shadows across the square
nearly to where he's sitting with all antennas out. Nobody seems to be
watching. He waits. Shadows retreat, sun climbs then begins to fall, at
last his man shows up, exactly as described: suit of Buenos Aires day­
time black, mustache, goldrim glasses, and whistling an old tango by
Juan d'Arienzo. Slothrop makes a show of searching all his pockets,
comes up with the foreign bill Squalidozzi told him to use: frowns at it,
gets up, goes over.

Como no, senor, no problem changing a 50-peso note-offering a seat,
coming out with currency, notebooks, cards, pretty soon the tabletop's
littered with pieces of paper that eventually get sorted back into pock­
ets so that the man has Squalidozzi's message and Slothrop has one to

bring back to Squalidozzi. And that's that.
Back to Zurich on an afternoon train, sleeping most of the way. He

gets off at Schlieren, some ungodly dark hour, just in case They're
watching the Bahnhof in town, hitches a ride in as far as the St. Pe­
terhofstatt. Its great clock hangs over him and empty acres of streets in
what he now reads as dumb malignity. It connects to Ivy League quad­
rangles in his distant youth, clock-towers lit so dim the hour could never
be read, and a temptation, never so strong though as now, to surrender
to the darkening year, to embrace what he can of real terror to the hour
without a name (unless it's ... no ... NO ... ): it was vanity, vanity
as his Puritan forerunners had known it, bones and heart alert to Noth­

ing, Nothing underneath the college saxophones melding sweetly, white
blazers lipsticked about the lapels, smoke from nervous Fatimas, Castile

soap vaporizing off of shining hair, and mint kisses, and dewed carna­
tions. It was being come for just before dawn by pranksters younger
than he, dragged from bed, blindfolded, Hey Reinhardt, led out into the
autumnal cold, shadows and leaves underfoot, and the moment then of

doubt, the real possibility that they are something else-that none of it
was real before this moment: only elaborate theatre to fool you. But
now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left.
The agents are here for you at last. . . .

What better place than Zurich to find vanity again? It's Reformation

country, Zwingli's town, the man at the end of the encyclopedia, and
stone reminders are everywhere. Spies and big business, in their ele­
ment, move tirelessly among the grave markers. Be assured there are ex­

young men, here in this very city, faces Slothrop used to pass in the

quads, who got initiated at Harvard into the Puritan Mysteries: who
took oaths in dead earnest to respect and to act always in the name of

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Vanitas, Emptiness, their ruler ... who now according to life-plan
such-and-such have come here to Switzerland to work for Allen Dulles
and his "intelligence" network, which operates these days under the
title "Office of Strategic Services." But to initiates OSS is also a secret
acronym: as a mantra for times of immediate crisis they have been
taught to speak inwardly oss . . . oss, the late, corrupt, Dark-age Latin
word for bone....

Next day, when Slothrop meets Mario Schweitar at the Straggeli to
front him half his fee, he asks also for the location of J amf' s grave. And
that's where they arrange to close the deal, up in the mountains.

Squalidozzi doesn't show up at the Kronenhalle, or the Odeon, or
anyplace Slothrop will think to look in the days that follow. Disappear­
ances, in Zurich, are not unheard of. But Slothrop will keep going back,
just in case. The message is in Spanish, he can't make out more than a
word or two, but he'll hold on to it, there might be a chance to pass it
on. And, well, the anarchist persuasion appeals to him a little. Back
when Shays fought the federal troops across Massachusetts, there were
Slothrop Regulators patrolling Berkshire for the rebels, wearing sprigsof hemlock in their hats so you could tell them from the Government
soldiers. Federals stuck a tatter of white paper in theirs. Slothrops in
those days were not yet so much involved with paper, and the wholesale
slaughtering of trees. They were still for the living green, against the
dead white. Later they lost, or traded away, knowledge of which side
they'd been on. Tyrone here has inherited most of their bland ignorance
on the subject.

Back behind him now, wind blows through J amf' s crypt. Slothrop'sbeen camped here these past few nights, nearly out of money, waitingfor word from Schweitar. Out of the wind, huddled inside a couple ofSwiss army blankets he managed to promote, he's even been able to
sleep. Right on top of Mister Imipolex. The first night he was afraid to
fall asleep, afraid of a visit from Jamf, whose German-scientist mind
would be battered by Death to only the most brute reflexes, no way to
appeal to the dumb and grinning evil of the shell that was left ...
voices twittering with moonlight around his image, as step by step he,It, the Repressed, approaches. . . . waitaminute up out of sleep, facenaked, turning to the foreign gravestones, the what? what was it . . .
back again, almost to it, up again ... up, and back, that way, most ofthe early night.

There's no visit. It seems J amf is only dead. Slothrop woke next morn­
ing feeling, in spite of an empty stomach and a runny nose, better than

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he had in months. Seemed like he'd passed a test, not somebody else's
test, but one of his own, for a change.

The city below him, bathed now in a partial light, is a necropolis of
church spires and weathercocks, white castle-keep towers, broad build­
ings with mansard roofs and windows glimmering by thousands. This
forenoon the mountains are as translucent as ice. Later in the day they
will be blue heaps of wrinkled satin. The lake is mirror-smooth but
mountains and houses reflected down there remain strangely blurred,
with edges fine and combed as rain: a dream of Atlantis, of the Suggen­
thaI. Toy villages, desolate city of painted alabaster.... Slothrop hun­
kers down here in the cold curve of a mountain trail, packing and
lobbing idle snowballs, not much to do around here but smoke the last
butt of what for all he knows is the last Lucky Strike in all Switzer­
land....

Footfalls down the trail. Clinking galoshes. It is Mario Schweitar's de­
livery boy, with a big fat envelope. Slothrop pays him, chisels a cigarette
and some matches, and they part. Back at the crypt Slothrop relights a
small pile of kindling and pine boughs, warms up his hands, and begins
to thumb through the data. The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an
odor, one he knows but can't quite name, an aura that threatens to go
epileptic any second. The information is here-not as much as he
wanted (aw, how much was that?) but more than he hoped, being one
of those practical Yankees. In the weeks ahead, in those very few mo­
ments he'll be allowed to wallow in his past, he may even have time to
wish he hadn't read any of it. . . .

D D D D D D D

oran(!

Mr. Pointsman has decided to spend Whitsun by the sea. Feeling a bit
megalo these days, nothing to worry about really, never gets worse than,
oh perhaps the impression, whilst zooming along through the corridors
of "The White Visitation," that all the others seem to be frozen in atti­
tudes of unmistakable parkinsonism, with himself the only alert, un­
palsied one remaining. It is peacetime again now, no room for the pi­
geons in Trafalgar Square on V-E Night, everyone at the facility that
day mad drunk and hugging and kissing, except for the Blavatskian
wing of Psi Section, who were off on a White Lotos Day pilgrimage to
19 Avenue Road, St. John's Wood.

Now there's time again for holidays. Though Pointsman does feel a

269

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certain obligation to go relax, there is also, of course, The Crisis. A
leader must show self-possession, up to and including a holiday mood, in
the midst of Crisis.

There's now been no word of Slothrop for nearly a month, since the
fumbling asses in military intelligence lost him in Zurich. Pointsman is a
bit browned-off with the Firm. His clever strategy appears to've failed.
In first discussions with Clive Mossmoon and the others, it seemed fool­
proof: to let Slothrop escape from the Casino Hermann Goering, and
then rely on Secret Service to keep him under surveillance instead of
PISCES. An economy move. The surveillance bill is the most excruci­
ating thorn in the crown of funding problems he seems condemned to
wear for the duration of this project. Damned funding is going to be his
downfall, if Slothrop doesn't drive him insane first.

Pointsman has blundered. Hasn't even the Tennysonian comfort of
saying "someone" has blundered. No, it was he and he alone who au­
thorized the Anglo-American team of Harvey Speed and Floyd Perdoo
to investigate a random sample of Slothropian sex adventures. Budget
was available, and what harm could it do? They went off practically
skipping, obsessive as Munchkins, out into the erotic Poisson. Don Gio­
vanni's map of Europe-640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France,
91 in Turkey but, but, but-in Spain! in Spain, l003!-is Slothrop's map
of London, and the two gumshoes become so infected with the pre­
vailing fondness out here for mindless pleasures that they presently are
passing whole afternoons sitting out in restaurant gardens dawdling
over chrysanthemum salads and mutton casseroles, or larking at the
fruit monger's-"Hey Speed, look, canteloupes! I haven't seen one of
them since the Third Term-wow, smell this one, it's beautiful! Say,
how about a canteloupe, Speed? Huh? Come on."

"Excellent idea, Perdoo, excellent."
"Uh ... Oh, well you pick out the one you want, okay?"
"The one?"
"Yeah. This is the one," turning it to show him as the faces of threat­

ened girls are roughly turned by villains, "that I picked out, see?"
"But but I thought we were both going to-" gesturing feebly towardwhat he still cannot quite accept as Perdoo's melon, in whose intaglio

net now, as among craters of the pale moon, a face is indeed emerging,the face of a captive woman with eyes cast downward, lids above as
smooth as Persian ceilings. . . .

"Well, no, I usually, uh-" this is embarrassing for Perdoo, it's like
being called on to, to justify eating an apple, or even popping a grapeinto your mouth-"just, well, sort of, eat them ... whole, you know,"

270

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chuckling in what he hopes is a friendly way, to indicate politely the so­
cial oddness of this discussion-

-but the chuckle is taken the wrong way by Speed: taken as evi­
dence of mental instability in this slightly bucktoothed and angular
American, who is dancing now from stoop to English stoop, lank as a
street-puppet in the wind. Shaking his head, he nevertheless selects his
own whole canteloupe, realizes he's been left to pay the bill, which is
exorbitant, and goes skipping off after Perdoo, hippety hop both of
them, tra-la-la-la slam right into another dead end:

"Jenny? No-no Jenny here....
"

"A Jennifer, perhaps? Genevieve?"
"Ginny" (it could've been misspelled), "Virginia?"
"If you gentlemen are looking for a good time-" Her grin, her red,

maniacally good-morning-and-I-mean-good! grin, is wide enough to hold
them both right, shivering, smiling, here, and she's old enough to be
their Mother-their joint Mother, combining the worst traits of Mrs.
Perdoo and Mrs. Speed-in fact she is turning now into just that, even
as they watch. These wrecked seas are full of temptresses-it's watery
and wanton out here all right. As the two gawking soft-boiled shamuses
are drawn along into her aura, winking right here in the street, brassy
with henna-glare, with passion-flowers on rayon-just before the last
stumbling surrender into the lunacy of her purple eyes, they allow
themselves, for the sinful tickle of it, a last thought of the project they're
supposed to be here on-Slothropian Episodic Zone, Weekly Historical
Observations (SEZ WHO)-a thought that comes running out in the

guise of a clown, a vulgar, loose-ends clown bespangled with wordless
jokes about body juices, bald-headed, an amazing fall of nose-hair out
both nostrils which he has put into braids and tied with acid-green
bows-a scrabbling dash now out past sandbags and falling curtain,
trying to get back his breath, to garble to them in a high unpleasant
screech: "No Jenny. No Sally W. No Cybele. No Angela. No Catherine.
No Lucy. No Gretchen. When are you going to see it? When are you
going to see it?"

No "Darlene" either. That came in yesterday. They traced the name
as far as the residence of a Mrs. Quoad. But the flashy young divorcee
never, she declared, even knew that English children were named
"Darlene." She was dreadfully sorry. Mrs. Quoad spent her days loung­
ing about a rather pedicured Mayfair address, and both investigators
felt relieved to be out of the neighborhood. . . .

When are you going to see it? Pointsman sees it immediately. But he
"sees" it in the way you would walking into your bedroom to be jumped

271

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on, out of a bit of penumbra on your ceiling, by a gigantic moray eel, its
teeth in full imbecile death-smile, breathing, in its fall onto your open
face, a long human sound that you know, horribly, to be a sexual
sigh ....

That is to say, Pointsman avoids the matter-as reflexively as he
would any nightmare. Should this one turn out not to be a fantasy but
real, well . . .

"The data, so far, are incomplete." This ought to be prominently
stressed in all statements. "We admit that the early data seem to show,"
remember, act sincere, "a number of cases where the names on Slo­
throp's map do not appear to have counterparts in the body of fact
we've been able to establish along his time-line here in London. Estab­
lish so far, that is. These are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs
without the Ys so to speak, ranks without files. Difficult to know how far
into one 'far enough' really is.

"And what if many-even if most-of the Slothropian stars are
proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real
events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did
young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, faCing a similar viola­
tion of probability-all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might
have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You
must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly
defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this."

So far, it is Pointsrnan's burden alone. The solitude of a Fuhrer: he
feels himself growing strong in the rays of this dark companion to his
public star now on the rise ... but he doesn't want to share it, no not
just yet ....

Meetings of the staff, his staff, grow worse and worse than useless.
They bog down into endless arguments about trivia-whether or not to
rename PISCES now that the Surrender has been Expedited, what sort
of letterhead, if any, to adopt. The representative from Shell Mex
House, Mr. Dennis Joint, wants to put the program under Special Pro­
jectiles Operations Group (SPOG), as an adjunct of the British rocket­
scavenging effort, Operation Backfire, which is based out of Cuxhaven
on the North Sea. Every other day brings a fresh attempt, from some
quarter, to reconstitute or even dissolve PISCES. Pointsman is finding it
much easier of late to slip into a l' etat c'est moi frame of mind-who
else is doing anything? isn't he holding it all together, often with noth­
ing beyond his own raw will . . . ?

Shell Mex House, naturally, is frantic about Slothrop's disappearance.
Here's a man running loose who knows everything it's possible to know

272

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-not only about the A4, but about what Great Britain knows about the
A4· Zurich teems with Soviet agents. What if they've already got Slo­
throp? They took Peenemiinde in the spring, it appears now they will be
given the central rocket works at Nordhausen, another of the dealings at
Yalta.... At least three agencies, VIAM, TsAGI, and NISO, plus engi­
neers working out of other commissariats, are even now in Soviet-occu­
pied Germany with lists of personnel and equipment to be taken east.
Inside the SHAEF sphere of influence, American Army Ordnance, and
a host of competing research teams, are all busy collecting everything in
sight. They've already rounded up von Braun and 500 others, and in­
terned them at Garmisch. What if they get hold of Slothrop?

There have also been, aggravating the Crisis, defections: Rollo Groast
assumed back into the Society for Psychical Research, Treacle setting
up a practice, Myron Grunton again a full-time wireless personality.
Mexico has begun to grow distant. The Borgesius woman still performs
her nocturnal duties, but with the Brigadier ill now (has the old fool
been forgetting his antibiotics? Must Pointsman do everything?) she's
beginning to fret. Of course Ceza Hozsavolgyi is still with the project. A
fanatic. Rozsavolgyi will never leave.

So. A holiday by the sea. For political reasons, the party is made up of
Pointsman, Mexico, Mexico's girl, Dennis Joint, and Katje Borgesius.
Pointsman wears rope-soled shoes, his prewar bowler, and a rare smile.
The weather is not ideal. An overcast, a wind that will be chilly by mid­
afternoon. A smell of ozone blows up from the Dodgem cars out of the
gray steel girderwork along the promenade, along with smells of
shellfish on the barrows, and of salt sea. The pebbled beach is crowded
with families: shoeless fathers in lounge suits and high white collars,
mothers in blouses and skirts startled out of war-long camphor sleep,
kids running all over in sunsuits, nappies, rompers, short pants, knee
socks, Eton hats. There are ice cream, sweets, Cokes, cockles, oysters
and shrimps with salt and sauce. The pinball machines writhe under the
handling of fanatical servicemen and their girls, throwing body-english,
cursing, groaning as the bright balls drum down the wood obstacle
courses through ka-chungs, flashing lights, thudding flippers. The don­
keys hee-haw and shit, the children walk in it and their parents scream.
Men sag in striped canvas chairs talking business, sports, sex, but most
usually politics. An organ grinder plays Rossini's overture to La Gazza
Ladra (which, as we shall see later, in Berlin, marks a high point in
music which everybody ignored, preferring Beethoven, who never got
further than statements of intention), and here without snaredrums or
the sonority of brasses the piece is mellow, full of hope, promising lav-

273

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ender twilights, stainless steel pavilions and everyone elevated at last to
aristocracy, and love without payment of any kind. . . .

It was Pointsman's plan today not to talk shop, but to let the conver­
sation flow more or less organically. Wait for others to betray them­
selves. But there is shyness, or constraint, among them all. Talk is mini­
mal. Dennis Joint is watching Katje with a horny smile, with now and
then a suspicious stare for Roger Mexico. Mexico meantime has his
troubles with Jessica-more and more often these days-and at the mo­
ment the two aren't even looking at each other. Katje Borgesius has her
eyes far out to sea, and there is no telling what is going on with this one.
In some dim way, Pointsman, though he can't see that she has any lever­
age at all, is still afraid of her. There is still a lot he doesn't know. Per­
haps what's bothering him most right now is her connection, if any, with
Pirate Prentice. Prentice has been down to "The White Visitation" sev­
eral times asking rather pointed questions about her. When PISCES re­
cently opened its new branch office in London (which some wag, prob­
ably that young imbecile Webley Silvernail, has already dubbed
"Twelfth House") Prentice began hanging heavily around up there, ro­
mancing secretaries, trying for a peep into this file or that. . . . What's
up? What afterlife have the Firm found, this side of V - E Day? What
does Prentice want . . . what's his price? Is he in love with La Borge­
sius here? Is it possible for this woman to be in love? Love? Oh, it's
enough to make you scream. What would her idea of love be....

"Mexico," grabbing the young statistician's arm.
"Eh?" Roger interrupted eying a lovely looks a bit like Rita Hayworth

in a one-piece floral number with straps that X across her lean
back. ...

"Mexico, I think I am hallucinating."
"Oh, really? You think you are? What are you seeing?"
"Mexico, I see . . . I see. . . . What do you mean, what am I seeing,

you nit? It's what I'm hearing."
"Well, what are you hearing, then." A touch of peevishness to Roger

now.

"Right now I'm hearing you, saying, 'What are you hearing, then.'
And I don't like it!"

"Why not."
"Because: unpleasant as this hallucination is, I find I still much prefer

it to the sound of your voice."
Now this is odd behavior from anybody, but from usually correct Mr.

Pointsman, it is enough to stop this mutually-paranoid party in their

rrack.
Golls
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tracks. Nearby is a Wheel of Fortune, with Lucky Strike packs, kewpie
dolls and candy bars stuffed among the spokes.

"I say, what d'you think?" blond, hale-fellow Dennis Joint nudges
Katje with an elbow as broad as a knee. In his profession he has learned
to make instant evaluations of those with whom he deals. He judges old

Katje here to be a jolly girl, out for a spot of fun. Yes, leadership mate­
rial here, definitely. "Hasn't he gone a bit mental suddenly?" Trying to

keep his voice down, grinning in athletic paranoia vaguely over in the

peculiar Pavlovian's direction-not right at him you understand, eye
contact might be suicidal folly given his state of mind. . . .

Meantime, Jessica has gone into her Fay Wray number. This is a kind
of protective paralysis, akin to your own response when the moray eel

jumps you from the ceiling. But this is for the Fist of the Ape, for the

lights of electric New York white-waying into the room you thought was
safe, could never be penetrated . . . for the coarse black hair, the ten­
dons of need, of tragic love. . . .

"Yeah well," as film critic Mitchell Prettyplace puts it in his definitive
18-volume study of King Kong, "you know, he did love her, folks." Pro­

ceeding from this thesis, it appears that Prettyplace has left nothing out,

every shot including out-takes raked through for every last
bit of sym­

bolism, exhaustive biographies of everyone connected with the film, ex­

tras, grips, lab people . . . even interviews with King Kong Kultists,
who to be eligible for membership must have seen the movie at least
100 times and be prepared to pass an 8-hour entrance exam.... And

yet, and yet: there is Murphy's Law to consider, that brash
Irish prole­

tarian restatement of Codel's Theorem-when everything has been
taken care of, when nothing can go wrong, or even surprise us . . . some­

thing will. So the permutations 'n' combinations of Pudding's Things
That Can Happen in European Politics for 1931, the year of Codel's

Theorem, don't give Hitler an outside chance. So, when laws of heredity
are laid down, mutants will be born. Even as determinist a piece of

hardware as the A4 rocket will begin spontaneously generating items
like the "S-Cerat" Slothrop thinks he's chasing like a grail. And so, too,
the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from

the

tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to gener­

ate its own children, running around inside Cermany even now-the

Schwarzkommando, whom Mitchell Prettyplace, even, could not antici­

pate.
At PISCES it is widely believed that the Schwarzkommando have

been summoned, in the way demons may be gathered in, called up to

275

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the light of day and earth by the now defunct Operation Black Wing.
You can bet Psi Section was giggling about this for a while. Who could
have guessed there'd be real black rocket troops? That a story made up
to scare last year's enemy should prove to be literally true-and no way
now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward: no
one ever knew the complete spell-different people knew different
parts of it, that's what teamwork is.... By the time it occurs to them
to look back through the Most Secret documentation surrounding Oper­
ation Black Wing, to try and get some idea of how this all might've hap­
pened, they will find, curiously, that certain critical documents are ei­
ther missing or have been updated past the end of the Operation, and
that it is impossible at this late date to reconstruct the spell at all,
though there will be the usual elegant and bad-poetic speculation. Even
earlier speculation will be lopped and tranquilized. Nothing will re­
main, for example, of the tentative findings of Freudian Edwin Treacle
and his lot, who toward the end even found themselves at odds with
their own minority, the psychoanalytic wing of Psi Section. It began as a
search for some measurable basis for the common experience of being
haunted by the dead. After a while colleagues began to put in chits re­
questing they be transferred out. Unpleasantries such as "It's beginning
to sound like the Tavistock Institute around here" began muttering up
and down the basement halls. Palace revolts, many of them conceived
in ornamentally splendid flashes of paranoia, brought locksmiths and
welders in by droves, led to mysterious shortages of office supplies, even
of water and heat . . . none of which kept Treacle and lot from
carrying on in a Freudian, not to mention Jungian frame of mind. Word
of the Schwarzkommandos real existence reached them a week before
V-E Day. Individual events, who really said what to whom, have been
lost in the frenzy of accusation, crying, nervous breakdowns, and areas
of bad taste that followed. Someone remembers Gavin Trefoil, face as
blue as Krishna, running through the topiary trees stark naked, and
Treacle chasing him with an ax, screaming "Giant ape? I'll show you a
giant ape all right!"

Indeed he would show the critter to many of us, though we would not
look. In his innocence he saw no reason why co-workers on an office
project should not practice self-criticism with the same rigor as revolu­
tionary cells do. He had not meant to offend sensibilities, only to show
the others, decent fellows all, that their feelings about blackness were
tied to feelings about shit, and feelings about shit to feelings about pu­
trefaction and death. It seemed to him so clear . . . why wouldn't theylisten? Why wouldn't they admit that their repressions had, in a sense

276

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that Europe in the last weary stages of its perversion of magic has lost,
had incarnated real and living men, likely (according to the best intelli­
gence) in possession of real and living weapons, as the dead father who
never slept with you, Penelope, returns night after night to your bed,
trying to snuggle in behind you . . . or as your unborn child wakes you,
crying in the night and you feel its ghost-lips at your breast ... they are
real, they are living, as you pretend to scream inside the Fist of the Ape
. . . but looking over now at the much more likely candidate, cream­
skinned Katje under the Wheel of Fortune, who is herself getting ready
now to bolt down the beach and into the relative calm of the switch­

back railway. Points man is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman
is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave
her? In a control that is out of control. Not even back in the leather and

pain of gemutlich Captain Blicero's world has she felt as terrified as
now.

Roger Mexico is taking it personally, oh-I-say, only trying to
help....

What the somewhat disconnected Mr. Pointsman has been hearing all
this time is a voice, strangely familiar, a voice he once imagined a face
in a well-known news photograph from the War to have:

"Here is what you have to do. You need Mexico now, more than ever.

Your winter anxieties about the End of History seem now all well com­
forted to rest, part of your biography now like any old bad dream. But
like Lord Acton always sez, History is not woven by innocent hands.
Mexico's girl friend there is a threat to your whole enterprise. He will
do anything to hold on. Scowling and even cursing him she will never­
theless seduce him away, into a civilian fogbank in which you will lose
him and never find him-not unless you act now, Pointsman. Operation
Backfire is sending ATS girls out to the Zone now. Rocket girls: secreta­
rial and even minor technical duties at the Cuxhaven test range. You

have only to drop a word to SPOG, through Dennis Joint here, and Jes­
sica Swanlake is out of your way. Mexico may complain for a while, but
all the more reason for him, given the proper direction, to Lose Himself
In His Work, eh? Remember the eloquent words of Sir Denis Nayland
Smith to young Alan Sterling, whose fiancee is in the clutches of the in­
sidious yellow Adversary: 'I have been through the sort of fires which
are burning you now, Sterling, and I have always found that work was
the best ointment for the burns.' And we both know what Nayland
Smith represents, mm? don't we."

"1 do," sez Pointsman, aloud, "but I can't really say that you do, can
I, if I don't even know who you are, you see."

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This strange outburst does not reassure Pointsman's companions.
They begin to edge away, in definite alarm. "We should find a doctor,"
murmurs Dennis Joint, winking at Katje like a blond crewcut Groucho
Marx. Jessica, forgetting her sulk, takes Roger's arm.

"You see, you see," the voice starts up again, "she feels that she's pro­
tecting him, against you. How many chances does one get to be a syn­
thesis, Pointsman? East and West, together in the same bloke? You can
not only be Nayland Smith, giving a young lad in a funk wholesome ad­
vice about the virtues of work, but you also, at the same time, get to be
Fu Manchu! eh? the one who has the young lady in his power! How's
that? Protagonist and antagonist in one. I'd jump at it, if I were you."

Pointsman is about to retort something like, "But you're not me,"
only he sees how the others all seem to be goggling at him. "Oh, ha, ha,"
he sez instead. "Talking to myself, here. Little-sort of-eccentricity,
heh, heh."

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We are safely past the days of the Eis-Heiligen-St. Pancratius, St. Ser­
vatius, St. Bonifacius, die kalte Sophie . . . they hover in clouds above
the vineyards, holy beings of ice, ready with a breath, an intention, to
ruin the year with frost and cold. In certain years, especially War years,
they are short on charity, peevish, smug in their power: not quite saintly
or even Christian. The prayers of growers, pickers and wine enthusiasts
must reach them, but there's no telling how the ice-saints feel-coarse

laughter, pagan annoyance, who understands this rear-guard who pre­
serve winter against the revolutionaries of May?

They found the countryside, this year, at peace by a scant few days.
Already vines are beginning to grow back over dragon's teeth, fallen

Stukas, burned tanks. The sun warms the hillsides, the rivers fall bright
as wine. The saints have refrained. Nights have been mild. The frost
didn't come. It is the spring of peace. The vintage, God granting at least

a hundred days of sun, will be fine.
Nordhausen puts less credence in the ice-saints than do

wine regions
farther south, but even here the season looks promising. Rain blows

scattering out over the town as Slothrop comes in in the early morning,
bare feet, blistering and reblistering, cooled here in the wet grass.
There's sunlight up on the mountains. His shoes got lifted by some DP
with fingers lighter than dreams, on one of the many trains since the
Swiss border, someplace rolling across Bavaria fast asleep. Whoever it
was left a red tulip between Slothrop's toes. He has taken it for a sign. A
reminder of Katje.

Signs will find him here in the Zone, and ancestors will reassert
them­

selves. It's like going to that Darkest Africa to study the natives there,
and finding their quaint superstitions taking you over. In fact, funny
thing, Slothrop just the other night ran into an African, the first one

he

ever met in his life. Their discussion on top of the freight car in the

moonlight lasted only a minute or two. Small talk for the sudden
back­

ground departure of Major Duane Marvy over the side
bounce-clatter

down the cobbled fill into the valley-well, certainly nothing was said
then of any Heroro beliefs about ancestors.

Yet he feels his own,

stronger now as borders fall away and the Zone envelops him,
his own

WASPs in buckled black, who heard God clamoring to them in every
turn of a leaf or cow loose among apple orchards in autumn. . . .

Signs of Katje, and doubles too. One night he sat in a
children's play

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house on an abandoned estate, feeding a fire from the hair of a blonde
doll with lapis lazuli eyes. He kept those eyes. A few days later he
traded them for a ride and half a boiled potato. Dogs barked far away,
summerwind blew in the birches. He was on one of the main arterials of
the spring's last dissolution and retreat. Somewhere nearby, one of
Major-General Kammler's rocket units had together found corporate
death, leaving in their crippled military rage pieces, modules, airframe
sections, batteries rotting, paper secrets rained back into slurry. Slo­
throp follows. Any clue's good enough to hop a train for. . . .

The doll's hair was human. The smell of it burning is horrible. Slo­
throp hears movement from the other side of the fire. A ratcheting
noise-he grabs his blanket, ready to vault away out the empty window
frame, expecting a grenade. Instead one of these little brightly painted
German toys, an orangutan on wheels comes ki-ki-ki-ing into the fire­
light, spastic, head lolling, face in an idiot's grin, steel knuckles scraping
the floor. It rolls nearly into the fire before the clockwork runs down,
the wagging head coming to dead center to stare at Slothrop.

He feeds the fire another tuft of golden hair. "Evening."
Laughter, somewhere. A child. But old laughter.
"Come on out, I'm harmless."
The ape is followed by a tiny black crow with a red beak, also on

wheels, hopping, cawing, flapping metal wings.
"Why are you burning my doll's hair?"
"Well, it's not her own hair, you know."
"Father said it belonged to a Russian [ewess."
"Why don't you come in to the fire?"
"Hurts my eyes." Winding again. Nothing moves. But a music box

begins to play. The tune is minor and precise. "Dance with me."
"I can't see you."
"Here." Out of the fire's pale, a tiny frost-flower. He reaches and just

manages to find her hand, to grasp her little waist. They begin their
stately dance. He can't even tell if he's leading.

He never saw her face. She felt like voile and organdy.
"Nice dress."
"I wore it for my first communion." The fire died presently, leaving

starlight and a faint glow over some town to the east, through windows
whose panes were all gone. The music box still played, beyond the run­
ning time, it seemed, of an ordinary spring. Their feet moved over
clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits and kit­
tens. The geometrical path took them among ballooning, ripped arrases,
smelling of dust and an older bestiary than the one by the fire . . . uni-

282



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blonot corns, chimaeras ... and what had he seen festooning the child-sized
ater 01 entranceway? Garlic bulbs? Wait-weren't they to keep away oam-
r awa)'. pires? A faint garlic smell reached him exactly then, an inbreaking of
eria��f Balkan blood on the air of his north, as he turned back to her to ask if

one �f she really was Katje, the lovely little Queen of Transylvania. But the

�oratt music had run down. She had vaporized from his arms.
irfram1 Well here he is skidded out onto the Zone like a planchette on a

ry, �I� Ouija board, and what shows up inside the empty circle in his
brain

might string together into a message, might not, he'll just have to
see.

Ie, �I� But he can feel a sensitive's fingers, resting lightly but sure on his days,

tcneo�; and he thinks of them as Katje's.
\\in��� He's still Ian Scuffiing, war (peace?) correspondent, though back in

�aint� British uniform these days, with plenty of time on these trains to
hash

tnefut, over in his mind the information Mario Schweitar bootlegged for him

crarll1 back there in Zurich. There is a fat
file on Imipolex G, and it seems to

omit point to Nordhausen. The engineer on the customer
end of the Imipolex

contract was one Franz Pokler, He came to Nordhausen in early '44, as
the rocket was going into mass production. He was billeted in the Mit­

telwerke, an underground factory complex run largely by the SS. No
word on where he went when the plant was evacuated in February and

rul��1 March. But Ian Scuffiing, ace reporter, will be sure to find a clue
down

in the Mittelwerke.

Slothrop sat in the swaying car with thirty other cold and
tattered

souls, eyes all pupil, lips cratered with sores. They were singing, some
of

them. A lot of them kids. It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop
will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the

lic� road, in a dozen variations:

Jea\1�!
'nOO\\I
eM'

dOl1l
nd �I·
rralll,

,urn'

If you see a train this evening,
Far away against the sky,
Lie down in your wooden blanket,

Sleep, and let the train go by.
Trains have called us, every midnight,
From a thousand miles away,
Trains that pass through empty cities,
Trains that have no place to stay.

No one drives the locomotive,
Noone tends the staring light,
Trains have never needed riders,
Trains belong to bitter night.

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Railway stations stand deserted,
Rights-of-way lie clear and cold:
What we left them, trains inherit,
Trains go on, and we grow old.

Let them cry like cheated lovers,
Let their cries find only wind.
Trains are meant for night and ruin.
We are meant for song, and sin.

Pipes are passing around. Smoke hangs from the damp wood slats, is
whipped out cracks into the night slipstream. Children wheeze in their
sleep, the rachitic babies cry . . . now and then the mothers exchange aword. Slothrop huddles inside his paper misfortune.

The Swiss firm's dossier on L. (for Laszlo) J amf listed all his assets at
the time he came to work in Zurich. Apparently he had sat-as token
scientist-on the board of directors of the Crossli Chemical Corpora­tion as late as 1924. Among stock options and pieces of this firm andthat back in Germany-pieces to be gathered in over the next year ortwo by the octopus I G-was the record of a transaction between J amfand Mr. Lyle Bland, of Boston, Massachusetts.

On the beam, Jackson. Lyle Bland is a name he knows, all right. Anda name that also shows up often in the private records J amf kept of hisown business deals. Seems that Bland, during the early twenties, washeavily involved with the Hugo Stinnes operation in Germany. Stinnes,while he lasted, was the Wunderkind of European finance. Based out ofthe Ruhr, where his family had been coal barons for generations, youngStinnes built up a good-sized empire of steel, gas, electric and water
power, streetcars and barge lines before he was 30. During the WorldWar he worked closely with Walter Rathenau, who was ramrodding thewhole economy then. After the war Stinnes managed to put the hori­zontal electrical trust of Siemens-Schuchert together with the coal andiron supplies of the Rheinelbe Union into a super-cartel that was bothhorizontal and vertical, and to buy into just about everything else­shipyards, steamship lines, hotels, restaurants, forests, pulp mills, news­
papers-meantime also speculating in currency, buying foreign moneywith marks borrowed from the Reichsbank, driving the mark down andthen paying off the loans at a fraction of the original figure. More than
anyone financier he was blamed for the Inflation. Those were the dayswhen you carried marks around in wheelbarrows to your daily shoppingand used them for toilet paper, assuming you had anything to shit. Stin-

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nes's foreign connections went all over the world-Brazil, the East In­

dies, the United States-businessmen like Lyle Bland found his growth
rate irresistible. The theory going around at the time was that Stinnes
was conspiring with Krupp, Thyssen, and others to ruin the mark and so

get Germany out of paying her war debts.
Bland's connection was vague. Jamfs records mention that he had

negotiated contracts for supplying tons of private currency
known as

Notgeld to Stinnes and colleagues, as well as "Mefo bills" to the
Wei­

mar Republic-another of Hjalmar Schacht's many bookkeeping dodges
to keep official records clear of any hint of weapons procurement
banned under the terms of Versailles. Some of these banknote contracts

were let to a certain Massachusetts paper mill, on whose board Lyle
Bland happened to sit.

The name of this contractor was the Slothrop Paper Company.
He reads his name without that much surprise. It belongs here, as do

the most minor details during deja vu. Instead of any sudden incidence

of light (even in the shape of a human being: golden
and monitory

light), as he stares at these eight ink marks, there passes
a disagreeable

stomach episode, a dread tangible as vomit beginning to assert
itself­

the same vertigo that overtook him one day long ago in the
Himmler­

Spielsaal. A gasbag surrounds his head, rubbery, vast, pushing
in from

all sides, that feeling we know, yes, but ... He is also getting a hardon,
for no immediate reason. And there's that smell again, a smell from be­

fore his conscious memory begins, a soft and chemical smell, threaten­

ing, haunting, not a smell to be found out in the
world-it is the breath

of the Forbidden Wing . . . essence of all the still figures waiting
for

him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot
survive.

Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay help­
less....

His erection hums from a certain distance, like an instrument in­

stalled, wired by Them into his body as a colonial outpost
here in our

raw and clamorous world, another office representing Their white Me­

tropolis far away. . . .
A sad story, all right. Slothrop, very nervous by now,

reads on. Lyle
Bland, eh? Well, sure, that fits. He can recall dimly once or twice

hav­

ing seen Uncle Lyle. The man used to come to visit
his father, affable,

fair-haired, a hustler in the regional Jim Fisk style. Bland was always

picking young Tyrone up and swinging him around by
his feet. That

was O.K.-Slothrop had no special commitment at the time to right
side

up.
From what it sez here, Bland either saw the Stinnes crash coming be-

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fore most of its other victims, or was just naturally nervous. Early in '23
he began to sell off his interests in the Stinnes operations. One of these
sales was made through Laszlo Jamf to the Crossli Chemical Corpora­
tion (later Psychochemie AG). One of the assets transferred in this sale
was "all interest in Schwarzknabe enterprise. Seller agrees to continue
surveillance duties until such time as Schwindel operative can be re­
lieved by purchaser equivalent, acceptability to be determined byseller."

Jamf's codebook happens to be in the dossier. Part of the man's per­
sonality structure, after all. "Schwindel" was his code name for HugoStinnes. Clever sense of humor, the old fart. Across from "Schwarz­
knabe," now, are the initials "T.S."

Well, holy cow, Slothrop reckons, that must be me, huh. Barring theoutside possibility of Tough Shit.
Listed as a "Schwarzknabe" liability is the unpaid remainder of a bill

to Harvard University, about $5000 worth including the interest, "as
per agreement (oral) with Schwarzvater."

"Schwarzvater" is the code word for "B.S." Which, barring the out­side possibility of Bull Shit, seems to be Slothrop's own father, Broder­
ick. Blackfather Slothrop.

Nice way to find out your father made a deal 20 years ago with some­
body to spring for your education. Come to think of it, Slothrop nevercould quite put the announcements, all through the Depression, of im­minent family ruin, together with the comfort he enjoyed at Harvard.
Well, now, what was the deal between his father and Bland? I've been
sold, Jesus Christ I've been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef. Sur­
veillance? Stinnes, like every industrial emperor, had his own company
spy system. So did the IG. Does this mean Slothrop has been under their
observation-m-maybe since he was born? Yaahhh . . .

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with
a simple Fuck You. . . . A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edgeof his memory. He can't see it, can't make it out. Doesn't want to. It is
allied with the Worst Thing.

He knows what the smell has to be: though according to these papersit would have been too early for it, though he has never come across anyof the stuff among the daytime coordinates of his life, still, down here,back here in the warm dark, among early shapes where the clocks and
calendars don't mean too much, he knows that what's haunting him
now will prove to be the smell of Imipolex G.

Then there's this recent dream he is afraid of having again. He was inhis old room, back home. A summer afternoon of lilacs and bees, and
286

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warm air through an open window. Slothrop had found a very old dic­

tionary of technical German. It fell open to a certain page prickling
with black-face type. Reading down the page, he would come to JAMF.
The definition would read: I. He woke begging It no-but even after

waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him again,
any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps

It has

warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slo­

throp'll be feeling now.
What he does is lurch to his feet, over to the door of the freight car,

which is going up a grade. He drags open the door, slips out-action,
action-and mounts a ladder to the roof. A foot from his face, this dou­

ble row of shiny bright teeth hangs in the air. Just what he needs. It is

Major Marvy of U.S. Army Ordnance, leader of Marvy's Mothers,
the

meanest-ass technical intelligence team in this whole fuckin' Zone, mis­
ter. Slothrop can call him Duane, if he wants. "Boogie, boogie, boogie!
Catch all 'em jungle bunnies back 'ere in 'at next car! Sheee-oo!"

"Wait a minute," sez Slothrop, "I think I've been asleep or some­

thing." His feet are cold. This Marvy is really fat. Pants
bloused into

shiny combat boots, roll of fat hanging over a web belt where
he keeps

his sunglasses and .45, hornrims, hair slicked back, eyes like safety
valves that pop out at you whenever-as

now-the pressure in his head

gets too high.
Marvy hitched a lift on a P-47 from Paris far as Kassel, got coupled

onto this train here west of Heiligenstadt. He's headed for the Mittel­

werke, like Ian Scuffling. Needs to coordinate with some Project
Hermes people from General Electric. Sure makes him nervous, those

niggers next door. "Hey, ought to be a good story for you people.
Warn

the folks back home."

"Are they GIs?"
"Shit no. Kraut. South-West African. Something. You mean you don't

know about that? Come on. Aw. Limey intelligence sure ain't too intel­

ligent, hahah, no offense understand. I thought the whole world
knew."

Follows a lurid tale-which sounds like something SHAEF made up,
Coebbels's less than giddy imagination reaching no further than Alpine
Redoubts and such-of Hitler's scheme for setting up a Nazi empire in

black Africa, which fell through after Old Blood 'n' Guts handed Rom­
mel's ass to him in the desert.

"

'Here's yer ass, General.' 'Ach du
lieber!

Mein Arsch! YAH-hahaha ...
'"

clutching comically at the seat of

his own large trousers. Well, the black cadres had no more future
in Af­

rica, stayed on in Germany as governments-in-exile without even
official

recognition, drifted somehow into the ordnance branch
of the German

287

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Army, and pretty soon learned how to be rocket technicians. Now they
were just running loose. Wild. Haven't been interned as P /Ws, far as
Marvy knows they haven't even been disarmed. "Not enough we have
to worry about Russkys, frogs, limeys-hey, beg pardon, buddy. Now
we got not just niggers you see, but kraut niggers. Well, Jesus. V-E Day
just about everyplace you had a rocket, you had you a nigger. Never any
all-boogie batteries, understand. Even the krauts couldn't be that daffy!
One battery, that's 81 men, plus all your support, your launch-control,
power, propellants, your surveying-champ, that'd sure be one heap 0'
niggers all in one place. But are they still all scattered out, like theywere? You find out, you got you a scoop, friend. Cause if they're gettin'
together now, oh dat's bi-i-i-g trouble! There's at least two dozen in that
car-right down there, look. A-and they're headin' for Nordhausen,
pal!" a fat finger-poke in the chest with each word, "hah? Whatcha
think they have in mind? You know what I think? They have a plan.
Yeah. I think it's rockets. Don't ask me how, it's just something I feel
here, in m'heart, A-and you know, that's awful dangerous. You can't
trust them- With rockets? They're a childlike race. Brains are smaller."

"But our patience," suggests a calm voice now out of the darkness,
"our patience is enormous, though perhaps not unlimited." So saying, atall African with a full imperial beard steps up grabs the fat American,
who has time to utter one short yell before being flung bodily over the
side. Slothrop and the African watch the Major bounce down the em­
bankment behind them, arms and legs flying, out of sight. Firs crowd
the hills. A crescent moon has risen over one ragged crest.

The man introduces himself in English, as Oberst Enzian, of the
Schwarzkommando. He apologizes for his show of temper, notes Slo­
throp's armband, declines an interview before Slothrop can get in aword. "There's no story. We're DPs, like everybody else."

"The Major seemed worried that you're headed for Nordhausen."
"Marvy is going to be an annoyance, I can tell. Still, he doesn't pose

as much of a problem as-" He peers at Slothrop. "Hmm. Are you re­
ally a war correspondent?"

"No."
((A free agent, I'd guess."
"Don't know about that (free,' Oberst."
"But you are free. We all are. You'll see. Before long." He steps away

�own the spine of �e freighuop, waving a beckoning German good-by.Before long. . . .
Slothrop sits on the rooftop, rubbing his bare feet. A friend? A goodomen? Black rocket troops? What bizarre shit?

288



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Well good mornin' gang, let's start it
Off with a bang, so long to
Double-u Double-u Two-o-o-o!

Now the fightin's over and we're all in clover
And I'm here ta bring sunshine to you-
Hey there Herman the German, stop yer fussin'

and squirmin',
Don'tcha know you're goin' home ta stay­
No, there's never a frown, here in Rocket,

Sock-it Town,
Where ev'ry day's a beautiful day­
(Quit kvetchin', Gretchen!)
Go on and have a beautiful daa-aay!

Nordhausen in the morning: the lea is a green salad, crisp with rain­

drops. Everything is fresh, washed. The Harz hump up all around,
dark

slopes bearded to the tops with spruce, fir and larch. High-gabled
houses, sheets of water reflecting the sky, muddy streets, American and
Russian GIs pouring in and out the doors of the taverns and

makeshift

PXs, everybody packing a sidearm. Meadows and logged-off wedges up
on the mountainsides flow with mottled light as rainclouds blow away
over Thuringia. Castles perch high over the town, sailing in and out

of

torn clouds. Old horses with smudged knobby knees, short-legged and

big-chested, pull wagonloads of barrels, necks straining at twin
collars

chained together, heavy horseshoes sending mudflowers at each
wet

clop, down from the vineyards to the taverns.

Slothrop wanders into a roofless part of town. Old people
in black are

bat - flittering among the walls. Shops and dwellings here are all long­
looted by the slave laborers liberated from the Dora camp. Lotta

those

fags still around, with baskets and 175 badges out on display, staring
moistly from doorways. From the glassless bay window of a

dress shop,
in the dimness behind a plaster dummy lying bald and sprawled, arms
raised to sky, hands curved for bouquets or cocktail glasses they'll

never

hold again, Slothrop hears a girl singing. Accompanying herself
on a bal­

alaika. One of those sad little Parisian-soundina tunes in 3/4:

Love never goes away,
Never completely dies,
Always some souvenir
Takes us by sad surprise.

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You went away from me,
One rose was left behind­
Pressed in my Book of Hours,
That is the rose I find. . . .

Though it's another year,
Though it's another me,
Under the rose is a drying tear,
Under my linden tree. .

Love never goes away,
Not if it's really true,
It can return, by night, by day,
Tender and green and new
As the leaves from a linden tree, love,

that I left with you.

Her name turns out to be Geli Tripping, and the balalaika belongs to
a Soviet intelligence officer named Tchitcherine. In a way, Geli does
too-part-time, anyhow. Seems this Tchitcherine maintains a harem, a
girl in every rocket-town in the Zone. Yup, another rocket maniac. Slo­
throp feels like a tourist.

Geli talks about her young man. They sit in her roofless room drinking
a pale wine known hereabouts as Nordhauser Schattensaft. Overhead,
black birds with yellow beaks lace the sky, looping in the sunlight from
their nests up in the mountain castles and down in the city ruins. Far
away, perhaps in the marketplace, a truck convoy is idling all its en­
gines, the smell of exhaust washing over the maze of walls, where moss
creeps, water oozes, roaches seek purchase, walls that baffle the motor
sound so that it seems to come in from all directions.

She's thin, a bit awkward, very young. Nowhere in her eyes is there
any sign of corrosion-she might have spent all her War roofed and se­
cure, tranquil, playing with small forest animals in a rear area some­
place. Her song, she admits, sighing, is mostly wishful thinking. "When
he's away, he's away. When you came in I almost thought you were
Tchitcherine.

"

"Nope. Just a hard-working newshound, is all. No rockets, no ha­
rems."

"It's an arrangement," she tells him. "It's so unorganized out here.
There have to be arrangements. You'll find out." Indeed he will-he'll
find thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple move­
ment along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its fantasy of

290

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being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for

being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all these others so pri­
vate, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though he doesn't know it yet,
is as properly constituted a state as any other in the Zone these days.
Not paranoia. Just how it is. Temporary alliances, knit and undone. He
and Geli reach their arrangement hidden from the occupied streets by
remnants of walls, in an old fourposter bed facing a dark pier glass. Out
the roof that isn't there he can see a long tree-covered mountain ascend­

ing. Wine on her breath, nests of down in the hollows of her arms,

thighs with the spring of saplings in wind. He's barely inside her before
she comes, a fantasy about Tchitcherine in progress, clear and touch­

ingly, across her face. This irritates Slothrop, but doesn't keep him from

coming himself.
The foolishness begins immediately on detumescence, amusing ques­

tions like, what kind of word has gone out to keep everybody away from
Geli but me? Or, is it that something about me reminds her of Tchitch­

erine, and if so, what? And, say, where's that Tchitcherine right now?
He dozes off, is roused by her lips, fingers, dewy legs sliding along his.
The sun jumps across their section of sky, gets eclipsed by a breast, is
reflected out of her child's eyes . . . then clouds, rain for which she puts

up a green tarp with tassels she's sewn on, canopy style . . .
rain sluices

down off the tassels, cold and loud. Night. She feeds him boiled cabbage
with an old heirloom of a spoon with a crest on it. They drink more of
that wine. Shadows are soft verdigris. The rain has stopped. Somewhere
kids go booting an empty gas can over the cobblestones.

Something comes flapping in out of the sky: talons scrabble along
the

top of the canopy. "What's that?" half awake
and she's got the covers

again, c'mon Celio ...

"My owl," sez Celio "Wernher. There's a candy bar in the top
drawer

of the chiffonier, Liebchen, would you mind feeding him?"
Liebchen indeed. Staggering off the bed, vertical for the first time all

day, Slothrop removes a Baby Ruth from its wrapper, clears
his throat,

decides not to ask her how she came by it because he knows, and lobs
the thing up on the canopy for that Wernher. Soon, lying together
again, they hear peanuts crunching, and a clacking beak.

"Candy bars," Slothrop grouches. "What's the matter
with him?

Don't you know he's supposed to be out foraging, for live mice
or some

shit? You've turned him into a house owl."

"You're pretty lazy yourself." Baby fingers creeping down along
his

ribs.

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"Well-x-I bet-cut it out-I bet that Tchitcherine doesn't have to get
up and feed that owl."

She cools, the hand stopping where it is. "He loves Tchitcherine. He
never comes to be fed, unless Tchitcherine's here."

Slothrop's turn to cool. More correctly, freeze. "Uh, but, you don't
mean that Tchitcherine is actually, uh

"

"He was supposed to be," sighing.
"Oh. When?"
"This morning. He's late. It happens."
Slothrop's off the bed halfway across the room with a softoff, one sock

on and the other in his teeth, head through one armhole of his under­
shirt, fly zipper jammed, yelling shit.

"My brave Englishman," she drawls.
"Why didn't you bring this up earlier, Geli, huh?"
"Oh, come back. It's nighttime, he's with a woman someplace. He

can't sleep alone."
"I hope you can."
"Hush. Come here. You can't go out with nothing on your feet. I'll

give you a pair of his old boots and tell you all his secrets."
"Secrets?" Look out, Slothrop. "Why should I want to know-"
"You're not a war correspondent."
"Why does everybody keep saying that? Nobody believes me. Of

course I'm a war correspondent." Shaking the brassard at her. "Can't
you read? Sez 'War Correspondent.' I even have a mustache, here,
don't I? Just like that Ernest Hemingway."

"Oh. Then I imagine you wouldn't be looking for Rocket Number
00000 after all. It was just a silly idea I had. I'm sorry."

Oh boy, am I gonna get out of here, sez Slothrop to himself, this is a
badger game if I ever saw one, man. Who else would be interested in
the one rocket out of 6000 that carried the Imipolex G device?

"And you couldn't care less about the Schwarzgerat, either," she
keeps on. She keeps on.

"The what?"
"They also called it S-Gerat."
Next higher assembly, Slothrop, remember? Wernher, up on the can­

opy, is hooting. A signal to that Tchitcherine, no doubt.
Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they're paranoid,but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberatelyinto paranoid situations.
"Now how on earth," elaborately uncorking a fresh bottle of Nord­

hauser Schattensaft, thoppp, best Cary Grant imitation he can summon
292

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to �e(

e,Re

don't

un�r

oio,

aiel!

ora.
rno�

up with bowels so echoing tight, suavely refilling glasses, handing
one to

her, "would a sweet, young, thing, like you, know anything,
about

rocket, hahd-weah?"
"I read Vaslav's mail," as if it's a dumb question, which it is.

"You shouldn't be blabbing to random strangers like this. If he
finds

out, he'll murder you."
"I like you. I like intrigue. I like playing."
"Maybe you like to get people in trouble."
"All right." Out with the lower lip.
"O.K., O.K., tell me about it. But I don't know if the

Guardian will

even be interested. My editors are a rather stuffy lot, you know."

Goose bumps crowd her bare little breasts. "I posed once
for a rocket

insignia. Perhaps you've seen it. A pretty young
witch straddling an Ai.

Carrying her obsolete broom over her
shoulder. I was voted the Sweet­

heart of 31 Art. Abt. (mot) 485."
"Are you a real witch?"

"I think I have tendencies. Have you been up to
the Brocken yet?"

"Just hit town, actually."
"I've been up there every Walpurgisnacht

since I had my first period.
I'll take you, if you like."

"Tell me about this, this 'Schwarzgerat.'
"

"I thought you weren't interested."
"How can I know if I'm interested or not if I don't

even know what

I'm supposed or not supposed to be interested
in?"

"You must be a correspondent. You have a way with
words."

Tchitcherine comes roaring through the window, a Nagant blazing
in

his fist. Tchitcherine lands in a parachute and fells Slothrop
with one

judo chop. Tchitcherine drives a Stalin
tank right into the room, and

blasts Slothrop with a 76 mm shell. Thanks
for stalling him, Liebchen,

he was a spy, well, cheerio, I'm off to
Peenemiinde and a nubile Polish

wench with tits like vanilla ice cream, check you
out later.

"I have to go, I think," Slothrop sez, "typewriter
needs a new ribbon,

gotta sharpen pencils, you know how it
is-"

"I told you, he won't be
here tonight."

"Why? Is he out after that Schwarzgeriit,
eh?"

"No. He hasn't heard the latest. The message
came in from Stettin

yesterday."
"In clear, of course."

"Why not?"
"Couldn't be very important."
"It's for sale."

293

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"The message?" �it
"The S-Gerat, you pill. A man in Swinerniinde can get it. Half a mil- �als

lion Swiss francs, if you're in the market. He waits on the Strand-Prome- �reE
nade, every day till noon. He'll be wearing a white suit."

Oh yeah? "Blodgett Waxwing."
"It didn't give the name. But I don't think it's Waxwing. He sticks

close to the Mediterranean."
"You get around."
"Waxwing is already a legend around the Zone. So is Tchitcherine.

For all I know, so are you. What was your name?"
"Cary Grant. Ge-li, Ge-li, Ge-li.... Listen, Swinemiinde, that's in

that Soviet zone, ain't it."
mo

"You sound like a German. Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. ronl
There aren't any." hllcl

"There are soldiers."
Iler

"That's right." Staring at him. "But that's different." M
"Oh."

�I
"You'll learn. It's all been suspended. Vaslav calls it an 'interregnum.' IoUYou only have to flow along with it." iliol"Gonna flow outa here now, kid. Thanx for the info, and a tip of the �onScuffling hat to ya-"

lni�"Please stay." Curled on the bed, her eyes about to spill over with �eltears. Aw, shit, Slothrop you sucker ... but she's just a little kid. . . . IW"Come here... ."
�nQThe minute he puts it in, though, she goes wicked and a little crazy, wnslashing at his legs, shoulders, and ass with chewed-down fingernails 100sharp as a saw. Considerate Slothrop is trying to hold off coming till renshe's ready when all of a sudden something heavy, feathered, and many­pointed comes crashing down onto the small of his back, bounces off

triggering him and as it turns out Geli too ZONNGGG! eeeeee ... oh,
gee whiz. Wings flap and Wernher-for it is he-ascends into the dark­
ness.

"Fucking bird," Slothrop screams, "he tries that again I'll give him aBaby Ruth right up his ass, boy-" it's a plot it's a plot it's Pavlovianconditioning! or something, "Tchitcherine trained him to do that,
right?"

"Wrong! I trained him to do that." She's smiling at him so four-year­old happy and not holding a thing back, that Slothrop decides to believe
everything she's been telling him.

"You are a witch." Paranoid that he is, he snuggles down under the
counterpane with the long-legged sorceress, lights a cigarette, and de-

294

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a mil.
rom1·

enOt,

'�iolli,

urn,

spite endless Tchitcherines vaulting in over the roofless walls with arse­
nals of disaster all for him, even falls asleep, presently, in her bare and

open arms.

D D D D D D D

It's a Sunday-funnies dawn, very blue sky with gaudy pink clouds in it.
Mud across the cobblestones is so slick it reflects light, so that you walk
not streets but these long streaky cuts of raw meat, hock of werewolf,
gammon of Beast. Tchitcherine has big feet. Geli had to stuff pieces of
an old chemise in the toes of his boots so they'd fit Slothrop. Dodging
constantly for jeeps, ten-ton lorries, Russians on horseback, he finally
hitches a ride from an 18-year-old American first lieutenant in a gray
Mercedes staff car with dents all over it. Slothrop frisks mustaches,
flashes his armband, feeling defensive. The sun's already warm. There's
a smell of evergreens on the mountains. This rail driving, who's attached
to the tank company guarding the Mittelwerke, doesn't think Slothrop
should have any trouble getting inside. English SPOG have come and

gone. Right now American Army Ordnance people are busy crating
and

shipping out parts and tools for a hundred A4s. A big hassle. "Trying
to

get it all out before the Russians come to take
over." Interregnum. Ci­

vilians and bureaucrats show up every day, high-level tourists, to stare
and go wow. "Guess nobody's seen 'em this big before. I don't

know

what it is. Like a burlesque crowd. Not gonna do anything, just here to
look. Most of them bring cameras. Notice you didn't. We have them for
rent at the main gate, if you're interested."

One of many hustles. Yellow James the cook has got him a
swell little

sandwich wagon, you can hear him in the
tunnels calling, "Come an' get

'em! Hot 'n' cold and drippin' with greens!" And there'll be grease on
the glasses of half these gobbling fools in another five minutes.

Nick De

Profundis, the company lounge lizard, has surprised everybody by
changing, inside the phone booth of factory spaces here, to an energetic
businessman, selling A4 souvenirs: small items that can be worked

into

keychains, money clips or a scatter-pin for that special gal back home,
burner cups of brass off the combustion chambers,

ball bearings from

the servos, and this week the hep item seems to be SA 100 acorn diodes,
cute little mixing valves looted out of the Telefunken units,

and the

even rarer SA 102S, which of course fetch a higher price. And there's
"Micro" Graham, who's let his sideburns grow and lurks in the Stollen

where the gullible visitors stray: "Pssst."

295

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"Pssst?"

"Forget it."
"Well now you've got me curious."
"Thought you looked like a sport. You taking the tour?"
"1-1 only stepped away for a second. Really, I'm going right

back. ...
"

"Finding it a little dull?" Oily Micro moves in on his mark. "Ever
wonder to yourself: 'What really went on in here?'?"

The visitor who is willing to spend extravagant sums is rarely disap­
pointed. Micro knows the secret doors to rock passages that lead
through to Dora, the prison camp next to the Mittelwerke. Each mem­
ber of the party is given his own electric lantern. There is hurried, basic
instruction on what to do in case of any encounter with the dead. "Re­
member they were always on the defensive here. When the Americans
liberated Dora, the prisoners who were still alive went on a rampage
after the material-they looted, they ate and drank themselves sick. For
others, Death came like the American Army, and liberated them spir­
itually. So they're apt to be on a spiritual rampage now. Guard your
thoughts. Use the natural balance of your mind against them. They'll be
coming at you off-balance, remember."

A popular attraction is the elegant Raumwaffe spacesuit wardrobe,
designed by famous military couturier Heini of Berlin. Not only are
there turnouts dazzling enough to thrill even the juvenile leads of a
space-operetta, down to the oddly-colored television images flickering
across their toenails, but Heini has even thought of silks for the amusing
little Space-Jockeys (Raum-Jockeier) with their electric whips, who will
someday zoom about just outside the barrier-glow of the Raketen-Stadt,
astride "horses" of polished meteorite all with the same stylized face (a
high-contrast imago of the horse that follows you, emphasis on its de­
mented eyes, its teeth, the darkness under its hindquarters . . .), with
the propulsive gases blowing like farts out their tail ends-the juvenileleads giggle together at this naughty bathroom moment, and slowly, inwhat's hardly more than a sigh of gravity here, go bobbing, each radiant
in a display of fluorescent plastics, back in to the Waltz, the strangelycommunal Waltz of the Future, a slightly, disquietingly grainy-disso­
nant chorale implied here in the whirling silence of faces, the bare
shoulderblades slung so space-Viennese, so jaded with Tomorrow. . . .

Then come-the Space Helmets! At first you may be alarmed, on no­
ticing that they appear to be fashioned from skulls. At least the upperdome of this unpleasant headgear is certainly the skull of some manlike
creature built to a larger scale. . . . Perhaps Titans lived under this

296

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mountain, and their skulls got harvested like giant mushrooms. . . . The

eye-sockets are fitted with quartz lenses. Filters may be slipped
in.

Nasal bone and upper teeth have been replaced by a metal breathing
apparatus, full of slots and grating. Corresponding to the jaw

is a built­

up section, almost a facial codpiece, of iron and ebonite, perhaps
hous­

ing a radio unit, thrusting forward in black fatality.
For an extra few

marks you are allowed to slip one of these helmets on. Once inside
these

yellow caverns, looking out now through neutral-density orbits,
the

sound of your breath hissing up and around the bone spaces, what you
thought was a balanced mind is little help. The compartment

the

Schwarzkommando were quartered in is no longer an amusing travel­

ogue of native savages taking on ways of the z ist century.
The milk cal­

abashes appear only to be made from some plastic. On the spot
where

tradition sez Enzian had his Illumination, in the course of a wet dream
I

where he coupled with a slender white rocket, there is the dark stain,

miraculously still wet, and a smell you understand is
meant to be that of

.

semen-but it is really closer to soap, or bleach. The wall-paintings
lose

their intended primitive crudeness and take on primitive spatiality,

depth and brilliance-transform, indeed, to
dioramas on the theme

"The Promise of Space Travel." Lit sharply by carbide light which
hisses and smells like the bad breath of someone quite familiar to you,
the view commands your stare. After a few

minutes it becomes possible
to make out actual movement down there, even at the immense

dis­

tances implied by the scale: yes, we're hanging now down
the last limb

of our trajectory in to the Raketen-Stadt, a difficult night
of magnetic

storm behind us, eddy currents still shimmering through all our
steel

like raindrops that cling to vehicle windows . . . yes,
it is a City: vege­

table "Ho-lyl"s and "Isn't that something!"s go away echoing
as we

crowd about the bloom of window in this salt underground. . . .

Strangely, these are not the symmetries we were programmed
to expect,

not the fins, the streamlined corners, pylons, or simple solid geometries
of the official vision at all-that's for the ribbon clerks

back on the

Tour, in the numbered Stollen. No, this Rocket-City,
so whitely lit

against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately
To Avoid Sym­

metry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror (from
the Preamble to the

Articles of Immachination)-but tourists have to connect the
look of it

back to things they remember from their times and planet-back
to the

wine bottle smashed in the basin, the bristlecone pines outracing
Death

for millennia, concrete roads abandoned years ago,
hairdos of the late

1930s, indole molecules, especially polymerized indoles,
as in Imipolex

G-

297

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Wait-which one of them was thinking that? Monitors, get a fix on it,
hurry up-

But the target slips away. "They handle their own security down in­
side," the young rail is telling Slothrop, "we're here for Surface Guard
only. Our responsibility ends at Stollen Number Zero, Power and Light.
It's really a pretty soft racket for us." Life is good, and nobody's looking
forward much to redeployment. There are frauleins for screwing, cook­
ing, and doing your laundry. He can put Slothrop on to champagne,
furs, cameras, cigarettes .... Can't just be interested in rockets, can he,
that's crazy. He's right.

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be
the chance to ignore no-parking signs. There are struck Ps in circles upall over the place, nailed on trees, wired on girderwork, but the main
tunnel entrances are pretty well blocked with vehicles by the time the
dimpled Mercedes arrives. "Shit," hollers the young tanker, turns off his t�mre
engine and leaves the German short at no particular angle on the broad rom�la
muddy apron. Leaving keys in the car too, Slothrop's learning to notice �tnralitems like this. . . .

�JiliroThe entrance to the tunnel is shaped like a parabola. The Albert :j�, , ,
Speer Touch. Somebody during the thirties was big on parabolas any- ��ucer.how, and Albert Speer was in charge of the New German Architecture MJmaOthen, and later he went on to become Minister of Munitions, and nomi- �IDtomrl�nal chief customer for the Ai. This parabola here happens to be the in- Illoiliro
spiration of a Speer disciple named Etzel Olsch. He had noted this pa- I,m,��asinlrabola shape around on Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w., flant�and thought it was the most contemporary thing he'd ever seen. Imag- ;oo�o\Vouine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also the shape of !I�t�torthe path intended for the rocket through space. (What he actually said I�mit�in
was, "Oh, that's nice.") It was his mother who'd named him after Attila rnilitrliliethe Hun, and nobody ever found out why. His parabola has a high loft ��Dorato it, and the railroad tracks run in underneath, steel into shadows. Bat- l�r�\Vertened cloth camouflage furls back at the edges. The mountain goes slop- :�tofilieing away above, rock cropping out here and there among the bushes !,ilielebreand the trees.

liliotneSlothrop presents his sooper dooper SHAEF pass, Signed off by Ike 'l�rated"and even more authentic, by the colonel heading up the American The

baSI"Special Mission V-z" out of Paris. A Waxwing specialty of the house. B )�hlaNCompany, 47th Armored Infantry, 5th Armored Division appears to be jij�ngtoup to something besides security for this place. Slothrop is shrugged on lit. Thesethrough. There is a lot of moseying, drawling, and country humor l�untain
2g8



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een, Ima�·
e shape of
tualirSalO
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a hi�h lott
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e bushes

around here. Somebody must've been picking his nose. A couple days
later Slothrop will find a dried piece of snot on the card, a crystal brown
visa for Nordhausen.

In past the white-topped guard towers. Transformers buzz through
the spring morning. Someplace chains rattle and a tailgate drops. Be­
tween ruts, high places, ridges of mud are beginning to dry out in the
sun, to lighten and crumble. Nearby the loud wake-up yawn and stretch
of a train whistle cuts loose. In past a heap of bright metal spheres in
daylight, with a comical sign PLEEZ NO SQUEEZ-A DA OXYGEN-A UNIT, EH?
how long, how long you sfacim-a dis country. . . . In under parabola
and parable, straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the
dark, the long echoes of the Mittelwerke.

There is that not-so-rare personality disorder known as Tannhauser­
ism. Some of us love to be taken under mountains, and not always with
horny expectations-Venus, Frau Holda, her sexual delights-no, many
come, actually, for the gnomes, the critters smaller than you, for the se­
pulchral way time stretches along your hooded strolls down here, qui­
etly through courtyards that go for miles, with no anxiety about getting
lost . . . no one stares, no one is waiting to judge you . . . out of the
public eye . . . even a Minnesinger needs to be alone . . . long cloudy­
day indoor walks . . . the comfort of a closed place, where everyone is
in complete agreement about Death.

Slothrop knows this place. Not so much from maps he had to study at
the Casino as knowing it in the way you know someone is there. . . .

Plant generators are still supplying power. Rarely a bare bulb will
hollow out a region of light. As darkness is mined and transported from
place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it
from its inertia, and has become one of the great secret ikons of the Hu­
mility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History. When
the Dora prisoners went on their rampage, the light bulbs in the rocket
works were the first to go: before food, before the delights to be looted
out of the medical lockers and the hospital pharmacy in Stollen Number
1, these breakable, socketless (in Germany the word for electric socket
is also the word for Mother-so, motherless too) images were what the
"liberated" had to take....

The basic layout of the plant was another inspiration of Etzel
Olsch, a Nazi inspiration like the parabola, but again also a symbol be­
longing to the Rocket. Picture the letters SS each stretched lengthwise a
bit. These are the two main tunnels, driven well over a mile into the
mountain. Or picture a ladder with a slight S-shaped ripple in it, lying

fix on it,

down in­
lee Guara
lnd Light.
y's loohn�
�ing, COOK­
hampa�1,

tlets,canne,ng, must�circles u�
t iliemam
etimeilie

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IS to De

ggedon
humor

299

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flat: 44 runglike Stollen or cross-tunnels, linking the two main ones. A
couple hundred feet of rock mountain, at the deepest, press down over­
head.

But the shape is more than an elongated SS. Apprentice Hupla comes
running in one day to tell the architect. "Master!" he's yelling, "Mas­
ter!" Olsch has taken up quarters in the Mittelwerke, insulated from the
factory down a few private drifts that don't appear on any map of the
place. He's getting into a grandiose idea of what an architect's life
should be down here, insisting now on the title "Master" from all his
helpers. That isn't his only eccentricity, either. Last three designs he
proposed to the Fuhrer all were visually in the groove, beautifully New
German, except that none of the buildings will stay up. They look nor­
mal enough, but they are designed to fall down, like fat men at the
opera falling asleep into someone's lap, shortly after the last rivet is
driven, the last forms removed from the newly set allegorical statue.This is bIsch's "deathwish" problem here, as the little helpers call it: it
rates a lot of gossip in the commissary at meals, and beside the coffee
urns out on the gloomy stone loading docks.... It's well after sunset
now, each desk in this vaulted, almost outdoor bay has its own incandes­
cent light on. The gnomes sit out here, at night, with only their bulbs
shining conditionally, precariously . . . it all might go dark so easily, inthe next second. . . . Each gnome works in front of his drawing board.
They're working late. There's a deadline-it's not clear if they're work­
ing overtime to meet it, or if they have already failed and are here as
punishment. Back in his office, Etzel blsch can be heard singing. Taste­less, low beer-hall songs. Now he is lighting a cigar. Both he and the
gnome Apprentice Hupla who's just run in know that this is an explod­ing cigar, put in his humidor as a revolutionary gesture by persons un­known but so without power that it doesn't matter-"Wait, Master,don't light it-Master, put it out, please, it's an exploding cigar!""Proceed, Hupla, with the intelligence that prompted your ratherrude entrance."

"But-"
"Rupla . . ." Puffing masterful clouds of cigar smoke."It-it's about the shape of the tunnels here, Master."
"Don't flinch like that. I based that design on the double lightning-stroke, Hupla=-the SS emblem."
"But it's also a double integral sign! Did you know that?""Ah. Yes: Summe, Summe, as Leibniz said. Well, isn't that-"
BLAM.
All right. But Etzel bIsch's genius was to be fatally receptive to im-

300



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agery associated with
the Rocket. In the static space of the architect, he

might've used a double integral now and then, early
in his career, to

find volumes under surfaces whose equations were known-masses,
mo­

ments, centers of gravity. But it's been years since
he's had to do with

anything that basic. Most of his calculating
these days is with marks and

pfennigs, not functions of idealistic
rand B, naive x and y. . . . But in

the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the
double integral has a

different meaning. To integrate here is to operate
on a rate of change so

that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . "Meters per
second" will in­

tegrate to "meters." The moving
vehicle is frozen, in space, to become

architecture, and timeless. It was never
launched. It will never fall.

In the guidance, this is what happened: a little pendulum
was kept

centered by a magnetic field. During launch, pulling gs,
the pendulum

would swing aft, off center. It had a coil
attached to it. When the coil

moved through the magnetic field, electric
current flowed in the coil. As

the pendulum was pushed off center by the
acceleration of launch, cur­

rent would flow-the more acceleration, the more
flow. So the Rocket,

on its own side of the flight, sensed acceleration first. Men, tracking it,

sensed position or distance first. To get
to distance from acceleration,

the Rocket had to integrate twice-needed a moving coil,
transformers,

electrolytic cell, bridge of diodes, one
tetrode (an extra grid to screen

away capacitive coupling inside the tube),
an elaborate dance of design

precautions to get to what human eyes
saw first of all-the distance

along the flight path.
There was that backward symmetry again, one that

Pointsman

missed, but Katje didn't. "A life of its own,"
she said. Slothrop remem­

bers her reluctant smile, the Mediterranean afternoon,
the peeling twist

of a eucalyptus trunk, the same pink, in that weakening light,
as the

American officer's trousers Slothrop wore once upon a time,
and the

acid, the pungent smell of the leaves. . .
. The current, flowing in the

coil, passed a Wheatstone bridge and charged up
a capacitor. The

charge was the time integral of the
current flOWing in the coil and

bridge. Advanced versions of this
so-called "IG" guidance integrated

twice, so that the charge gathering on one side of
the capacitor grew di­

rectly as the distance the Rocket had
traveled. Before launch, the other

side of the cell had been charged up to a level representing
the distance

to a particular point out in space.
Brennschluss exactly here would

make the Rocket go on to hit 1000 yards east of
Waterloo Station. At

the instant the charge (BiL) accumulating in flight equaled
the preset

charge (AiL) on the other side, the capacitor discharged.
A switch

closed, fuel cut off, burning ended. The Rocket
was on its own.

301

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That is one meaning of the shape of the tunnels down here in the Mit­
telwerke. Another may be the ancient rune that stands for the yew tree,
or Death. The double integral stood in Etzel Olsch's subconscious for
the method of finding hidden centers, inertias unknown, as if monoliths
had been left for him in the twilight, left behind by some corrupted idea
of "Civilization," in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters high
at the corners of the stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of
"the People" are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imagi­
nary centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of not
as "heart," "plexus," "consciousness," (the voice speaking here grows
more ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre, as the list goes
on . . .)" Sanctuary," "dream of motion," "cyst of the eternal present,"
or "Gravity's gray eminence among the councils of the living stone."
No, as none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise
as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall. And
what is the specific shape whose center of gravity is the Brennschluss
Point? Don't jump at an infinite number of possible shapes. There's only
one. It is most likely an interface between one order of things and an­
other. There's a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang
up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of theZodiac named for it ... but they lie so close to Earth that from many
places they can't be seen at all, and from different places inside the zone
where they can be seen, they fall into completely different pat­terns....

Double integral is also the shape of lovers curled asleep, which iswhere Slothrop wishes he were now-all the way back with Katje, evenlost as he might feel again, even more vulnerable than now-even (be­
cause he still honestly misses her), preserved by accident, in ways hecan't help seeing, accident whose own much colder honesty each loverhas only the other to protect him from. . . . Could he live like that?
Would They ever agree to let him and Katje live like that? He's had
nothing to say to anyone about her. It's not the gentlemanly reflex thatmade him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun forTantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear ofhaving a soul captured by a likeness of image or by a name. . . . He
wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, fromTheir softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it
for her he can also do it for himself . . . although that's awful close to
nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own.In the sheet-metal ducting that snakes like a spine along the over­head, plant ventilation moans. Now and then it sounds like voices.

302

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Traffic from somewhere remote. It's not as if they were discussing
Slo­

throp directly, understand. But he wishes he
could hear it better. ...

Lakes of light, portages of darkness. The concrete facing
of the tunnel

has given way to whitewash over chunky fault-surfaces,
phony-looking

as the inside of an amusement-park cave. Entrances to
cross-tunnels slip

by like tuned pipes with an airflow at
their mouths ... once upon a

time lathes did screech, playful machinists had shootouts
with little

brass squirt cans of cutting oil . . .
knuckles were bloodied against

grinding wheels, pores, creases and quicks
were stabbed by the fine

splinters of steel ... tubeworks of alloy
and glass contracted tinkling in

air that felt like the dead of winter, and
amber light raced in phalanx

among the small
neon bulbs. Once, all this did happen. It is hard down

here in the Mittelwerke to live in the present for very long.
The nostal­

gia you feel is not your own,
but it's potent. All the objects have grown

still, drowned, enfeebled with evening,
terminal evening. Tough skins of

oxides, some only a molecule thick, shroud the
metal surfaces, fade out

human reflection. Straw-colored drive belts of polyvinyl
alcohol sag and

release their last traces of industrial odor. Though found
adrift and

haunted, full of signs of recent human tenancy,
this is not the legendary

ship Marie-Celeste-it isn't bounded
so neatly, these tracks underfoot

run away fore and aft into
all stilled Europe, and our flesh doesn't sweat

and pimple here for the domestic mysteries,
the attic horror of What

Might Have Happened so much as for
our knowledge of what likely did

happen ... it was always easy, in open
and lonely places, to be visited

by Panic wilderness fear, but these
are the urban fantods here, that

come to get you when you are lost or
isolate inside the way time is pass­

ing, when there is no more History,
no time-traveling capsule to find

your way back to, only the lateness and the
absence that fill a great rail­

way shed after the capital has been evacuated,
and the goat-god's city

cousins wait for you at the edges of the light, playing
the tunes they al­

ways played, but more audible now,
because everything else has gone

away or fallen silent . . .
barn-swallow souls, fashioned of brown twi­

light, rise toward the white ceilings ... they
are unique to the Zone,

they answer to the new Uncertainty.
Ghosts used to be either likenesses

of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories
have been blurred badly. The status of the name you miss, love,

and

search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but
this is even more

than the bureaucracy of mass absence-some still live,
some have died,

but many, many have forgotten which they
are. Their likenesses will not

serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in
the dark: im­

ages of the Uncertainty. .
. .

303



-

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Post-At humanity is moving, hammering, and shouting among the
tunnels. Slothrop will catch sight of badged civilians in khaki, helmet
liners with GE stenciled on, sometimes getting a nod, eyeglasses flashing
under a distant light bulb, most often ignored. Military working parties
go at route-step bitching in and out, carrying crates. Slothrop is hungry
and Yellow James is nowhere in sight. But there is nobody down here
even going to say howdy to, much less feed, the free lance Ian Scuffling.
No, wait, by golly here comes a delegation of girls in tight pink lab coats
reaching just to the tops of bare thighs, tripping up the tunnel on stylish
gold wedgies "Ah, so reizend ist!" too many to hug at once, "Hiibsch,
was?" now now ladies one at a time, they are giggling and reaching to
drape around his neck lush garlands of silvery B nuts and flange fittings,
scarlet resistors and bright-yellow capacitors strung like little sausages,
scraps of gasketry, miles of aluminum shavings as curly-bouncy 'n'
bright as Shirley Temple's head-hey Hogan ya can keep yer hula girls
-and where are they taking him here? into an empty Stollen, where
they all commence a fabulous orgy, which goes on for days and days,
full of poppies, play, singing, and carrying on.

Moving into Stollen 20 and up, traffic grows heavier. This was the A4
part of the factory, which the Rocket shared with V-l and turboprop
assemblies. Out of these Stollen, the 20S, 30S, and 40s, Rocket compo­
nents were fed out crosswise into the two main assembly lines. As you
walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket's becoming: superchargers, center
sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections ... lotta
these tail sections still around here, stacked alternately fins up/fins
down, row on row identical, dimpled ripply metal surfaces. Slothrop
moseys along looking at his face in them, watching it warp and slide by,
just a big underground fun house here folks. . . . Empty dollies with
small metal wheels chain away back down the tunnel: they carry four­
bladed arrowhead shapes that point at the ceiling-oh. Right-the
pointed holders must've fit inside the expansion nozzles of the thrust
chambers, sure enough here comes a bunch of them, big fucking things
tall as Slothrop, capital As painted in white near the burner cups. . . .
Overhead the fat and sinuous white-lagged pipes are lurking, and the
steel lamps give no light out of their scorched skullcap reflectors . . .
down the tunnel's centerline run Lally columns, slender, gray, the ex­
posed threads locked in rust of long standing . . . blue shadows wash
through the spare-parts cages, set on planking and I beams hung from
damp and chimney-sized columns of brick . . . glass-wool insulation lies
beside the tracks, heaped like snow. . . .

Final assembly went on in Stollen 41. The cross-tunnel is 50 feet

_. - . ,;-- -_

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a

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deep, to accommodate the finished Rocket.
Sounds of carousing, of

voices distinctly unbalanced, come welling up, reverberating
off of the

concrete. Personnel are weaving back up the main tunnel
with a glassy

and rubicund look to their faces. Slothrop squints down into
this long

pit, and makes out a crowd of
Americans and Russians gathered around

a huge oak beer barrel. A gnome-size
German civilian with a red von

Hindenburg mustache is dispensing steins of
what looks to be mostly

head. Ordnance smoke-puffs flicker on nearly every sleeve.
The Ameri­

cans are singing

ROCKET LIMERICKS

There once was a thing called a V-2,
To pilot which you did not need to­
you just pushed a button,
And it would leave nuttin'

But stiffs and big holes and debris, too.

The tune is known universally among American fraternity boys.
But

for some reason it is being sung here in German Storm Trooper style:
notes clipping off sharp at the end of each line,

then a pulse of silence

before the attack on the next line.

[Refrain:] Ja, ja, ja, ja!
In Prussia they never eat pussy!
There ain't hardly cats enough,
There's garbage and that's enough,
So waltz me around again, Russky!

Drunks are hanging from steel ladders and draped
over catwalks.

Beer fumes crawl in the long cavern, among pieces of
olive-drab rocket,

some upright, some lying on their sides.

There was a young fellow named Crockett,

Who had an affair with a rocket.

If you saw them out there

You'd be tempted to stare,
But if you ain't tried it, don't

knock it!

Slothrop is hungry and thirsty. Despite
the clear and present miasma

of evil in Stollen 41, he starts looking for some way to go
down there

305



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�-......

-

:"",�:.�, .. ., . .. . .•.•.• . . ,#':� ,�

and maybe score some of that lunch. Turns out the only way down is by
a cable, hooked to an overhead hoist. A fat cracker Pfc. lounges at the
controls, sucking on a bottle of wine. "Go ahead, Jackson, I'll give you a
good ride. They taught me how to run these in the WPA." Bracing his
mustache in what he figures to be a stiff upper lip, Ian Scuffling climbs
on, one foot through an eye-splice, the other hanging free. An electric
motor whines, Slothrop lets go the last steel railing and clutches on to
the cable as 50 feet of twilit space appears underneath him. Db . . .

Rolling out over Stollen 41, heads milling far below, beer foam bob­
bing like torches in the shadows-suddenly the motor cuts off and he's
falling like a rock. Oh fuck, "Too young!" he screams, voice pitched
way too high so it comes out like a teenager on the radio, which ordinar­
ily would be embarrassing, but here's the concrete floor rushing up at
him, he can see every shuttering mark, every dark crystal of Thuringian
sand he's going to be splashed over-not even a body nearby to get him
off with only multiple fractures. . . . With about ten feet to go the Pfc.
puts on the brakes. Maniacal laughter from above and behind. The
cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop's hand till he loses his grip
on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in
among funseekers around the beer keg who, used to this form of arrival
by now, only continue their singing:

There was a young fellow named Hector,
Who was fond of a launcher-erector.
But the squishes and pops
Of acute pressure drops
Wrecked Hector's hydraulic connector.

Each young American in turn getting to his feet (optional), raising his
tankard, and singing about different ways of Doing It with the Ai or its
related hardware. Slothrop does not know that they are singing to him,
and neither do they. He eyes the inverted scene with a certain unease:
with his brain approaching the frontiers of red-out, there comes to him
the peculiar notion that it's Lyle Bland who has hold of his ankle here.
So he is borne stately into the fringes of the party. "Hey!" observes a
crewcut youth, "l-it's Tarzan or something! Ha! Ha!" Half a dozen Ord­
nance people, juiced and roaring happily, grab for Slothrop. After a lot
of twisting and shoving, the foot is freed from its wire loop. The hoist
whines back the way it came, to its prankish operator and the next fool
he can talk into riding it.

306

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There once was a fellow named Moorehead,

Who had an affair with a warhead.

His wife moved away
The very next day-
She was always kind of a sorehead.

The Russians are drinking relentlessly and in silence, shuffling boots,

frowning, maybe trying to translate these
limericks. It isn't clear

whether the Americans are here on Russian
sufferance or vice versa.

Somebody presses on Slothrop a shell-case,
ice cold, foaming down the

sides. "Gee, we weren't expecting the English too. Some party,
huh?

Stick around-he'll be along in a minute."
"Who's that." Thousands of these luminous worms

are wriggling all

over Slothrop's field of vision, and his foot is beginning
to prickle awake

again. Oh, this beer here is cold,
cold and hop-bitter, no point coming

up for air, gulp, till it's
all-hahhhh. His nose comes up drowned in

foam, his mustache white and bubbly too. All
at once comes shouting

from the edges of the company. "Here he is,
here he is!" "Give him a

beer!" "Hi there, Major, babes, sir!"

There was a technician named Urban,

Who had an affair with a turbine.

"It's much nicer," he said,
"Than a woman in bed,
And it's sure as hell cheaper than bourbon!"

"What's happening," inquires Slothrop through the
head of another

beer just materialized in his hand.
"It's Major Marvy. This is his going-away party." Marvy's

Mothers

are all singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow,"
now. Which nobody can

deny if they know what's good for them,
is the impression one cannot

help receiving. . . .
"Uh, wherc's he going?"
"Away."
"Thought he was here to see that GE."

"Sure, who do ya think's pickin' up the tab f'r
this?"

Marvy here by subterranean light is even
less engaging than he was in

the moonlight on top of that boxcar. The
rolls of fat, bulging eyes and

glistening teeth are grayer here,
screened more coarsely. A strip of ad­

hesive tape plastered athletically over the bridge
of his nose, and a pur­

ple, yellow, and green decoration
around one eye testify to his rapid

I ff
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journey down the railroad embankment the other night. He is shaking
hands with his well-wishers, booming male endearments, paying special
attention to the Russians-"Well, bet you've spiked that with a little
vodka! Hah?" moving on "Vlad, fella, how's yer ass!" The Russians do
not appear to understand, which leaves them only the fanged smile, the
Easter-egg eyes, to make sense of. Slothrop is just snorting foam out of
his nose when Marvy spots him, and those eyes bug out in earnest.

"There he is," in a great roar, indicating Slothrop with a trembling
finger, "by God the limey sonofabitch go git him, boys!" Go git him,
boys? Slothrop continuing to gaze a moment here at this finger, illumi­
nated in cute flourishes and curlicues of cherubic fat.

"There, there, my man," begins Ian ScufHing, by which point hostile
faces have begun to close in. Hmm.... Oh, that's right, escape-he
sloshes beer at the head nearest, heaves the empty shell case at another,
finds a gap in the crowd, slithers through and flees, across florid faces of
drunks asleep, vaulting khaki paunches festooned with splashes of
vomit, away down the deep cross-tunnel, among the pieces of Rocket.

"Reveille you hammerheads," Marvy's screaming, "don't let that
'sucker git away!" A sergeant with a boy's face and gray hair, dozing
with a grease gun cradled against him, wakes up crying, "Krauts!" lets
loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight into the beer barrel,
which destroys the bottom half and sends a great gush of wet amber and
foam surging among the pursuing Americans, half of whom promptly
slip and go down on their ass. Slothrop reaches the other end of the
Stollen with a good lead, and goes sprinting up a ladder there, taking
rungs two at a time. Shots- Terrific blasts in this soundbox. Either
Marvy's Mothers are too drunk, or the darkness is saving him. He hits
the top out of breath.

In the other main tunnel now, Slothrop falls into a jog down the long
mile to the outside, trying not to wonder if he has the wind to make it.
He hasn't gone 200 feet when the vanguard comes clambering up off of
that ladder behind him. He dodges into what must be a paint shop,
skids on a patch of wet Wehrmacht green, and goes down, proceeding
through big splashes of black, white, and red before coming to rest
against the combat boots of an elderly man in a tweed suit, with white,
water-buffalo mustaches. "Gruss Gott."

"Say, I think they're trying to kill me back there. Is there some­
place-"

The old man winks, motions Slothrop through the Stollen and on into
the other main tunnel. Slothrop notices a pair of coveralls streaked with
paint, and thinks to grab them. Past four more Stollen, then a sharp

308

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right. It's a metal storage area. "Watch this."
The old man goes chuck­

ling down the long shop among blue racks of
cold-rolled sheets, heaps of

aluminum ingots, sheafs of 3712 bar stock, 1624,723
....

"This is going

to be good."
"Not that way, man, that's the one they're coming

down." But this

oversize elf already has set about hitching cable from a
hoist overhead

to a tall bundle of Monel bars. Slothrop climbs into those coveralls,

combs his pompadour down over his forehead, takes
out a pocketknife

and saws off pieces of mustache on both sides.

"You look like Hitler now. Now they will really want to kill you!"
German humor. He introduces himself as Glimpf, Professor of

Mathe­

matics of the Technische Hochschule, Darmstadt,
Scientific Advisor to

the Allied Military Government, which takes a while.
"Now-we bring

them this way."
1 am in the hands of a raving maniac-"Why not just

hide out in

here, till they forget it?" But here comes dim
shouts up-tunnel now:

"All clear in 37 and 38, Chuckie babes!" "O.K.,
old hoss, you guys take

odds we'll take evens." They are not going to forget it, they
are making

a tunnel-by-tunnel search instead. It's peacetime, they
can't shoot you

in peacetime ... but they're drunk ... oh boy. Slothrop
is scared shit­

less.
"What do we do?"

"You will be the expert in idiomatic English. Say something provoca­

tive."

Slothrop sticks his head out in the long
tunnel and hollers, in his most

English accent, "Major Marvy sucks!"

"Dp this way!" Sounds of galloping
GI boots, nailheads smacking the

concrete and a lot of other ominous metal too going
snick

snick ...

"Now," beams mischievous Glimpf, setting the hoist
in motion.

A fresh thought occurs to Slothrop. He puts
his head back out and

hollers "Major Marvy sucks NIGGERS!"
"I think we should hurry," sez Glimpf.
"Aw, 1 just thought of a good one about

his mother." Slack has been

disappearing inch by inch from the bight of
cable between the hoist and

the bar stock, which Glimpf has rigged to topple
across the doorway,

hopefully about the time the Americans
show up.

Slothrop and Glimpf light out through
the opposite exit. About the

time they reach the first curve in the tunnel,
all the lights go out. The

ventilation whines on. The phantom voices inside it gain
confidence

from the dark.

309



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The bundle of Monel falls with a great crash. Slothrop touches rock
wall, and uses the wall then for guidance through this absolute black­
ness. Glimpf is still someplace in the middle of the tunnel, on the tracks.
He is not breathing hard, but he is chuckling to himself. Behind are the
hollow staggerings of the pursuit, but no light yet. There is a soft clang
and sharp "Himmel" from the old professor. Sounds of yelling have
grown louder and now here are the first flashlights, and it's time to get
out of the bathtub-

"What's happening? For Christ's sake ...
"

"Come here:" Glimpf has collided with some kind of miniature train,
just visible now in outline-it was used once to show visitors from Ber­
lin around the factory. They climb aboard the tractor in front, and
Glimpf fiddles with switches.

Well here we go, all aboard, lights must've been all that Marvy cut,
sparks are crackling out behind and there's even a little wind now.
Good to be rolling.

Ev'ry little Nazi's shootin' pool or playin' potsy
On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!
All the funny Fascists just a-twirlin' their mustaches
Where we goin'? Can't you guess?
Headin' for the country just down the tracks,
Never heard 0' shortages or in-corne-tax,
Gonna be good-times, for Minnie and-Max,
On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!

Glimpf has switched on a headlamp. From side-tunnels booming by,
figures in khaki stare. Whites of eyes give back the light for an instant
before flicking past. A few people wave. Shouts go dopplering Hey­
eyyy-y-y-y like car horns at the crossings going home at night on the
Boston and Maine. . . . The Express is rolling at a fair clip. Damp wind
rushes by in a whistle. In the lamp's backscatter, silhouettes of warhead
sections can be made out, stacked on the two little flatcars the engine's
towing. Local midgetry scuttle and cringe alongside the tracks, nearly
out of the light. They think of the little train as their own, and feel hurt
whenever the big people come to commandeer it. Some sit on stacks of
crates, dangling their legs. Some practice handstands in the dark. Their
eyes glow green and red. Some even swing from ropes secured to the
overhead, in mock Kamikaze attacks on Glimpf and Slothrop, scream-

310

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ing, "Banzai, banzai," before vanishing
with a giggle. It's all in play.

They're really quite an amiable-

Right behind, loud as megaphones, in massed
chorale:

There once was a fellow named Slattery

o get
' "Oh, shit," sez Slothrop.

Who was fond of the course-gyro battery.
With that 50-volt shock,
What was left of his cock

Was all slimy and sloppy and spattery.

Ja, ja, [a, ja,
In Prussia they never eat pussy, u.s.w.

"Can you get back and uncouple those cars?" Glimpf wants
to know.

"Reckon so....
"

But he seems to fumble at it for hours. Meantime:

There was a young fellow named Pope,
Who plugged into an oscilloscope.
The cyclical trace
Of their carnal embrace

Had a damn nearly infinite slope.

"Engineers," Glimpf mutters. Slothrop gets the cars uncoupled
and

the engine speeds up. Wind is tearing at all Irish pennants, collarpoints,
cuffs, buckles, and belts. Back behind them there's a tremendous

crash

and clank, and a few shouts in the dark.
"Think that stopped 'em?"
Right up their ass, in four-part harmony:

There was a young fellow named Yuri,

Fucked the nozzle right up its venturi.
He had woes without cease

From his local police,
And a hell of a time with the jury.

"O.-K., Jocko babes! Got that old phosphorus flare?"
"Stand by, good buddy!"
With only that warning, in blinding concussion the Icy

Noctiluca

breaks, floods through the white tunnel. For a minute or two nobody
in

311



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here can see. There is only the hurtling on, through amazing perfect
whiteness. Whiteness without heat, and blind inertia: Slothrop feels a
terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long
as he can remember-never has he been as close as now to the true mo­
mentum of his time: faces and facts that have crowded his indenture to
the Rocket, camouflage and distraction fall away for the white moment,
the vain and blind tugging at his sleeves it's important . . . please . . .
look at us . . . but it's already too late, it's only wind, only g-loads, and
the blood of his eyes has begun to touch the whiteness back to ivory, to
brushings of gold and a network of edges to the broken rock . . . and
the hand that lifted him away sets him back in the Mittelwerke-

"Whoo-weel There's 'at 'sucker now!"
Out of the flare, inside easy pistol range, emerges a lumbering diesel

engine, pushing ahead of it the two cars Slothrop uncoupled, itself
stuffed with bloodshot, disheveled, bloated Americans, and at an apex,
perched lopsided on their shoulders, Major Marvy himself, wearing a
giant white Stetson, and clutching two .45 automatics.

Slothrop ducks down behind a cylindrical object at the rear of the
tractor. Marvy starts shooting, wildly, inspired by hideous laughter from
the others. Slothrop happens to notice now that what he's chosen to
hide behind, actually, seems to be another warhead. If the Amatol
charges are still in-say, Professor, could the shock wave from a .45 bul­
let at this range succeed in detonating this warhead here if it struck the
casing? e-even if there was no fuze installed? Well, Tyrone, now that
would depend on many things: muzzle velocity, wall thickness and
composition-

Counting at least on a pulled arm muscle and hernia, Slothrop man­
ages to tip and heave the warhead off onto the track while Marvy's bul­
lets go whanging and crashing all over the tunnel. It bounces and comes
to rest tilted against one of the rails. Good.

The flare has begun to die. Shadows are reoccupying the mouths of
the Stollen. The cars ahead of Marvy hit the obstacle a solid WHONK!
doubling up in an inverted V-diesel brakes screech in panic yi-i-i-i-ke
as the big engine derails, slews, begins to tip, Americans grabbing franti­
cally for handholds, each other, empty air. Then Slothrop and Glimpf
are around the last curve of the integral sign, and there is another huge
crash behind them, screaming that prolongs, echoing, as they see now
the entrance ahead, growing parabola of green mountainslopes, and
sunlight....

"Did you have a car when you came?" inquires the twinkling Glimpf.
"What?" Slothrop recalls the keys still in that Mercedes. "Oh, "

312

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Glimpf eases on the brakes as they coast out under the parabola into

daylight, and roll to a smooth and respectable stop. They flip salutes at
the B Company sentries and proceed to hijack the Mercedes, which is

right where that rail left it.
Out on the road, Glimpf gestures them north, watching Slothrop's

driving with a leery eye. They wind snarling up into the Harz,
in and

out of mountain shadows, pine and fir odors enveloping them, screech­

ing around curves and sometimes nearly off of the road. Slothrop
has the

inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions, and anyhow
he's jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head

aswarm with

souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling
Thunderbolts.

Coming around a blind corner, using the whole width of
the pavement

to make it-a sharp road-racing trick he happens to know-they nearly
buy it from a descending American Army deuce-and-a-half,

the words

fucking idiot clearly visible on the mouth of the driver as they barely
scoot past, heartbeats slamming low in their throats, mud

from the

truck's rear tires slapping over them in a great wing that shakes the rig
and blots out half the windshield.

The sun is well past its zenith when they pull up, finally, below a for­
ested dome with a small dilapidated castle on top, hundreds of doves,
white teardrops, dripping from its battlements. The green breath of

the

woods has sharpened, grown colder.

They climb a switchbacking path strewn with rocks, among
dark firs

toward the castle in the sunlight, jagged and brown above as a chunk of
bread left out for all its generations of birds.

"This is where you're staying?"
"I used to work here. 1 think Zwitter might still be around." There

wasn't enough room in the Mittelwerke for many of the smaller
assem­

bly jobs. Control systems mainly. So they were put together
in beerhalls,

shops, schools, castles, farmhouses all around Nordhausen here, any
in­

door lab space the guidance people could find. Glimpf's colleague
Zwit­

ter is from the T.H. in Munich. "The usual Bavarian approach to elec­
tronics." Glimpf begins to frown. "He's bearable, 1 suppose."

Whatever

mysterious injustices spring from a Bavarian approach to
electronics

now remove Glimpf's twinkle, and keep him occupied in surly intro­

spection the rest of the way up.
Mass liquid cooing, damped in white fluff, greets them as they slip

in

a side entrance to the castle. Floors are dirty and littered with bottles
and scraps of papers. Some of the papers

are stamped with the magenta
GEHEIME KOMMANDOSACHE. Birds fly in and out of broken windows.
Thin beams of light come in from chinks and erosions. Dust motes,

313



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fanned by the doves' wings, never stop billowing here. Walls are hung
with dim portraits of nobles in big white Frederick the Great hairdos,
ladies with smooth faces and oval eyes in low-necked dresses whose
yards of silk spill out into the dust and wingbeats of the dark rooms.
There is dove shit all over the place.

By contrast, Zwitter's laboratory upstairs is brightly lit, well-ordered,
crammed with blown glass, work tables, lights of many colors, speckled
boxes, green folders-a mad Nazi scientist lab! Plasticman, where are
you?

There's only Zwitter: stocky, dark hair parted down the middle, eye­
glass lenses thick as the windows of a bathysphere, the fluorescent hy­
dras, eels, and rays of control equations swimming seas behind
them....

But when they see Slothrop, there is immediate clearing there, and
glazed barriers come down. Hmm, T.S., what's this? Who are these peo­
ple? What's happened to the apples in old Glimpf's cheeks? What's a
Nazi guidance expert doing this side of the fence at Garmisch, with his
lab intact?

OH ... thur's ...
Nazis in the woodwork,
Fascists in the walls,
Little Japs with bucktooth grins
A-gonna grab yew bah th' balls.
Whin this war is over,
How happy Ah will be,
Gearin' up fer thim Rooskies
And Go-round Number Three.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

In the days when the white engineers were disputing the at­
tributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came
to Enzian of Bleicherode and said, "We cannot agree on the
chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pres­
sure of 40 atii would be the most desirable. But all the data we
know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atii."

"Then clearly," replied the Nguarorerue, "you must listen to
the data."

"But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value,"
protested the German.

"Pro

not dir

we Roc

number
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"Proud man," said the Nguarorerue. "What are these data,
if

not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from

the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare
a

number you have only derived on paper with a
number that is

the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise
value."

-from Tales of the Schwarzkommando,
collected by Steve Edelman

In the mountains around Nordhausen and Bleicherode,
down in aban­

doned mine shafts, live the Schwarzkommando. These days
it's no

longer a military title: they are a people now,
Zone-Hereros, in exile for

two generations from South-West
Africa. Early Rhenish missionaries

began to bring them back to the Metropolis,
that great dull zoo, as spec­

imens of a possibly doomed race. They were gently experimented
with:

exposed to cathedrals, Wagnerian soirees, Jaeger
underwear, trying to

get them interested in
their souls. Others were taken back to Germany

as servants, by soldiers who went to put down the great
Herero rising of

1904-1906. But only after 1933 did most of the present-day leadership

arrive, as part of a scheme-never openly
admitted by the Nazi party­

for setting up black juntas,
shadow-states for the eventual takeover of

British and French colonies in black Africa, on the model of Germany's

plan for the Maghreb. Siidwest by then
was a protectorate administered

by the Union of South Africa, but the
real power was still with the

old

German colonial families, and they cooperated.
There are several underground communities now near

Nordhausenl

Bleicherode, Around here they are known collectively as the
Erd­

schweinhohle. This is a Herero joke, a bitter one. Among the Ovatjimba,
the poorest of the Hereros, with no

cattle or villages of their own, the

totem animal was the Erdschwein or aardvark. They took their
name

from him, never ate his flesh, dug their food from the earth, just
as he

does. Considered outcasts, they lived on the veld, in the open. You
were

likely to come across them at night, their fires flaring bravely against
the

wind, out of rifle range from the iron tracks:
there seemed no other

force than that to give them locus out in that emptiness.
You knew what

they feared-not what they wanted, or what
moved them. And you had

business upcountry, at the mines: so, presently, as
the sputtering lights

slipped behind, so did all further need to
think of them ....

But as you swung away,
who was the woman alone in the earth,

planted up to her shoulders in the
aardvark hole, a gazing head rooted



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to the desert plane, with an upsweep of mountains far behind her,
darkly folded, far away in the evening? She can feel the incredible pres­
sure, miles of horizontal sand and clay, against her belly. Down the trail
wait the luminous ghosts of her four stillborn children, fat worms lying
with no chances of comfort among the wild onions, one by one, crying
for milk more sacred than what is tasted and blessed in the village cala­
bashes. In preterite line they have pointed her here, to be in touch with
Earth's gift for genesis. The woman feels power flood in through every
gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and
toes. It is sure and nourishing as sleep. It is a warmth. The more the
daylight fades, the further she submits-to the dark, to the descent of
water from the air. She is a seed in the Earth. The holy aardvark has dug
her bed.

Back in Siidwest, the Erdschweinh6hle was a powerful symbol of fer­
tility and life. But here in the Zone, its real status is not so clear.

Inside the Schwarzkommando there are forces, at present, who have
opted for sterility and death. The struggle is mostly in silence, in the
night, in the nauseas and crampings of pregnancies or miscarriages. But
it is political struggle. No one is more troubled with it than Enzian. He
is Nguarorerue here. The word doesn't mean "leader" exactly, but "one
who has been proven."

Enzian is also known, though not to his face, as Otyikondo, the Half­
breed. His father was a European. Not that it makes him unique among
the Erdschweinhohlers here: there's German, Slavic and Gypsy blood
mixed in by now too. Over the couple of generations, moved by acceler­
ations unknown in the days before the Empire, they have been growing
an identity that few can see as ever taking final shape. The Rocket will
have a final shape, but not its people. Eanda and oruzo have lost their
force out here-the bloodlines of mother and father were left behind, in
Siidwest. Many of the early emigrants had even gone over to the faith of
the Rhenish Missionary Society long before they left. In each village, as
noon flared the shadows in tightly to their owners, in that moment of
terror and refuge, the omuhona took from his sacred bag, soul after con­
verted soul, the leather cord kept there since the individual's birth, and
untied the birth-knot. Untied, it was another soul dead to the tribe. So
today, in the Erdschweinhohle, the Empty Ones each carry one knotless
strip of leather: it is a bit of the old symbolism they have found useful.

They call themselves Otukungurua. Yes, old Africa hands, it ought to
be "Omakungurua," but they are always careful-perhaps it's less
healthy than care-to point out that oma- applies only to the living and
human. Otu- is' for the inanimate and the rising, and this is how they

316

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imagine themselves. Revolutionaries of the Zero, they
mean to carryon

what began among the old Hereros after the 1904
rebellion failed. They

want a negative birth rate. The program is racial
suicide. They would

finish the extermination the Germans began in 1904.
A generation earlier, the declining number of live

Herero births was a

topic of medical interest throughout
southern Africa. The whites looked

on as anxiously as they would have at an outbreak of rinderpest among
the cattle. How provoking, to watch one's subject population dwindling
like this, year after year. What's a colony

without its dusky natives?

Where's the fun if they're all going to die off? Just a big hunk of desert,

no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the
construction or the

mining-wait, wait a minute there, yes
it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist

skipping away with his teeth together
and his eyebrows up trying to

make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas
Markets. . . .

Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more.
Colonies are the outhouses of

the European soul, where a fellow can
let his pants down and relax,

enjoy the smell of his own shit.
Where he can fall on his slender prey

roaring as loud as he feels like,
and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh?

Where he can just wallow and rut and let
himself go in a softness, a re­

ceptive darkness of limbs, of hair
as woolly as the hair on his own for­

bidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis
and coca grow full and

green, and not to the
colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric,

the blight and fungus native to Europe.
Christian Europe was always

death, Karl, death and repression. Out and
down in the colonies, life

can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms,
with no harm done

to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals,
white marble statues,

noble thoughts.... No word ever gets back.
The silences down here

are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter
how dirty, how animal

it gets....
Some of the more rational men of medicine attributed

the Herero

birth decline to a deficiency of Vitamin E in the
diet-others to poor

chances of fertilization given the peculiarly long and narrow
uterus of

the Herero female. But underneath all this
reasonable talk, this scien­

tific speculating, no white Afrikaner could quite put
down the way it

felt. . . . Something sinister was moving out
in the veld: he was begin­

ning to look at their faces, especially
those of the women, lined beyond

the thorn fences, and he knew beyond logical proof: there was a
tribal

mind at work out here, and it had chosen to commit suicide.
. . .

Puz­

zling. Perhaps we weren't as fair as we might
have been, perhaps we did

take their cattle and their lands away and then the. work-camps
of

course, the barbed wire and the
stockades Perhaps they feel it is a

317



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world they no longer want to live in. Typical of them, though, giving up,
crawling away to die ... why won't they even negotiate? We could
work out a solution, some solution. . . .

It was a simple choice for the Hereros, between two kinds of death:
tribal death, or Christian death. Tribal death made sense. Christian
death made none at all. It seemed an exercise they did not need. But to
the Europeans, conned by their own Baby Jesus Con Game, what they
were witnessing among these Hereros was a mystery potent as that of
the elephant graveyard, or the lemmings rushing into the sea.

Though they don't admit it, the Empty Ones now exiled in the Zone,
Europeanized in language and thought, split off from the old tribal
unity, have found the why of it just as mysterious. But they've seized it,
as a sick woman will seize a charm. They calculate no cycles, no returns,
they are in love with the glamour of a whole people's suicide-the pose,
the stoicism, and the bravery. These Otukungurua are prophets of mas­
turbating, specialists in abortion and sterilization, pitchmen for acts oral
and anal, pedal and digital, sodomistical and zoophiliac-their approach
and their game is pleasure: they are spieling earnestly and well, and
Erdschweinhohlers are listening.

The Empty Ones can guarantee a day when the last Zone-Herero will
die, a final zero to a collective history fully lived. It has appeal.

There is no outright struggle for power. It is all seduction and coun­
terseduction, advertising and pornography, and the history of the Zone­
Hereros is being decided in bed.

Vectors in the night underground, all trying to flee a center, a force,
which appears to be the Rocket: some immachination, whether of jour­
ney or of destiny, which is able to gather violent political opposites to­
gether in the Erdschweinh6hle as it gathers fuel and oxidizer in its
thrust chamber: metered, helmsmanlike, for the sake of its scheduled
parabola.

Enzian sits this evening under his mountain, behind him another day
of schemes, expediting, newly invented paperwork-forms he manages
to destroy or fold, Japanese style, before the day's end, into gazelles, or­
chids, hunter-hawks. As the Rocket grows toward its working shape and
fullness, so does he evolve, himself, into a new configuration. He feels it.
It's something else to worry about. Late last night, among the blue­
prints, Christian and Mieczislav looked up, abruptly smiled, and fell si­
lent. A transparent reverence. They study the drawings as if they were
his own, and revelations. This is not flattering to him.

What Enzian wants to create will have no history. It will never need
318

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a design change. Time, as time is known to the other nations,
will wither

away inside this new one.
The Erdschweinhohle will not be bound, like

the Rocket, to time. The people will find the Center again, the
Center

without time, the journey without hysteresis, where every departure
is a

return to the same place, the only place. . . .
He has thus himself found a strange rapprochement with the Empty

Ones: in particular with Josef Ombindi of Hannover. The
Eternal Cen­

ter can easily be seen as the Final Zero. Names and
methods vary, but

the movement toward stillness is the same. It has led
to strange passages

between the two men. "You know," Ombindi's eyes rolled
the other

way, looking up at a mirror-image
of Enzian that only he can see,

"there's ... well, something you ordinarily wouldn't think of as
erotic

-but it's really the most erotic thing there is."

"Really," grins Enzian, flirting. "I can't think of
what that would be.

Give me a clue."

"It's a non-repeatable act."

"Firing a rocket?"
"No, because there's always another rocket. But

there's nothing-

well, never mind."
"Hal Nothing to follow it with, that's what you

were going to say."

"Suppose I give you another clue."
"All right." But Enzian has already guessed: it's

there in the way he

holds his jaw and is just about to laugh. . . .
"It embraces all the Deviations in one single act." Enzian Sighs,

irri­

tated, but does not call him on this use of
"Deviations." Bringing up the

past is part of Ombindi's game. "Homosexuality,
for example." No rise.

"Sadism and masochism. Onanism? Necrophilia....
"

"All those in the same act?"

All those, and more. Both know by now that what's under
discussion

is the act of suicide, which also includes bestiality ("Think how sweet,"

runs the pitch, "to show mercy, sexual mercy to
that hurt and crying an­

imal"), pedophilia ("It is widely reported that just
at the edge you grow

glaringly younger"), lesbianism ("Yes, for as
the wind blows through all

the emptying compartments the two
shadow-women at last can creep

out of their chambers in the dying shell, at the last ashen shoreline,
to

meet and embrace ... "), coprophilia and urolagnia ("The final
convul-

sions "), fetishism ("A wide choice of death-fetishes,
natu-

rally "). Naturally. The two of them sit there, passing
a cigarette

back and forth, till it's smoked down to a very small stub.
Is it idle talk,

or is Ombindi really trying to hustle Enzian here?
Enzian's got to be



SOLD ON SUICIDE

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sure before he moves. If he comes out sez, "This is a hustle, right?" and
turns out it isn't, well- But the alternative is so strange, that Enzian is,
in some way, being

Well I don't care-for, th' things I eat,
Can't stand that boogie-woogie beat­
But I'm sold, on, suicide!

You can keep Der Bingle too, a­
And that darn "bu-bu-bu-boo,"
Cause I'm sold on suicide!

Oh! I'm not too keen on ration stamps,
Or Mothers who used to be baby vamps,
But I'm sold, on, suicide!

Don't like either, the Cards or Browns,
Piss on the country and piss on the town,
But I'm S.O.S., yes well actually this goes on, verse after

verse, for quite some time. In its complete version it represents a pretty
fair renunciation of the things of the world. The trouble with it is that
by Coders Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has
omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top
of one's head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the
whole thing, meantime correcting mistakes and inevitable repetitions,
and putting in new items that will surely have occurred to one, and­
well, it's easy to see that the "suicide" of the title might have to be post­
poned indefinitely!

Conversations between Ombindi and Enzian these days are thus a se­
ries of commercial messages, with Enzian not so much mark as unwill­
ing shill, standing in for the rest of the tip, who may be listening and
maybe not.

"Ahh, do I see your cock growing, Nguarorerue? ... no, no, perhaps
you are only thinking of someone you loved, somewhere, long ago . . .
back in Siidwest, eh?" To allow the tribal past to disperse, all memories
ought to be public record, there's no point in preserving history with
that Final Zero to look forward to.... Cynically, though, Ombindi has
preached this in the name of the old Tribal Unity, and it's a weakness in
his pitch all right-it looks bad, looks like Ombindi's trying to make be­
lieve the Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it

�ID\IIt we,

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320



has infected us all, some to death. Yes it is a little bit jive of Ombindi

here to look back toward an innocence he's really only heard about,
can't himself believe in-the gathered purity of opposites, the village
built like a mandala. . . . Still he will profess and proclaim it, as an

image of a grail slipping through the room, radiant, though
the jokers

around the table be sneaking Whoopee Cushions into the Siege Peril­

ous, under the very descending arse of the grailseeker , and though
the

grails themselves come in plastic these years, a dime a dozen, penny
a

gross, still Ombindi, at times
self-conned as any Christian, praises and

prophesies that era of innocence he just missed living in,
one of the last

pockets of Pre-Christian Oneness left on the planet:
"Tibet is a special

case. Tibet was deliberately set aside by the Empire as free and neutral

territory, a Switzerland for the spirit where
there is no extradition, and

Alp-Himalayas to draw the soul upward, and danger rare enough
to tol­

erate. . . . Switzerland and Tibet are linked along one of the true me­
ridians of Earth, true as the Chinese have drawn meridians of the body.
· .. We will have to learn such new maps of Earth: and as

travel in the

Interior becomes more common, as the maps grow another dimension,

so must we....
"

And he tells too of Gondwanaland, before the conti­

nents drifted apart, when Argentina lay snuggled up to Siidwest
...

the people listen, and filter back to cave and bed and family
calabash

from which the milk, unconsecrated, is swallowed in cold whiteness,

cold as the north. . . .

So, between these two, even routine greeting does not pass
without

some payload of meaningfulness and the hope of Blitzing the
other's

mind. Enzian knows that he is being used for his name. The name has
some magic. But he has been so unable to touch,

so neutral for so long
· . . everything has flowed away but the name, Enzian,

a sound for

chanting. He hopes it will be magic enough for one thing,
one good

thing when the time comes, however short of the Center
.... What are

these persistences among a people, these traditions and offices,
but

traps? the sexual fetishes Christianity knows how to flash,
to lure us in,

meant to remind us of earliest infant love. . . . Can his name, can
"En­

zian" break their power? Can his name prevail?
The Erdschweinhohle is in one of the worst traps of all, a dialectic of

word made flesh, flesh moving toward something else.... Enzian sees

the trap clearly, but not the way out. . . . Sitting now
between a pair

of candles just lit, his gray field-jacket open at the neck,
beard feather­

ing down his dark throat to shorter, sparser glossy
black hairs that go

running in a whirl, iron filings about the south pole of
his Adam's apple

· .. pole ... axis ... axle-tree.... Tree ... Omumborombanga

321



-��_/
I �

f:'"'�;';'_" '" _ _ .. .....• _ . 7�

... Mukuru ... first ancestor ... Adam ... still sweating, hands
from the working day gone graceless and numb, he has a minute to drift
and remember this time of day back in Siidwest, above ground, partici­
pating in the sunset, out watching the mist gather, part fog, part dust
from the cattle returning to the kraals to milking and sleep . . . his tribe
believed long ago that each sunset is a battle. In the north, where the
sun sets, live the one-armed warriors, the one-legged and one-eyed, who
fight the sun each evening, who spear it to death until its blood runs out
over the horizon and sky. But under the earth, in the night, the sun is
born again, to come back each dawn, new and the same. But we, Zone­
Hereros, under the earth, how long will we wait in this north, this locus
of death? Is it to be reborn? or have we really been buried for the last
time, buried facing north like all the rest of our dead, and like all the
holy cattle ever sacrificed to the ancestors? North is death's region.
There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may
have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the
pattern. Nordhausen means dwellings in the north. The Rocket had to
be produced out of a place called Nordhausen. The town adjoining was
named Bleicherode as a validation, a bit of redundancy so that the mes­
sage would not be lost. The history of the old Hereros is one of lost mes­
sages. It began in mythical times, when the sly hare who nests in the
Moon brought death among men, instead of the Moon's true message.
The true message has never come. Perhaps the Rocket is meant to take
us there someday, and then Moon will tell us its truth at last. There are
those down in the Erdschweinhohle, younger ones who've only known
white autumn-prone Europe, who believe Moon is their destiny. But
older ones can remember that Moon, like Ndjambi Karunga, is both the
bringer of evil and its avenger. . . .

And Enzian's found the name Bleicher6de close enough to "Blicker,"
the nickname the early Germans gave to Death. They saw him white:
bleaching and blankness. The name was later Latinized to "Dominus
Blicero." Weissmann, enchanted, took it as his SS code name. Enzian
was in Germany by then. Weissmann brought the new name home to
his pet, not showing it off so much as indicating to Enzian yet another
step to be taken toward the Rocket, toward a destiny he still cannot see
past this sinister cryptography of naming, a sparse pattern but one that
harshly will not be denied, that cries and nags him on stumbling as
badly as 20 years ago....

Once he could not imagine a life without return. Before his conscious
memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother's circular
village far out in the Kakau Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a

322

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323

departure and a return. . . . He was told about it years
later. Shortly

after he was born, his mother brought him back to her village, back

from Swakopmund. In ordinary times she would have been
banished.

She'd had the child out of wedlock, by a Russian sailor whose name she

couldn't pronounce. But under the German invasion, protocol
was less

important than helping one another. Though the
murderers in blue

came down again and again, each time, somehow, Enzian
was passed

over. It is a Herod myth his admirers still like to bring up, to his an­

noyance. He had been walking only for a few months
when his mother

took him with her to join Samuel Maherero's great trek across the
Kala­

hari.
Of the stories told about these years, this is the most tragic. The ref­

ugees had been on the
desert for days. Khama, king of the Bechuanas,

sent guides, oxen, wagons and water to help them.
Those who arrived

first were warned to take water only little by little. But by the time the

� I stragglers arrived, everyone else was asleep. No one
to warn them. An­

other lost message. They drank till they died, hundreds of
souls. En­

zian's mother was among them. He had fallen asleep under a cowhide,
exhausted from hunger and thirst. He woke among the dead. It

is said

that he was found there by a band of Ovatjimba, taken and cared for.

They left him back at the edge of his mother's village,
to walk in alone.

They were nomads, they could have taken any
other direction in that

waste country, but they brought him back to the place he'd
left. He

found hardly anyone remaining there. Many had gone
on the trek, some

had been taken away to the coast and herded
into kraals, or to work on

the railroad the Germans were building through the desert. Many oth­

ers had died eating cattle dead of rinderpest.
No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been

extermina­

ted. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into
a

white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures
were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question

oc­

curred to him, he could find no way to account for his own
survival. He

could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga
and the

Christian God were too far away. There was no difference
between the

behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann,
the

European whose protege he became, always believed
he'd seduced En­

zian away from religion. But the gods had gone away
themselves: the

gods had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think
what he wanted

to. The man's thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert's for water.
It's been a long time now since the two men have seen

each other.

Last time they spoke was during the move from
Peenemiinde down

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here to the Mittelwerke. Weissmann is probably dead by now. Even in
Siidwest, 20 years ago, before Enzian could even speak his language,
he'd seen that: a love for the last explosion-the lifting and the scream
that peaks past fear. ... Why should Weissmann want to survive the
war? Surely he'd have found something splendid enough to match his
thirst. It could not have ended for him rationalized and meek as his hun­
dred glass bureaus about the SS circuit-located in time and space al­
ways just to miss grandeur, only to be in its vacuum, to be tugged
slightly along by its slipstream but finally left to lie still again in a few
tarnished sequins of wake. Biirgerlichkeit played to Wagner, the brasses
faint and mocking, the voices of the strings drifting in and out of
phase....

At night down here, very often lately, Enzian will wake for no reason.
Was it really Him, pierced Jesus, who came to lean over you? The white
faggot's-dream body, the slender legs and soft gold European eyes ...
did you catch a glimpse of olive cock under the ragged loincloth, did
you want to reach to lick at the sweat of his rough, his wooden bond­
age? Where is he, what part of our Zone tonight, damn him to the knob
of that nervous imperial staff. . . .

There are few such islands of down and velvet for him to lie and
dream on, not in these marble passages of power. Enzian has grown
cold: not so much a fire dying away as a positive coming on of cold, a
bitter taste growing across the palate of love's first hopes. . . . It began
when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among
these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with
masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. De­
manded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . .
Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won,
away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable
but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was ob­
liged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the
Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he
would come to understand truly his manhood. . . .

"I used to imagine, in some naive way I have lost now, that all the ex­
citement of those days was being put on for me, somehow, as a gift from
Weissmann. He had carried me over his threshold and into his house,
and this was the life he meant to bring me to, these manly pursuits,
devotion to the Leader, political intrigue, secret re-arming in naughty
defiance of the aging plutocracies all around us . . . they were growing
impotent, but we were young and strong . . . to be that young and

324

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strong, at such a time in the life of a
nation! I could not believe so many

fair young men, the way the sweat
and dust lay on their bodies as they

lengthened the Autobahns day into ringing day: we
drove among trum­

peters, silk banners impeccably tailored as
suits of clothes . . . the

women seemed to move all docile, without color . . . I thought of them

in ranks, down on all fours, having their breasts milked into pails
of

shining steel. . . ."
"Was he ever jealous of the other young men-the way you felt

about

them?"
"Oh. It was still very physical for me then. But he had already

moved

past that part of it. No. No, I
don't think he minded.... I loved him

then. I could not see into him, or the things he believed in, but I wanted

to. If the Rocket was his life, then I would belong to the Rocket."

"And you never doubted him?
He certainly hadn't the most ordered

personality-"
"Listen-I don't know how to say this ... have you

ever been a

Christian?"

"Well ... at one time."

"Did you ever, in the street,
see a man that you knew, in the instant,

must be Jesus Christ-not hoped he was, or caught
some resemblance

-but knew. The Deliverer, returned and walking among the people,

just the way the old stories promised
... as you approached you grew

more and more certain-you could see nothing at all to
contradict that

first amazement . . . you drew near and passed, terrified that
he would

speak to you . .'. your eyes grappled . . . it
was confirmed. And most

terrible of all, he knew. He saw into your soul: all your
make-believe

ceased to matter....
"

"Then ... what's happened, since your first days in Europe, could

be described, in Max Weber's phrase, almost as a 'routinization of
char­

isma.'
"

"Outase," sez Enzian, which is one of many Herero
words for shit, in

this case a large, newly laid cow turd.
Andreas Orukambe sits in front of an army-green,

wrinkle-finished

transmitter I receiver rig, off in a rock alcove of the room.
A pair of rub­

ber headphones covers his ears. The
Schwarzkommando use the 50 em

band-the one the Rocket's Hawaii II guidance operated on. Who but

rocket-maniacs would listen in at 53 cm? Schwarzkommando
can be

sure, at least, that they're being monitored by every competitor
in the

Zone. Transmissions from the Erdschweinhohle begin around 0300 and

run till dawn. Other Schwarzkommando stations broadcast
on their own

325



��_ I ___.

t""'"'-:::·:···'· . '. .._ " .. """'f:!'''''''- .•. ',,_,': c. ,....

schedules. Traffic is in Herero, with a German loan-word now and then
(which is too bad, since these are usually technical words, and valuable
clues for whoever's listening).

Andreas is on the second dog watch, now, copying mostly, answering
when he has to. Keying any transmitter is an invitation to instant para­
noia. There springs into being an antenna pattern, thousands of square
kilometers full of enemies out in their own night encampments in the
Zone, faceless, monitoring. Though they are in contact with one an­
other-the Schwarzkommando try to listen in to as much as they can­
though there can be no illusion about their plans for the Schwarzkom­
mando, still they are holding off, waiting for the optimum time to move
in and destroy without a trace. . . . Enzian believes they will wait for
the first African rocket to be fully assembled and ready for firing: it will
look better if they move against a real threat, real hardware. Meantime
Enzian tries to keep security tight. Here at the home base it's no prob­lem: penetration by less than a regiment would be impossible. But far­
ther out in the Zone, rocket-towns like CelIe, Enschede, Hachenburg­
they can pick us off out there one by one, first a campaign of attrition,
then a coordinated raid . . . leaving then only this metropolis, under
siege, to strangle. . . .

Perhaps it's theater, but they seem no longer to be Allies ... thoughthe history they have invented for themselves conditions us to expect
"postwar rivalries," when in fact it may all be a giant cartel includingwinners and losers both, in an amiable agreement to share what is there
to be shared. . . . Still, Enzian has played them off, the quarreling scav­
engers, one against the other . . . it looks genuine enough. . . . Marvymust be together with the Russians by now, and with General Electric
too-throwing him off the train the other night bought us-what? a day
or two, and how well have we used the time?

It comes down to this day-to-day knitting and unraveling, minor suc­
cesses, minor defeats. Thousands of details, anyone of which carries the
chance of a fatal mistake. Enzian would like to be more out of the proc­
ess than he is-to be able to see where it's going, to know, in real time,
at each splitting of the pathway of decision, which would have been
right and which wrong. But it is their time, their space, and he still ex­
pects, naively, outcomes the white continuum grew past hoping for cen­turies ago. The details-valves, special tools that mayor may not exist,Erdschweinhohle jealousies and plots, lost operating manuals, techni­cians on the run from both East and West, food shortages, sick children-swirl like fog, each particle with its own array of forces and directions

. he can't handle them all at the same time, if he stays too much with
326

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any he's in danger of losing others. . . . But it's not only the details.
He

has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is

speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but
in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the
flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being
held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake
... he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which
must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on
for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which
he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it has a

stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an
Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs,
kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as

blue

dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people
whose old culture

and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world
... the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful riv­
ers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return, this

voyage: he has grown old inside his name,
the sweeping music of the

voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten
it

completely . . . but now it is finding him again. . . .
"Trouble in Hamburg-" Andreas is scribbling away, lifting one ear­

piece back smock damp with sweat so that he can be on
both ends of

the link at once. "Sounds like it might be the DPs again. Got a bad sig­
nal. Keeps fading-"

Since the surrender there have been these constant skirmishes be­

tween the German civilians and foreign prisoners freed from the camps.
Towns in the north have been taken over by displaced Poles, Czechs,
Russians who've looted the arsenals and granaries and mean to hold

what they've taken. But nobody knows how to feel about the local
Schwarzkommando. Some see only the ragged pieces of SS uniform, and

respond to that one way or another-others take them for
Moroccans or

Indians drifted somehow over the mountains from Italy. Germans still
remember the occupation of the Rhineland 20 years ago by French co­
lonial units, and the posters screaming SCHWARZE BESATZUNG AM

RHEIN!

Another stress in the pattern. Last week in Hamburg, two Schwarzkom­
mando were shot. Others were badly beaten. The British military gov­
ernment sent in some troops, but only after the killing was over. Their
main interest seemed to be in enforcing a curfew.

"It's Onguruve." Andreas hands over the earphones and swivels
to

roll out of Enzian's way.
"

... can't tell if it's us they want, or the oil refinery ...
"

the voice



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goes crackling in and out, ". . . hundred, maybe two hundred . . . so
many . . . -Res, clubs, handguns-"

Bl-bleep and a burst of hissing, then in laps a familiar voice. "I can
bring a dozen men."

"Hannover's answering," Enzian murmurs, trying to sound amused.
"You mean Josef Ombindi." Andreas is not amused.
Now Onguruve, calling for help, is neutral on the Empty Ones Ques­

tion, or tries to be. But if Ombindi can bring a relief force to Hamburg,
he may decide to stay. Hannover, even with the Volkswagen plant
there, is only a stepping-stone for him. Hamburg would give the Empty
Ones a stronger power base, and this could be the opportunity. The
north ought to be their native element, anyway . . .

"I'll have to go," handing the phones back to Andreas. "What's
wrong?"

"Could be the Russians, trying to draw you out."
"It's all right. Stop worrying about Tchitcherine. I don't think he's up

there."
"But your European said-"
"Him? I don't know how far to trust him. Remember, I did hear him

talking with Marvy on the train. Now he's with Tchitcherine's girl in
Nordhausen. I mean, would you trust him?"

"But if Marvy's chasing him now, it might mean he's worth some­
thing."

"If he is, we're sure to see him again."
Enzian grabs his kit, swallows two Pervitins for the road, reminds An­

dreas of a business detail or two for tomorrow, and climbs the long salt
and stone ramps to the surface.

Outside, he breathes the evergreen air of the Harz. In the old villages,
it would be the time of evening for the milking. The first star is out, ok­
anumaihi, the little drinker of sweet milk. . . .

But this must be a different star, a northern star. There is no comfort.
What has happened to us? If choices have never been our own, if the
Zone- Hereros are meant to live in the bosom of the Angel who tried to
destroy us in Siidwest . . . then: have we been passed over, or have we
been chosen for something even more terrible?

Enzian has to be in Hamburg before another spearing of the sun. Se­
curity on the trains is troublesome, but the sentries know him. The long
freights are rolling out from the Mittelwerke day and night, carrying At
hardware west to the Americans, north to the English . . . and soon,
when the new map of the occupation goes into effect, east to the Rus­
sians too. . . . Nordhausen will be under Russian administration and we

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, , , so should have some action then . . . will it give him a chance at Tchitch­
erine? Enzian has never seen the man, but they are meant to come to­

gether. Enzian is his half-brother. They are the same flesh.
His sciatic nerve is throbbing now. Too much sitting. He goes limp­

ing, alone, head still down for the low clearances back down
in the Erd­

schweinhohlc=-who knows what waits out here for the head held too

high? Down the road to the railway overpass, tall and gray in the grow­
ing starlight, Enzian is heading into the North....

D D D D D D D

"\\baf Just before dawn. A hundred feet below flows a pallid sheet of cloud,
stretching west as far as they can see. Here are Slothrop and the ap­
prentice witch Geli Tripping, standing up on top of the Brocken, the

very plexus of German evil, twenty miles north by northwest of the Mit­
telwerke, waiting for the sun to rise. Though May Day Eve's come and

gone and this frolicking twosome are nearly a month late, relics of the
latest Black Sabbath still remain: Kriegsbier empties, lace undergar­
ments, spent rifle cartridges, Swastika-banners of ripped red satin, tat­

tooing-needles and splashes of blue ink- "What the heck was that
for?" Slothrop wondered.

"For the devil's kiss, of course," Geli snuggling oh-you-old-silly up to
his armpit there, and Slothrop feeling a little icky and square for not

knowing. But then he knows next to nothing about witches, even

though there was, in his ancestry, one genuine Salem Witch, one of the
last to join the sus. per colI. crowd dangling, several of them back

through the centuries' couplings, off of the Slothrop family tree. Her
name was Amy Sprue, a family renegade turned Antinomian at age 23
and running mad over the Berkshire countryside, ahead of Crazy Sue
Dunham by 200 years, stealing babies, riding cows in the twilight,
sacrificing chickens up on Snodd's Mountain. Lot of ill will about those
chickens, as you can imagine. The cows and babies always, somehow,
came back all right. Amy Sprue was not, like young skipping Dorothy's
antagonist, a mean witch.

She headed for Rhode Island, seeking some of that

asylum,
And she thought she'd stop by Salem on her way,
But they didn't like her style, and they didn't like

her smile,

329



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...

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..."..

-_

��.:.; .. ,-.. . . .. . . . . .,.� = .. _ - _ ..•

So she never saw that Narragansett Bay....

They busted her for witchery and she got death. Another of Slo­
throp's crazy kinfolks. When she was mentioned aloud at all it was with
a shrug, too far away really to be a Family Disgrace-more of a curios­
ity. Slothrop grew up not quite knowing what to think about her.
Witches were certainly not getting a fair shake in the thirties. They
were depicted as hags who called you dearie, not exactly a wholesome
lot. The movies had not prepared him for this Teutonic version here.
Your kraut witch, for example, has six toes on each foot and no hair at
all on her cunt. That is how the witches look, anyhow, in the stairway
murals inside the one-time Nazi transmitter tower up on the Brocken
here, and government murals are hardly places to go looking for irre­
sponsible fantasy, right? But Geli thinks the hairless cunt derives from
the women von Bayros drew. "Aw, you just don't wanna shave yours,"
crows Slothrop. "Hal Ha! Some witch!"

"I'll show you something," she sez, which is why they are now awake
at this ungodly hour, side by side, holding hands, very still as the sun be­
gins to clear the horizon. "Now watch," Geli whispers: "out there."

As the sunlight strikes their backs, coming in nearly flat on, it begins
developing on the pearl cloudbank: two gigantic shadows, thrown miles
overland, past Clausthal-Zelterfeld, past Seesen and Goslar, across
where the river Leine would be, and reaching toward Weser.... "By
golly," Slothrop a little bit nervous, "it's the Specter." You got it up
around Greylock in the Berkshires too. Around these parts it is known
as the Brockengespenst.

God-shadows. Slothrop raises an arm. His fingers are cities, his biceps
is a province-of course he raises an arm. Isn't it expected of him? The
arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a
grab at Cottingen. Not ordinary shadows, either-three-dimensional
ones, cast out on the German dawn, yes and Titans had to live in these
mountains, or under them.... Impossibly out of scale. Never to be car­
ried by a river. Never to look to a horizon and think that it might go on
forever. Notrees to climb, no long journeys to take . . . only their deep
images are left, haloed shells lying prone above the fogs men move
in....

Geli kicks a leg out straight as a dancer, and tilts her head to the side.
Slothrop raises his middle finger to the west, the headlong finger dark­
ening three miles of cloud per second. Geli grabs for Slothrop's cock.
Slothrop leans to bite Cell's tit. They are enormous, dancing the floor of
the whole visible sky. He reaches underneath her dress. She twines a leg

330



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around one of his. The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense,
at all

their edges. Under the clouds out there it's
as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

But the Brockengespenstphanomen is confined
to dawn's slender in­

terface, and soon the shadows have come shrinking
back to their own­

ers.

"Say, did that Tchitcherine ever-"
"Tchitcherine's too busy for this."
"Oh, and I'm some kind of a drone or something."
"You're different."

"We-e-e-ll ... he ought to see it."
She looks at him curiously, but doesn't ask why-her

teeth halt on

her lower lip, and the warum (varoom, a
Plasticman sound) hovers

trapped in her mouth. Just as well. Slothrop
doesn't know why. He's no

help to anybody who's fixing to interrogate.
Last night he and Celi blun­

dered onto a Schwarzkommando picket outside one of the
old mine en­

trances. The Hereros threw questions at him for an
hour. Oh, just wan­

dering about you know, looking
for a bit of the odd, what we call

"human interest," fascinating of course, we're always
interested in what

you chaps are up to. . . . Celi snickering
in the darkness. They must

have known her. They didn't ask her anything.
When he brought it up later, she wasn't sure just

what this is between

Tchitcherine and the Africans, but whatever it is it's being
carried on

with high passion.
"It's hate, all right," she said. "Stupid, stupid. The

war's over. It isn't

politics or fuck-your-buddy, it's old-time, pure, personal
hate."

"Enzian?"

"I think so."

They found the Brocken occupied
both by American and by Russian

troops. The mountain lay on what was
to be the border of the Soviet

zone of occupation. The brick and stucco
ruins of the radio transmitter

and a tourist hotel loomed up just outside the firelight. Only
a couple of

platoons here. Nobody higher than
noncoms. The officers were all down

in Bad Harzburg, Halberstadt, someplace comfortable, getting
drunk or

laid. There is a certain air of resentment up on
the Brocken all right, but

the boys like Celi and tolerate Slothrop,
and luckiest of all, nobody

seems to be connected with that Ordnance.

It's only a moment's safety, though. Major Marvy
is gnashing about

the Harz, sending thousands of canaries into
cardiac episodes, dropping

in yellow droves belly-up out of the trees
as he marauds on by hollering

Cit that limey 'sucker I don't care how many
men it takes I want a fuck­

ing division you hear me boy? Only
a matter of time before he picks up

331



the trail again. He's out of his mind. Slothrop's a little daffy, but not like �utof
this-this is really unhealthy, this Marvy persecution. Is it possible . . . mtoili
yup, the thought has certainly occurred to him-that Marvy's in tight
with those Rolls Roycers who were after him in Zurich? There may be
no limit to their connections. Marvy is buddies with CE, that's Morgan
money, there's Morgan money in Harvard, and surely an interlock
someplace with Lyle Bland . . . who are they, hey? why do they want
Slothrop? He knows now for sure that Zwitter the mad Nazi scientist is
one of them. And that kindly old Professor Climpf was only waiting
down in the Mittelwerke to pick up Slothrop if he showed. Jesus. If Slo­
throp hadn't snuck out after dark back down into Nordhausen to Cell's
place, they'd have him locked up by now for sure, maybe beaten up,
maybe dead.

Before they head back down the mountain, they manage to chisel six
cigarettes and some K-rations off of the sentries. Celi knows a friend of
a friend who stays out on a farm in the Coldene Aue, a ballooning en-
thusiast named Schnorp, who is heading toward Berlin. �nno

"But I don't want to go to Berlin." \�!ollo"You want to go where Marvy isn't, Liebchen." \I�J)Schnorp is beaming, eager enough for company, just back from a �4ijOrOlocal PX with an armload of flat white boxes: merchandise he plans to "I'm
move in Berlin. "No trouble," he tells Slothrop, "don't worry. I've done .�orcothis trip hundreds of times. Nobody bothers a balloon." lei coHe takes Slothrop out in back of the house, and here in the middle of Imoat
a sloping green field is a wicker gondola beside a great heap of bright �t, Youyellow and scarlet silk.

w�e,""Real unobtrusive getaway," Slothrop mutters. A gang of kids have
appeared running out of an apple orchard to help them carry tin jerri­
cans of grain alcohol out to the gondola. All shadows are being thrown
uphill by the afternoon sun. Wind blows from the west. Slothrop gives
Schnorp a light from his Zippo to get the burner going while kids
straighten out the folds in the gasbag. Schnorp turns up the flame till it's
shooting sideways and with a steady roar into the opening of the great
silk bag. Children visible through the gap break up into wiggly heat
waves. Slowly the balloon begins to expand. "Remember me," Celi calls
above the rumbling of the burner. "Till I see you again ...

"

Slothrop
climbs in the gondola with Schnorp. The balloon rises a little off the
ground and is caught by the wind. They start to move. Celi and the kids
have taken hold of the gondola all around its gunwales, the bag still notall the way up but gathering speed, dragging them all as fast as their
feet can move, giggling and cheering, uphill. Slothrop keeps as much

332



out of the way as he can, letting Schnorp
see that the flame's pointed

into the bag and that lines to the basket are
clear. At last the bag swings

vertical, across the sun, the inside of it going
a riotous wreathing of yel­

low and scarlet heat. One by one the ground crew
fall away, waving

good-by. The last to go is Geli
in her white dress, hair brushed back

over her ears into pigtails, her soft chin and
mouth and big serious eyes

looking into Slothrop's for as long
as she can before she has to let go.

She kneels in the grass, blows a kiss. Slothrop
feels his heart, out of con­

trol, inflate with love and rise quick as a
balloon. It is taking him longer,

the longer he's in the Zone, to
remember to say aw quit being a sap.

What is this place doing to his brain?

They soar up over a stand of
firs. Geli and the children go dwindling

to shadow-strokes on the green
lawn. The hills fall away, flatten out.

Soon, looking back, Slothrop can see
Nordhausen: Cathedral, Rathaus,

Church of St. Blasius . . . the
roofless quarter where he

found

Celio ...

Schnorp nudges and points.
After a while Slothrop makes out a con­

voy of four
olive-drab vehicles dusting along toward the farm

in a hurry.

Marvy's Mothers, by the looks of things.
And Slothrop hanging from this

gaudy beach ball. Well, all right-
"I'm bad luck," Slothrop hollers over a little

later. They've found a

steady course now northeastward,
and are huddling close to the alcohol

flame, collars turned up, with a gradient
of must be 500 between the

wind at their backs and the warmth
in front. "I should've mentioned

that. You don't even know me, and
here we're flying into that Russian

zone."

Schnorp, his hair blown like holidays
of hay, does a wistful German

thing with his upper lip: "There
are no zones," he sez, which is also a

line of Cell's. "No zones but the
Zone."

Before too long Slothrop has begun checking
out these boxes here

that Schnorp brought along. There are
a dozen of them, and each con­

tains a deep, golden custard pie,
which will fetch a fantastic price in

Berlin. "Wow," cries Slothrop, "holy shit. Surely
I hallucinate," and

other such eager junior sidekick talk.

"You ought to have a PX card." A
sales pitch.

"Right now I can't afford a
ration stamp for an ant's jockstrap,"

re­

plies Slothrop, forthrightly.
"Well, I'll split this one pie here with you," Schnorp

reckons after a

time, "because I'm getting kind of hungry."
"Oboy,oboy."
Well, Slothrop is just chowing on

that pie! enjoying himself, licking

333



�-� I ...-

---

/

f�,·,·,·t _ �

custard off of his hands, when he happens to notice off in the sky, back
toward Nordhausen, this funny dark object, the size of a dot. "Uh-"

Schnorp looks around, "Kot!" comes up with a brass telescope and
braces it blazing on the gunwale. "Kot, Kot-no markings."

"I wonder . . ."
Out of air so blue you can take it between your fingers, rub, and bring

them back blue, they watch the dot slowly grow into a rusty old recon­
naissance plane. Presently they can hear its engine, snarling and sput­
tering. Then, as they watch, it banks and starts a pass.

Along the wind between them, faintly, comes the singing of Furies:

Ah

�oints
Di�wh
iliesee

There was a young man named McGuire,
Who was fond of the pitch amplifier.
But a number of shorts
Left him covered with warts,
And set half the bedroom on fire.

Ja, [a, ja, [a!
In Prussia they never eat pussy-

The plane buzzes by a yard or two away, showing its underbelly. It is
a monster, about to give birth. Out of a little access opening peers a red
face in leather helmet and goggles. "You limey 'sucker," going past, "we
fixin' to hand your ass to you."

Without planning to, Slothrop has picked up a pie. "Fuck you." He
flings it, perfect shot, the plane peeling slowly past and blop gets Marvy
right in the face. Yeah. Gloved hands paw at the mess. The Major's pink
tongue appears. Custard drips into the wind, yellow droplets fall in long
arcs toward earth. The hatch closes as the recon plane slides away,
slow-rolls, circles and heads back. Schnorp and Slothrop heft pies and
wait.

"There's no cowling around that engine," Schnorp has noticed, "so
we'll aim for that." Now they can see the dorsal side of the plane, its
cockpit jammed to capacity with beer-sodden Americans, singing:

There once was a fellow named Ritter,
Who slept with a guidance transmitter.
It shriveled his cock,
Which fell off in his sock,
And made him exceedingly bitter.

334



A hundred yards and closing fast. Schnorp grabs Slothrop's
arm and

points off to starboard.
Providence has contrived to put in their way a

ope ana big white slope of cloud, and the
wind is bringing them swiftly into it:

the seething critter puts out white tentacles, beckoning hurry
. . . hurry

. . .
and they are inside then, inside its wet

and icy reprieve. . . .

andorin1 "Now they'll wait."
oldremn. "No," Schnorp cupping an ear, "they've

cut the motor. They're in

andS]lUt. here with us." The
swaddled silence goes on for a

minute or two, but

sure enough:

There once was a fellow named Schroeder,

Who buggered the vane servomotor.

He soon grew a prong
On the end of his schlong,
And hired himself a promoter.

Schnorp is fiddling with the flame,
a rose-gray nimbus, trying for

less

visibility, but not too much loss
of altitude. They float in their own wan

sphere of light, without
coordinates. Outcrops of granite smash blindly

upward like fists into the cloud, trying
to find the balloon. The plane is

somewhere, with its own course and speed.
There is no action the bal­

loon can take. Binary decisions have lost meaning
in here. The cloud

presses in, suffocating. It
condenses in fat drops on top of the pies. Sud­

denly, raucous and hungover:

There was a young man from Decatur,

Who slept with a LOX generator.
His balls and his prick
Froze solid real quick,
And his asshole a little bit later.

Curtains of vapor drift back to
reveal the Americans, volplaning

along well inside ten meters and only
a little faster than the balloon.

"Now!" Schnorp yells, heaving a pie at the exposed engine.
Slothrop's

misses and splatters all over the windscreen
in front of the pilot. By

which time Schnorp has commenced flinging
ballast bags at the engine,

leaving one stuck between two of
the cylinders. The Americans,

taken

by surprise, reach in confusion
for sidearms, grenades, machine guns,

whatever it is your Ordnance types carry
around in the way of light ar­

mament. But they have glided on past, and
now the fog closes in again.

There are a few shots.

335



-_ -___ I .......
----

--_

/

f�'·
".... - - . ,,-

. .

�," .'- ,'"' ._", '.

"Shit, man, if they hit that bag-"
"Shh, I think we got the wire from the booster magneto." Off in the

middle of the cloud can be heard the nagging whicker of an engine re­
fusing to start. Linkage squeaks desperately.

"Oh, fuck!" A muffled scream, far away. The intermittent whining
grows fainter until there is silence. Schnorp is lying on his back, slurping
pie, laughing bitterly. Half of his inventory's been thrown away, and
Slothrop feels a little guilty.

"No, no. Stop worrying. This is like the very earliest days of the mer­
cantile system. We're back to that again. A second chance. Passages are
long and hazardous. Loss in transit is a part of life. You have had a
glimpse of the Ur-Markt."

When the clouds fall away a few minutes later, they find themselves
floating quietly under the sun, shrouds dripping, gasbag still shiny with
the moist cloud. No sign at all of Marvy's plane. Schnorp adjusts the
flame. They begin to rise.

Toward sundown, Schnorp gets thoughtful. "Look. You can see the
edge of it. At this latitude the earth's shadow races across Germany at
650 miles an hour, the speed of a jet aircraft." The cloud-sheet has bro­
ken up into little fog-banklets the color of boiled shrimp. The balloon
goes drifting, over countryside whose green patchwork the twilight is
now urging toward black: the thread of a little river flaming in the late
sun, the intricate-angled pattern of another roofless town.

The sunset is red and yellow, like the balloon. On the horizon the
mild sphere goes warping down, a peach on a china plate. "The farther
south you go," Schnorp continues, "the faster the shadow sweeps, till
you reach the equator: a thousand miles an hour. Fantastic. It breaks
through the speed of sound somewhere over southern France-around
the latitude of Carcassonne."

The wind is bundling them on, north by east. "Southern France," Slo­
throp remembers then. "Yeah. That's where I broke through the speed
of sound....

"

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

The Zone is in full summer: souls are found quiescent behind the pieces
of wall, fast asleep down curled in shell-craters, out screwing under the
culverts with gray shirttails hoisted, adrift dreaming in the middles of
fields. Dreaming of food, oblivion, alternate histories. . . .

The silences here are retreats of sound, like the retreat of the surf be-

fore
to �
max

cause

5trai�
�Oda\
�ur�e
�uiet
Germ



in the

we piecfl
cunderilie
�idill60f

fore a tidal wave: sound draining away, down slopes of acoustic passage,
to gather, someplace else, to a great surge

of noise. Cows-big lum­

moxes splotched black and white, harnessed now
for the plowing be­

cause German horses in the Zone are all but
extinct-will drudge with

straight faces right on into minefields,
sown back in the winter. The

godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns,
hide and ham­

burger come showering down all over the place,
and the dented bells lie

quiet in the clover. Horses might
have known to keep clear-but the

Germans wasted their horses, squandered the race, herding them into

the worst of it, the swarms of steel, the rheumatic marshes, the
unblank­

eted winter chills of our late Fronts. A few might have found safety
with the Russians, who still care for horses. You hear

them often in the

evenings. Their campfires send up rays for
miles from behind the stands

of beech, through northern-summer haze that's almost dry, only enough
of it to give a knife's edge to the firelight, a

dozen accordions and con­

certinas all going at once in shaggy chords with a reed-ringing
to it, and

the songs full of plaintive stvyehs and znyis
with voices of the girl auxili­

aries clearest of all. The horses whicker and move
in the rustling grass.

The men and women are kind, resourceful, fanatical-they are
the most

joyous of the Zone's survivors.
In and out of all the vibrant flesh moves the mad scavenger

Tchitch­

erine, who is more metal than anything else. Steel
teeth wink as he

talks. Under his pompadour is a silver plate. Gold wirework
threads in

three-dimensional tattoo among the fine wreckage of cartilage and
bone

inside his right knee joint, the shape of it always felt, pain's
hand-fash­

ioned seal, and his proudest battle decoration, because it is invisible,

and only he can feel it. A four-hour operation,
and in the dark. It was

the Eastern Front: there were no sulfa drugs, no anaesthesia. Of
course

he's proud.
He has marched here, with his limp as permanent as gold, out of cold­

ness, meadows, mystery. Officially he reports to TsAGI,
which is the

Central Aero and Hydrodynamics Institute in Moscow. His
orders men­

tion technical intelligence. But his real mission in the
Zone is private,

obsessive, and not-so his superiors have let him know,
in a number of

delicate ways-in the people's interest. Tchitcherine guesses
that this,

taken literally, may be true enough. But he is not
sure about the inter­

ests of those who warned him. They could have their own reasons
for

wanting Enzian liquidated in spite of what they say.
Their differences

with Tchitcherine may be over the timing, or the
motives. Tchitcher­

ine's motives are not political. The little State he is building in
the Ger­

man vacuum is founded on a compulsive need he has given up trying
to

337



understand, a need to annihilate the Schwarzkommando and his mythi­
cal half-brother, Enzian. He comes from Nihilist stock: there are in his
ancestry any number of bomb throwers and jubilant assassins. He is no
relation at all to the Tchitcherine who dealt the Rapallo Treaty with ilier�
Walter Rathenau. There was a long-term operator, a Menshevik turned IYnoa
Bolshevik, in his exile and his return believing in a State that would out­
live them all, where someone would come to sit in his seat at the table
just as he had slipped into Trotsky's-sitters would come and go but the
seats would remain . . . well, fine. There is that kind of State. But then
again, there is this other Tchitcherine's kind, a mortal State that will
persist no longer than the individuals in it. He is bound, in love and in
bodily fear, to students who have died under the wheels of carriages, to
eyes betrayed by nights without sleep and arms that have opened mani­
acally to death by absolute power. He envies their loneliness, their will­
ingness to go it alone, outside even a military structure, often without
support or love from anyone. His own faithful network of frauleins
around the Zone is a compromise: he knows there's too much comfort in
it, even when the intelligence inputs are good. But the perceptible haz-
ards of love, of attachment, are still light enough for him to accept, ID�ffiOry
when balanced against what he has to do. �\IlDer

��t, , ,
During the early Stalin days, Tchitcherine was stationed in a remote �ertai

"bear's corner" (medvezhy ugolok), out in Seven Rivers country. In the
summer, irrigation canals sweated a blurry fretwork across the green
oasis. In the winter, sticky teaglasses ranked the windowsills, soldiers
played preference and stepped outside only to piss, or to shoot down the
street at surprised wolves with a lately retooled version of the Moisin. It
was a land of drunken nostalgia for the cities, silent Kirghiz riding, end-
less tremors in the earth ... because of the earthquakes, nobody built �frerhigher than one story and so the town looked like a Wild West movie: a r��lowbrown dirt street, lined with grandiose two- and three-story false fronts.

He had come to give the tribesmen out here, this far out, an alphabet:
it was purely speech, gesture, touch among them, not even an Arabic
script to replace. Tchitcherine coordinated with the local Likbez cen­
ter, one of a string known back in Moscow as the "red dzurts." Youngand old Kirghiz came in from the plain, smelling of horses, sour milk
and weed-smoke, inside to stare at slates filled with chalk marks. The
stiff Latin symbols were almost as strange to the Russian cadre-tall
Galina in her cast-off Army trousers and gray Cossack shirts ... mar­
celled and soft-faced Luba, her dear friend ... Vaslav Tchitcherine,
the political eye . . . all agents-though none thought of it this way-

338

I



)'thi.
n his

representing the NTA (New Turkic Alphabet)
in uncommonly alien

country.
In the mornings after mess,

Tchitcherine will usually mosey down to

the red dzurt there, fixing to look in on that Galina
the schoolmarm­

who appeals to what must be a
feminine linkage or two in his personal­

ity ... well ... often
he'll come outside to find his morning skies

full

of sheet-lightning: gusting, glaring. Awful.
The ground shudders just

below his hearing. It might be the end of the world, except
that it is a

fairly average day, for
Central Asia. Pulse after heavenwide pulse.

Clouds, some in very clear profile, black
and jagged, sail in armadas to­

ward the Asian arctic, above the sweeping
dessiatinas of grasses, of mul­

lein stalks, rippling out of sight, green and gray
in the wind. An amazing

wind. But he stands in the street, out
in it, hitching his pants, lapel­

points whipped rattling against
his chest, cursing Army, Party, His­

tory-whatever has put him here.
He will not come to love this sky or

plain, these people, their
animals. Nor look back, no not even in the

worst marsh-bivouacs of his soul, in naked Leningrad
encounters with

the certainty of his death, of
the deaths of comrades, never keep any

memory of Seven
Rivers to shelter with. No music heard, no

summer

journey taken . . . no
horse seen against the steppe in the

last day­

light....
Certainly not Galina. Galina

won't even be a proper "memory." Al­

ready she is more like the shape
of an alphabet, the procedure for

field­

stripping a Moisin-yes,
like remembering to hold back trigger

with

forefinger of left hand as you
remove bolt with right, a set of interlock­

ing precautions, part of a process among
the three exiles Galina/Lu­

ba/Tchitcherine which is working out its changes, its
little dialectic,

until it ends, with nothing past the structure to
remember....

Her eyes hide in iron shadows,
the orbits darkened as if by very pre­

cise blows. Her jaw is small, square,
levered forward, the lower teeth

more apt to show when she speaks.
. . . Hardly ever a smile. Bones in

her face strongly curved and welded.
Her aura is chalkdust, laundry

soap, sweat. With desperate
Luba about the edges, always, of her room,

at her window, a pretty hawk. Galina
has trained her-but it's only

Luba who flies, who knows the verst-long dive,
the talon-shock and the

blood, while her lean owner must stay
below in the schoolroom, shut in

by words, drifts and frost-patterns
of white words.

Light pulses behind the clouds.
Tchitcherine tracks mud off the street

into the Center, gets a blush from Luba,
a kind of kowtow and

mopflourish from the comical
Chinese swamper Chu Piang,

unreadable

stares from an early pupil or two. The traveling
"native" schoolteacher

339



._� I -"!"'!
--_

��:.- 'f•• " " ...., • __ � _ _ 't;" - _ � �_;' w��.�· "j< ......� ,.�

Dzaqyp Qulan looks up from a clutter of pastel survey maps, black the­
odolites, bootlaces, tractor gaskets, plugs, greasy tierod ends, steel map­
cases, 7.62 mm rounds, crumbs and chunks of lepeshka, about to ask for
a cigarette which is already out of Tchitcherine's pocket and on route.

He smiles thank you. He'd better. He's not sure of Tohitcherine's in­

tentions, much less the Russian's friendship. Dzaqyp Qulan's father was
killed during the 1916 rising, trying to get away from Kuropatkin's
troops and over the border into China-one of about 100 fleeing Kirghiz
massacred one evening beside a drying trickle of river that might be
traceable somehow north to the zero at the top of the world. Russian
settlers, in full vigilante panic, surrounded and killed the darker ref­
ugees with shovels, pitchforks, old rifles, any weapon to hand. A com­
mon occurrence in Semirechie then, even that far from the railroad.
They hunted Sarts, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Dungans that terrible summer
like wild game. Daily scores were kept. It was a competition, good-na­
tured but mo�e than play. Thousands of restless natives bit the dust.
Their names, even their numbers, lost forever. Colors of skin, ways of
dressing became reasonable cause to jail, or beat and kill. Even speak­
ing-voices-because rumors of German and Turkish agents swept along
these plains, not without help from Petrograd. This native uprising was
supposed to be the doing of foreigners, an international conspiracy to
open a new front in the war. More Western paranoia, based solidly on
the European balance of power. How could there be Kazakh, Kirghiz­
Eastern-reasons? Hadn't the nationalities been happy? Hadn't fifty
years of Russian rule brought progress? enrichment?

Well, for now, under the current dispensation in Moscow, Dzaqyp
Qulan is the son of a national martyr. The Georgian has come to power,
power in Russia, ancient and absolute, proclaiming Be Kind To The Na­
tionalities. But though the lovable old tyrant does what he can, Dzaqyp
Qulan remains somehow as much a "native" as before, gauged day-to­
day by these Russians as to his degree of restlessness. His sorrel face, his
long narrow eyes and dusty boots, where he goes on his travels and
what really transpires inside the lonely hide tents Out There, among the
auls, out in that wind, these are mysteries they don't care to enter or
touch. They throw amiable cigarettes, construct him paper existences,
use him as an Educated Native Speaker. He's allowed his function and
that's as far as it goes . . . except, now and then, a look from Luba sug­
gesting falconhood-jesses, sky and earth, voyages. . . . Or from Galina
a silence where there might have been words. . . .

Here she has become a connoisseuse of silences. The great silences of
Seven Rivers have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will

340

�e, Th

tochal
ilieL�
�rnens
toalar
rne\�



be. They are apt at any time to come into a room,
into a heart, returning

to chalk and paper the sensible Soviet
alternatives brought out here by

the Likbez agents. They are silences NTA cannot fill,
cannot liquidate,

immense and frightening as the elements in this bear's
corner-scaled

to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more
distant from the sun. . . .

The winds, the city snows and heat waves of Calina's
childhood were

never so vast, so pitiless. She had to come out here to learn
what an

earthquake felt like, and how to wait out a
sandstorm. What would it be

like to go back now, back to a city? Often
she will dream some dainty

pasteboard model, a city-planner's city, perfectly
detailed, so tiny her

bootsoles could wipe out neighborhoods at a step--at
the same time,

she is also a dweller, down inside the little city, coming
awake in the

very late night, blinking up into painful daylight, waiting
for the annihi­

lation, the blows from the sky, drawn terribly tense
with the waiting,

unable to name whatever it is approaching, knowing-too awful
to say

-it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is
the Nameless

Thing she fears....
These tall, these star-blotting Moslem angels . . . 0, wie spurlos

zer­

trdte ein Engel den Trostmarkt. . . . He is
constant back there, west­

ward, the African half-brother and his poetry
books furrowed and sown

with Teutonic lettering burntwood-black-he waits, smudging
the

pages one by one, out across the
unnumbered versts of lowland and of

zonal light that slants as their autumns come
around again each year,

that leans along the planet's withers like an old
circus rider, tries to

catch their attention with nothing more than its public face, and
con­

tinues to fail at each slick, perfect pass around the ring.
But didn't Dzaqyp Qulan, now and then-not

often-across the

paper schoolroom, or by surprise in front
of windows into the green

deep open, give Tchitcherine a certain
look? Didn't the look say, "Noth­

ing you do, nothing he does, will help you
in your mortality"? And,

"You are brothers. Together, apart, why let it matter this
much? Live.

Die someday, honorably, meanly-but not by the
other's hand....

"

The light of each common autumn keeps bringing
the same free advice,

each time a little less hopefully. But neither brother can listen.
The

black must have found, somewhere in Germany, his own
version of

Dzaqyp Qulan, some childish native to stare
him out of German dreams

of the Tenth-Elegy angel coming, wingbeats already
at the edges of

waking, coming to trample spoorless the
white marketplace of his own

exile. . . . Facing east, the black face keeping watch
from some winter

embankment or earth-colored wall of a fine-grained stone into
low

wastes of Prussia, of Poland, the leagues of meadow waiting, just
as

341



Tchitcherine grows each month now more taut and windsmooth at his
westward flank, seeing History arid Geopolitics move them surely into
confrontation as the radios go screaming higher, new penstocks in the
night shudder to the touch with hydroelectric rage, mounting, across
the empty canyons and passes, skies in the day go thick with miles of
falling canopies, white as visions of rich men's heavenly dzurts, gaming
now and still awkward, but growing, each strewn pattern, less and less
at play....

Out into the bones of the backlands ride Tchitcherine and his faithful

Kirghiz companion Dzaqyp Qulan. Tchitcherine's horse is a version of
himself-an Appaloosa from the United States named Snake. Snake
used to be some kind of remittance horse. Year before last he was in
Saudi Arabia, being sent a check each month by a zany (or, if you enjoy
paranoid systems, a horribly rational) Midland, Texas oil man to stay off
of the U.S. rodeo circuits, where in those days the famous bucking
bronco Midnight was flinging young men right and left into the sun-beat
fences. But Snake here is not so much Midnight-wild as methodically
homicidal. Worse, he's unpredictable. When you go to ride him he may
be indifferent, or docile as a maiden. But then again, with no warning,
seized out of the last rufHing of a great sigh, he could manage to kill you
simply as the gesture of a hoof, the serpent tuck of a head toward the
exact moment and spot on the ground that you'll cease to live. No way
to tell: for months he can be no trouble at all. So far he's ignored
Tchitcherine. But he's tried for Dzaqyp Qulan three times. Twice dumb
luck preserved the Kirghiz, and the third time he actually hung on and
rode the colt a long time down to a fair kind of obedience. But each
time Tchitcherine goes up to Snake's jingling picket on the hillside, he
carries, with his leather gear and his bit of scarred tapestry for the
horse's back, the doubt, the inconsolable chance that the Kirghiz didn't
really break him last time. That Snake is only waiting his moment. . . .

They're riding away from the railroad: farther away from the kinder
zones of Earth. Black and white stars explode down the Appaloosa's
croup and haunch. At the center of each of these novae is a stark circle
of vacuum, of no color, into which midday Kirghiz at the roadsides have
taken looks, and grinned away with a turn of the head to the horizon be­
hind.

Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen.
Snake has seen a lot of changes since Arabia, on route to Tchitcherine,
who may be his other half-lot of horse thieves, hard riding, confisca­
tion by this government and that, escapes into ever more remote coun-

342

rwatur



try. This time, the Kirghiz pheasants scattering
now at the sound of

hooves, birds big as turkeys, black and white with splashes
of blood-red

all around the eyes, lumbering for the uplands,
Snake is going out into

what could be the last adventure of all, hardly remembering
now the

water-pipes at the oases crawling with smoke,
the bearded men, the

carved, nacred and lacquered saddles, the
neck-reins of twisted goat­

hide, the women pillioned and wailing with delight up
into Caucasian

foothills in the dark, carried by lust, by storm along streaks of
faintest

trail . . . only traces spread back in a wake
now over these terminal

grasslands: shadows damping and passing
to rest among the rout of

pheasants. Momentum builds as
the two riders plunge ahead. The smell

of forests on the night slowly disappears. Waiting,
out in sunlight which

is not theirs yet, is the . . . The . . . Waiting
for them, the unimagined

creature of height, and burning . . .
. . .

even now in her grownup dreams, to anxious
Calina comes the

winged rider, red Sagittarius off
the childhood placards of the Revolu­

tion. Far from rag, snow, lacerated
streets she huddles here in the Asian

dust with her buttocks arched skyward, awaiting
the first touch of him

-of it. . . . Steel hooves, teeth, some whistling sweep
of quills across

her spine . . . the ringing bronze
of an equestrian statue in a square,

and her face, pressed into the seismic earth....

"He's a soldier," Luba simply meaning Tchitcherine,
"and far away

from home." Posted out to the wild East, and carrying
on quiet, expres­

sionless, and clearly under some official curse.
The rumors are as extrav­

agant as this country is
listless. In the dayroom the corporals talk about

a woman: an amazing Soviet courtesan who
wore camisoles of white kid

and shaved her perfect legs every morning all the way
to the groin.

Horse-fucking Catherine, ermined and brilliant, brought up
to date. Her

lovers ran from ministers down to the likes
of Captain Tchitcherine,

naturally her truest. While neo-
Potemkins ranged the deep Arctic for

her, skilled and technocratic wolves erecting
settlements out of tundra,

entire urban abstractions out of the ice and snow,
bold Tchitcherine

was back at the capital, snuggled away in her dacha,
where they played

at fisherman and fish, terrorist and State, explorer and edge
of the wave­

green world. When
official attention was finally directed their way, it

did not mean death for Tchitcherine, not even
exile-but a thinning out

of career possibilities: that happened to be how
the vectors ran, in those

days. Central Asia for a good part of
his prime years, or attache

some­

place like Costa Rica (well-he
wishes it could be Costa Rica, someday

-a release from this purgatory, into shufHing surf, green nights-how

343

.

I $
,� -c-,

7/ '/ ; ��



he misses the sea, how he dreams of eyes dark and liquid as his own, co­
lonial eyes, gazing down from balconies of rotting stone . . .).

Meanwhile, another rumor tells of his connection with the legendary
Wimpe, the head salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH, a subsidiary of
the IG. Because it is common knowledge that IG representatives abroad
are actually German spies, reporting back to an office in Berlin known
as "NW7," this story about Tchitcherine is not so easy to believe. If it
were literally true, Tchitcherine wouldn't be here-there's no possible
way his life could have been spared in favor of this somnambulism
among the eastern garrison towns.

Certainly he could have known Wimpe. Their lives, for a while, ran
close enough in space and time. Wimpe was a Verbindungsman in the
classic style, with a streak of unhealthy enthusiasm: charming, hand­
some in a way that came at you in shelves or terraces of strength: amia­
ble gray eyes, vertical granite nose, mouth that never quivered, chin in­
capable of fantasies ... dark suits, immaculate leather belts and silver
studs, horsehide shoes that gleamed under the skylights in the Czarist
entrance-halls and across the Soviet concrete, always dapper, usually
correct, informed and passionate about organic chemistry, his specialty
and, it's been suggested, his faith.

"Think of chess," in his early days around the capital, looking for a
comparison that Russians might take to, "an extravagant game of
chess." Going on to show, if his audience was receptive (he had sales­
man reflexes, knew to steer automatically along lines of least indif­
ference) how each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possi­
bilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most
versatile, the queen, "the Great Catherine of the periodic table," down
to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns . . . and
the brute opposition of the chessboard yielding, in this chemical game,
to dance-figures in three dimensions, "four, if you like," and a radically
different idea of what winning and losing meant. . . . Schwarmerei, his
colleagues back home had muttered, finding excuses to drift away into
other conversations. But Tchitcherine would have stayed. Foolish and
romantic, he would have kept listening, even egged the German on.

How could they have failed to be observed? By and by, as the affair in
its repressed and bloodless way proceeded, the Soviet chain of com­
mand, solicitous as any 19th-century family, would begin to take simple
steps to keep the two apart. Conservative therapy. Central Asia. But in
the weeks of vague and soft intelligence, before the watchers quite
caught the drift of things . . . what heads and tails went jingling inside
the dark pockets of that indeterminacy? Since his earliest days as a de-

344



ml, co- tail man, Wimpe's expertise
had been focused in cyclized benzyliso­

quinolines. Those of major interest being
the opium alkaloids and

their

many variations. Right. The
inner rooms of Wimpe's office-a suite at

an older hotel-were full of samples,
German dope in amazing profu­

sion, Wimpe the jinni of the West holding
them up, vial after vial,

for

little Tchitcherine's face to wonder at:
"Eumecon, a 2% solution of

mor-

phine Dionine (we add
on an ethyl group, here, to the morphine,

as

you see) Holopon
and Nealpon, Pantopon and Omnopon,

all mix-

tures of opium alkaloids as the
soluble hydrochlorides . . . and Glyco­

pon, as glycero-phosphates
....

Here is Eucodal-a codeine with
two

hydrogens, a hydroxyl, a hydrochloride"
-gesturing in the air

around

his basic fist-"hanging off different parts
of the molecule." Among

these patent medicines, trappings
and detailing were half the game­

"As the French do with their dresses,
nicht wahr? a ribbon here, a

pretty buckle there,
to help sell a sparer design. . .

. Ah, this? Trivalin!"

One of the jewels of his line. "Morphine,
and caffeine, and cocaine, all

in solution, as the valerates. Valerian, ja-root
and rhizome: you may

have older relatives who took it years ago
as a nerve tonic . . . a bit of

passementerie, you might say-some trimming
over these bare mole­

cules."

What did Tchitcherine have to say? Was
Tchitcherine there at all?

sitting back in the dingy room
while the lift cables slapped and creaked

through the walls, and down
in the street, rarely enough to matter, a

droshky rattled whip-snapping
over these black old cobbles? Or

while

snow beat at the grimy windows? How far,
in the eyes of those

who

would send him to Central Asia, was too
far: would his simple presence

in these rooms have gotten him death automatically
. . .

or was there

still, even at this stage of things, enough
slack to let him reply?

"But once the pain has been taken care
of . . . the simple pain . . .

beyond. . . below that zero
level of feeling. . . I have heard . .

." He

has heard. Not the subtlest way to get
into it, and Wimpe must have

known every standard opener
there is. Some military men are only

blunt, while others are of such
reckless blood there is never a question

of "holding back"-it's a positive insanity, they
not only will commit

horse against cannon, they will lead
the charge themselves. It's magni­

ficent, but it's not war. Wait until
the Eastern Front. By his first action,

Tchitcherine will have gained his reputation as a
suicidal maniac. Ger­

man field commanders from Finland to
the Black Sea will develop for

him a gentlemanly distaste. It will be seriously
wondered if the man has

any sense of military decency
at all. They will capture him and

lose him,

wound him, take him for killed in action,
and he will go on, headlong, a

345



raving snowman over the winter marshes-there'll be no wind adjust­
ment, no field-change to the bottleneck fairing or deadly ogive of their
Parabellum rounds that can ever bring him down. He is fond, as was
Lenin, of Napoleon's on s'engage, et puis, on vait, and as for plunging
ahead, well, that IG man's hotel room may have been one of his earlier
rehearsals. Tchitcherine has a way of getting together with undesirables,
sub rosa enemies of order, counterrevolutionary odds and ends of hu­
manity: he doesn't plan it, it just happens, he is a giant supermolecule
with so many open bonds available at any given time, and in the drift of
things . . . in the dance of things . . . howsoever . . . others latch
on, and the pharmacology of the Tchitcherine thus modified, its on­
wardly revealed side-effects, can't necessarily be calculated ahead of
time. Chu Piang, the Chinese factotum in the red dzurt, knows some­
thing of this. The first day Tchitcherine came to report in to the place,
Chu Piang knew-and tripped over his mop, not so much to divert at­
tention as to celebrate the meeting. Chu Piang has a bond or two availa­
ble himself. He is a living monument to the success of British trade pol­
icy back during the last century. This classic hustle is still famous, even
today, for the cold purity of its execution: bring opium from India, in­
troduce it into China-howdy Fong, this here's opium, opium, this is
Fong-ah, so, me eatee!-no-ho-ho, Fong, you smokee, smokee, see?
pretty soon Fong's coming back for more and more, so you create an in­
elastic demand for the shit, get China to make it illegal, then sucker
China into a couple-three disastrous wars over the right of your mer­
chants to sell opium, which by now you are describing as sacred. You
win, China loses. Fantastic. Chu Piang being a monument to all this,
nowadays whole tourist caravans come through to look at him, usually
while he's Under The Influence . . . "Here ladies and gentlemen, as
you may have observed, the characteristic sooty-gray complexion. . . ."
They all stand peering into his dreamstruck facies, attentive men with
mutton-chop sideburns, holding pearl-gray morning hats in their hands,
the women lifting their skirts away from where horrid Asian critters are
seething microscopically across the old floorboards, while their tour
leader indicates items of interest with his metal pointer, an instrument
remarkably thin, thinner than a rapier in fact, often flashing along much
faster than eyes can really follow-"His Need, you will notice, retains
its shape under all manner of stresses. No bodily illness, no scarcity of
supply seems to affect it a whit ... " all their mild, their shallow eyes
following gently as piano chords from a suburban parlor . . . the inelas­
tic Need turns luminous this stagnant air: it is an ingot beyond price,
from which sovereigns yet may be struck, and faces of great administra-

346



adjust­
of thea

tors engraved and run off to signify. It was worth
the trip, just to see this

shining, worth the long passage by sleigh, over
the frozen steppe in an

enormous closed sleigh, big as a ferryboat, bedizened all over
with Vic­

torian gingerbread-inside are decks and levels for each
class of passen­

ger, velvet saloons,
well-stocked galleys, a young Dr. Maledetto whom

the ladies love, an elegant menu including everything
from Mille­

Feuilles it la Fondue de la Cervelle to La Surprise du Vesuve, lounges

amply fitted out with stereopticons and a library
of slides, oak toilets

rubbed to a deep red and hand-carved into mermaid faces,
acanthus

leaves, afternoon and garden shapes to remind the
sitter of home when

he needs it most, hot insides poised here so terribly above the
breakneck

passage of crystalline ice and snow,
which may be seen also from

the

observation deck, the passing vistas of horizontal pallor, the wheeling
snowfields of Asia, beneath skies of metal baser by far than this we

have

come to watch. . . .

Chu Piang is also watching them, as they come,
and stare, and go.

They are figures in dreams. They
amuse him. They belong to the opium:

they never come if it's anything else.
He tries not to smoke the hashish

out here, actually, any more than courtesy
demands. That chunky, res­

inous Turkestan phantasmagoric is fine for Russian, Kirghiz,
and other

barbaric tastes, but give Chu the tears of the poppy any
time. The

dreams are better, not so geometrical, so apt to turn everything-the

air, the sky-to Persian rugs. Chu prefers situations, journeys, comedy.

Finding the same appetite in Tchitcherine,
this stocky, Latin-eyed emis­

sary from Moscow, this
Soviet remittance man, is enough to make any­

body trip over his mop, suds hissing along
the floor and the bucket

gong-crashing in astonishment. In delight!
Before long these two wretched delinquents

are skulking out to the

edges of town to meet. It is a local
scandal. Chu, from some recess

within the filthy rags and shreds that hang from his
unwholesome yellow

body, produces a repulsive black gob of
the foul-smelling substance,

wrapped in a scrap torn from an old
Enbekii Qazaq for 17 August of last

year. Tchitcherine brings the pipe-being
from the West he's in charge

of the technology of the thing-a charred, nasty
little implement in red

and yellow repetitions over Britannia metal, bought
used for a handful

of kopecks in the Lepers' Quarter of Bukhara,
and yes, nicely broken in

too by that time. Reckless Captain
Tchitcherine. The two opiomaniacs

crouch behind a bit of wall wrecked and tilted from the last earthquake.

Occasional riders pass by, some noting them and some not,
but all in si­

lence. Stars overhead crowd the sky. Far into the country, grasses blow,

and the waves move on through, slow as sheep. It's a mild wind,

347



carrying the last smoke of the day, the odors of herds and jasmine, of
standing water, settling dust ... a wind Tchitcherine will never re­
member. Any more than he can now connect this raw jumble of forty
alkaloids with the cut, faceted, polished, and foiled molecules that sales­
man Wimpe showed him once upon a time, one by one, and told the
histories of. . . .

"Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in
the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a
chemist, to the Americans, whose National Research Council had begun
a massive program to explore the morphine molecule and its possibili­
ties-a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic study of
large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great
Synthesist. Connection? Of course there's one. But we don't talk about
it. NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from
pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups
such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem to be comple­
mentary, don't they? The American vice of modular repetition, com­
bined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can
kill intense pain without causing addiction.

"Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma
built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly
complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it
takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one prop­
erty without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify
position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity-"

"I could have told you that. But why-"
"Why. My dear captain. Why?"
"The money, Wimpe. To pour funds down the latrine on such a

hopeless search-"
A man-to-man touch then on his buttoned epaulet. A middle-aged

smile full of Weltschmerz. "Trade-off, Tchitcherine," whispers the
salesman. "A question of balancing priorities. Research people come
cheap enough, and even an IG may be allowed to dream, to hope
against hope. . . . Think of what it would mean to find such a drug-to
abolish pain rationally, without the extra cost of addiction. A surplus
cost-surely there is something in Marx and Engels," soothe the cus­
tomer, "to cover this. A demand like 'addiction,' having nothing to do
with real pain, real economic needs, unrelated to production or labor
. . . we need fewer of these unknowns, not more. We know how to pro­
duce real pain. Wars, obviously . . . machines in the factories, indus­
trial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water,

348



and even air-these are quantities tied directly
to the economy. We

know them, and we can control them.
But 'addiction'? What do we

know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts
will even agree on

how to define the word. 'Compulsion'?
Who is not compelled? 'Toler­

ance? 'Dependence'? What do they mean?
All we have are the thou­

sand dim, academic theories. A
rational economy cannot depend

on

psychological quirks. We could
not plan. . . ."

What premonition has begun to throb in
Tchitcherine's right knee?

What direct conversion between pain and gold?
"Are you really this evil, or is it just

an act? Are you really trafficking

in pain?"
"Doctors traffick in pain and no one would

dream of criticizing their

noble calling. Yet let the Verbindungsman
but reach for the latch on his

case, and you all start
to scream and run. Well-you won't

find many

addicts among us. The
medical profession is full of them,

but we sales­

men believe in real pain, real
deliverance-we are knights in the service

of that Ideal. It must all be real,
for the purposes of our

market. Other­

wise my employer-and
our little chemical cartel is

the model for the

very structure
of nations-becomes lost in

illusion and dream, and one

day vanishes into chaos.
Your own employer as well."

"My 'employer' is the
Soviet State."

"Yes?" Wimpe did say "is the model,"
not "will be." Surprising they

could have got this far, if
indeed they did-being of such

different per­

suasions and all. Wimpe, however, being far
more cynical, would have

been able to admit more of the truth
before starting to feel

uncomforta­

ble. His patience with
Tchitcherine's Red Army version of

economics

may have been
wide enough. They did part amiably. Wimpe

was re­

assigned to the United
States (Chemnyco of New York) shortly

after

Hitler became Chancellor.
Tchitcherine's connection, according to the

garrison gossip, ceased then,
forever.

But these are rumors. Their chronology
can't be trusted. Contra­

dictions creep in.
Perfect for passing a winter in

Central Asia, if you

happen not to be Tchitcherine.
If you are Tchitcherine, though,

well,

that puts you in more of a peculiar position.
Doesn't it. You have to get

through the winter on nothing
but paranoid suspicions about why

you're here. . . .
It's because of Enzian, it's got to be

damned Enzian. Tchitcherine
has

been to the Krasnyy Arkhiv, has
seen the records, the diaries and logs

from the epical, doomed voyage
of Admiral Rozhdestvenski,

some still

classified even after 20 years. And
now he knows. And if it's all

in the

archives, then They know, too.
Nubile young ladies

and German dope

349



salesmen are reason enough to send a man east in any period of history.
But They would not be who or where They are without a touch of
Dante to Their notions of reprisal. Simple talion may be fine for war­
time, but politics between wars demands symmetry and a more elegant
idea of justice, even to the point of masquerading, a bit decadently, as
mercy. It is more complicated than mass execution, more difficult and
less satisfying, but there are arrangements Tchitcherine can't see, wide
as Europe, perhaps as the world, that can't be disturbed very much, be­
tween wars....

It seems that in December, 1904, Admiral Rozhdestvenski, com­

manding a fleet of 42 Russian men-o' -war, steamed into the South-West
African port of Liideritzbucht. This was at the height of the Russo-Japa­
nese War. Rozhdestvenski was on route to the Pacific, to relieve the
other Russian fleet, which had been bottled up for months in Port Ar­
thur by the Japanese. Out of the Baltic, around Europe and Africa,
bound across the whole Indian Ocean and then north along the final
coast of Asia, it was to be among the most spectacular sea voyages of
history: seven months and 18,000 miles to an early summer day in the
waters between Japan and Korea, where one Admiral Togo, who'd been
lying in wait, would come sailing out from behind the island of Tsu­
shima and before nightfall hand Rozhdestvenski's ass to him. Only four
Russian ships would make it in to Vladivostok-nearly all the rest would
be sunk by the wily Jap.

Tchitcherine's father was a gunner on the Admiral's flagship, the
Suvorov. The fleet paused in Liideritzbucht for a week, trying to take on
coal. Storms lashed through the crowded little harbor. The Suvorov kept
smashing up against her colliers, tearing holes in the sides, wrecking
many of her own 12-pound guns. Squalls blew in, clammy coal dust
swirled and stuck to everything, human and steel. Sailors worked
around the clock, with searchlights set up on deck at night, hauling coal
sacks, half blind in the glare, shoveling, sweating, coughing, bitching.
Some went crazy, a few tried suicide. Old Tchitcherine, after two days
of it, went AWOL, and stayed away till it was over. He found a Herero
girl who'd lost her husband in the uprising against the Germans. It was
nothing he had planned or even dreamed about before going ashore.
What did he know of Africa? He had a wife back in Saint Petersburg,
and a child hardly able to roll over. Up till then Kronstadt was the far­
thest he'd been from home. He only wanted a rest from the working
parties, and from the way it looked . . . from what the black and white
of coal and arc-light were about to say ... no color, and the unreality
to go with it-but a familiar unreality, that warns This Is All Being

350

it 001\



history, Staged To See What I'll Do So
I Mustn't Make One Wrong

Move . . .

touch of on the last day of his life, with Japanese
iron whistling down on him

for W�. from ships that are too far off
in the haze for him even to see,

he will

e el�ant think of the slowly carbonizing
faces of men he thought he knew, men

dentirl� turning to coal, ancient
coal that glistened, each crystal, in

the hoarse

cult aM sputter of the Jablochkov candles,
each flake struck perfect . . . a con-

tseOl0f spiracy of carbon, though
he never phrased it as "carbon," it

was power

'muc�,�, he walked away from,
the feeling of too much meaningless

power,

flowing wrong . . . he
could smell Death in it. So he

waited till the mas­

ter-at-arms turned to light a cigarette, and
then just walked away-they

were all too black, artificially black,
for it to be easily noticed-and

found ashore the honest
blackness of the solemn Herero girl, which

seemed to him a breath of life
after long confinement, and stayed

with

her at the edge of the flat sorrowful
little town, near the railroad, in

a

one-room house built of saplings, packing-cases,
reeds, mud. The rain

blew. The trains cried and puffed. The
man and woman stayed in bed

and drank kari, which is brewed
from potatoes, peas, and sugar,

and in

Herero means "the drink of
death." It was nearly Christmas, and he

gave her a
medal he had won in some gunnery

exercise long ago on the

Baltic. By the time he left, they
had learned each other's

names and a

few words in the respective languages-afraid,
happy, sleep, love . . .

the beginnings of a new tongue,
a pidgin which they were perhaps

the

only two speakers of in
the world.

But he went back. His future
was with the Baltic fleet, it was

some­

thing neither he nor the girl questioned.
The storm blew out, fog cov­

ered the sea. Tchitcherine
steamed away, shut back

down in a dark and

stinking compartment
below the Suvorov's waterline, drinking

his

Christmas vodka and yarning about his good
times in a space that

didn't

rock, back at the edge of the dry
veld with something warm and

kind

around his penis besides his lonely
fist. He was already describing her as

a sultry native wench. It is
the oldest sea story. As he told

it he was no

longer Tchitcherine, but a single-faced
crowd before and after, all lost

but not all unlucky. The girl may have
stood on some promontory

watching the gray ironclads
dissolve one by one in the South

Atlantic

mist, but even if you'd like a few
bars of Madame Butterfly about here,

she was more probably out hustling,
or asleep. She was not going

to

have an easy time.
Tchitcherine had left her with a child,

born a few

months after the gunner went
down in sight of the steep cliffs

and green

forests of Tsushima, early in the evening of 27 May.

The Germans recorded the
birth and the father's name (he had

writ­

ten it down for her, as sailors do-he
had given her his name)

in their

351



- I
__

�

f�' ..� - ' � �.............. .. �. - -,... . �
/

.

central files at Windhoek. A travel pass was issued for mother and child
to return to her tribal village, shortly after. A census by the colonial gov­
ernment to see how many natives they'd killed, taken just after Enzian
was returned by Bushmen to the same village, lists the mother as de­
ceased, but her name is in the records. A visa dated December 1926 for
Enzian to enter Germany, and later an application for German citizen­
ship, are both on file in Berlin.

It took no small amount of legwork to assemble all these pieces of
paper. Tchitcherine had nothing to start with but a brief word or two in
the Admiralty papers. But this was in the era of Feodora Alexandrevna,
she of the kidskin underwear, and the access situation was a little better
for Tchitcherine than it is now. The Rapallo Treaty was also in force, so
there were any number of lines open to Berlin. That weird piece of
paper . . . in his moments of sickest personal grandeur it is quite clear
to him how his own namesake and the murdered Jew put together an
elaborate piece of theatre at Rapallo, and that the real and only purpose
was to reveal to Vaslav Tchitcherine the existence of Enzian ... the

garrison life out east, like certain drugs, makes these things amazingly
clear. ...

But alas, seems like the obsessive is his own undoing. The dossier that
Tchitcherine put together on Enzian (he'd even got to see what Soviet
intelligence had on then Lieutenant Weissmann and his political adven­
tures in Siidwest) was reproduced by some eager apparatchik and
stashed in Tchitcherine's own dossier. And so it transpired, no more
than a month or two later, that somebody equally anonymous had cut
Tchitcherine's orders for Baku, and he was grimly off to attend the first
plenary session of the VTsK NTA (Vsesoynznyy Tsentral'nyy Komitet
Novogo Tyurkskogo Alfavita), where he was promptly assigned to the '1
Committee.

'1 seems to be a kind of G, a voiced uvular plosive. The distinction
between it and your ordinary G is one Tchitcherine will never learn to
appreciate. Come to find out, all the Weird Letter Assignments have
been reserved for ne'er-do-wells like himself. Shatsk, the notorious Len­
ingrad nose-fetishist, who carries a black satin handkerchief to Party
congresses and yes, more than once has been unable to refrain from
reaching out and actually stroking the noses of powerful officials, is
here-banished to the 8 Committee, where he keeps forgetting that 8,
in the NTA, is (E, not Russian F, thus retarding progress and sowing
confusion at every working session. Most of his time is taken up with
trying to hustle himself a transfer to the � Committee, "Or actually," si­
dling closer, breathing heavily, "just a plain, N, or even an M, will,

352

"

�, ' ' .

�eoilie
�I out on
j�tral Asi
ufuiliese
xllOnation
!rricrtohi
�1�cated 0
\�turally

'Jflon�IJ
���5e
'�� of ilie ci

il'ofilie �
�frealC�
:u,orfeno'
mrealitJ1

J\oilluein
:lneaa,
IIOliootr

;bt�oU5 G
'IITom Ie

:1 NO men

'Jlwu�,
There is a

��," lnere i
'mlrnerine
i;fIDilterio
.I!�'seont
:�rdorm tn
�,�loDaaiiar
'oonierence.
:� �ureaucra
: minutes. 1
�ilietal

�oo over ao
!�Ie a�ent:
�must 0

iffiaoipulati
'000, Tehl



andc�1
onial�o\',
er Enti�

do. . . ." The impetuous and unstable practical joker Radnichny has

pulled the o Committee, o being a schwa or neutral uh,
where he has

set out on a megalomaniac project to replace every spoken vowel in
Central Asia-and why stop there, why not even a consonant or two?
with these schwas here . . . not unusual considering his record of im­

personations and dummy resolutions, and a brilliant but
doomed con­

spiracy to hit Stalin in the face with a grape
chiffon pie, in which he was

implicated only enough to get him Baku instead of worse.

Naturally Tchitcherine gravitates into this crew of
irredeemables. Be­

fore long, if it isn't some scheme of Radnichny's to infiltrate
an oil-field

and disguise a derrick as a giant penis, it's lurking down
in Arab quar­

ters of the city, waiting with the infamous Ukrainian doper Bugnogor­
kov of the glottal K Committee (ordinary K being represented by Q,
whereas C is pronounced with a sort of tch sound) for a hashish connec­

tion, or fending off the nasal advances of Shatsk. It occurs to
him that he

is, in reality, locked up in some military nut ward back
in Moscow, and

only hallucinating this plenary session. Noone here
seems quite right in

the head.
Most distressing of all is the power struggle he has

somehow been

suckered into with one Igor Blobadjian, a party representative on the

prestigious G Committee. Blobadjian is fanatically attempting
to steal

OJs from Tchitcherine's Committee, and change them to Gs, using
loan-words as an entering wedge. In the sunlit, sweltering commissary
the two men sneer at each other across trays of zapekanka and Georgian
fruit soup.

There is a crisis over which kind of g to use in the word "stenogra­

phy." -There is a lot of emotional attachment to the word
around here.

Tchitcherine one morning finds all the pencils in his conference
room

have mysteriously vanished. In revenge, he and Radnichny
sneak in Blo­

badjian's conference room next night with hacksaws, files
and torches,

and reform the alphabet on his typewriter. It is some fun in the
morn­

ing. Blobadjian runs around in a prolonged screaming
fit. Tchitcherine's

in conference, meeting's called to order, CRASH! two dozen linguists
and bureaucrats go toppling over on their ass. Noise echoes

for a full

two minutes. Tchitcherine, on his ass, notes that pieces of chair leg all
around the table have been sawed off, reattached with wax and var­

nished over again. A professional job, all right. Could Radnichny
be a

double agent? The time for lighthearted practical jokes is past.
Tchitch­

erine must go it alone. Painstakingly, by midwatch lantern light,
when

the manipulations of letters are most apt to produce other
kinds of illu­

mination, Tchitcherine transliterates the opening sura of the holy
Koran

353



__ � J
•

....-.
�

,,": '. .. ;,..,....",.. .. "... - \

into the proposed NTA, and causes it to be circulated among the Ar­
abists at the session, over the name of Igor Blobadjian.

This is asking for trouble, all right. These Arabists are truly a frenzied
bunch. They have been lobbying passionately for a New Turkic Alpha­
bet made up of Arabic letters. There are fistfights in the hallways with
unreconstructed Cyrillicists, and whispers of a campaign to boycott,
throughout the Islamic world, any Latin alphabet. (Actually nobody is
really too keen on a Cyrillic NTA. Old Czarist albatrosses still hang
around the Soviet neck. There is strong native resistance in Central Asia
these days to anything suggesting Russification, and that goes even for
the look of a printed language. The objections to an Arabic alphabet
have to do with the absence of vowel symbols, and no strict one-to-one
relation between sounds and characters. So this has left Latin, by de­
fault. But the Arabists aren't giving up. They keep proposing reformed
Arabic scripts-mostly on the model of one ratified at Bukhara in 1923
and used successfully among the Uzbeks. Palatal and velar vocalics of
spoken Kazakh can be got round by using diacritical marks.) And there
is a strong religious angle in all this. Using a non-Arabic alphabet is felt
to be a sin against God-most of the Turkic peoples are, after all, Is­
lamic, and Arabic script is the script of Islam, it is the script in which
the word of Allah came down on the Night of Power, the script of the
Koran-

Of the what? Does Tchitcherine know what he's doing with this for­
gery of his? It is more than blasphemy, it is an invitation to holy war.
Blobadjian, accordingly, is pursued through the black end of Baku by a
passel of screaming Arabists waving scimitars and grinning horribly.
The oil towers stand sentinel, bone-empty, in the dark. Hunchbacks,
lepers, hebephrenics and amputees of all descriptions have come pop­
ping out of their secret spaces to watch the fun. They loll back against
the rusting metal flanks of refinery hardware, their whole common sky
in a tessellation of primary colors. They occupy the chambers and bins
and pockets of administrative emptiness left after the Revolution, when
the emissaries from Dutch Shell were asked to leave, and the English
and Swedish engineers all went home. It is a period now in Baku of lull,
of retrenchment. All the oil money taken out of these fields by the No­
bels has gone into Nobel Prizes. New wells are going down elsewhere,
between the Volga and the Urals. Time for retrospection here, for re­
fining the recent history that's being pumped up fetid and black from
other strata of Earth's mind....

"In here, Blobadjian-quickly." Close behind, Arabists are ululating,
shrill, merciless, among the red-orange stars over the crowds of derricks.

:(nJ1lentin�
"'It)uitl yo
"�o,1 wan
100 late,

"�utne-"
'W)aol

:hlenout

:OOl�ma
i�11r wnere I

�l u�)tream
�knlrine de
��rint jus
�llie row
j1��et cra
'�lliatXn
�IJ\eme
�II ans'l
��·ilie.

354



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�=>. __ _ •• __ • • _
•• '" w,.. •• <-·_�_-__

w -_ "f���P�'

355

Slam. The last hatch is dogged. "Wait-what is this?"
"Come. Time for your journey now."
"But I don't want-"
"You don't want to be another slaughtered infidel. Too late, Blobad­

jian. Here we go. . . ."
The first thing he learns is how to vary his index of refraction. He can

choose anything between transparent and opaque. After the thrill of ex­

perimenting has worn off, he settles on a pale, banded onyx effect.
"It suits you," murmur his guides. "Now hurry."
"No. I want to pay Tchitcherine what he's got coming."
"Too late. You're no part of what he's got coming. Not any more."
"But he-"
"He's a blasphemer. Islam has its own machineries for that. Angels

and sanctions, and careful interrogating. Leave him. He has a different

way to go."
How alphabetic is the nature of molecules. One grows aware of it

down here: one finds Committees on molecular structure which are

very similar to those back at the NTA plenary session. "See: how they
are taken out from the coarse flow-shaped, cleaned, rectified, just as

you once redeemed your letters from the lawless, the mortal streaming
of human speech. . . . These are our letters, our words: they too can be
modulated, broken, recoupled, redefined, co-polymerized one to the
other in worldwide chains that will surface now and then over long mo­
lecular silences, like the seen parts of a tapestry."

Blobadjian comes to see that the New Turkic Alphabet is only one
version of a process really much older-and less unaware of itself-than
he has ever had cause to dream. By and by, the frantic competition be­
tween 0} and G has faded away to trivial childhood memories. Dim an­
ecdotes. He has gone beyond-once a sour bureaucrat with an upper lip
as clearly demarcated as a chimpanzee's, now he is an adventurer, well
off on a passage of his own, by underground current, without any anxi­
ety over where it may be taking him. He has even lost, an indefinite dis­
tance upstream, his pride in feeling once a little sorry for Vaslav
Tchitcherine, destined never to see the things Blobadjian is seeing....

And print just goes marching on without him. Copy boys go running
down the rows of desks trailing smeared galleys in the air. Native
printers get crash courses from experts airlifted in from Tiflis on how to
set up that NTA. Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and

Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent. On sidewalks and walls the very first
printed slogans start to show up, the first Central Asian fuck you signs,
the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this al-

.

I $ ,"
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. V I � __



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.. �- I

-

-

--_

�.� •• '.'�'.. '. • ., ,. • • ...:�
__ r-",.-""",, _. �

7.�

phabet is really something!) and so the magic that the shamans, out in
the wind, have always known, begins to operate now in a political way,
and Dzaqyp Qulan hears the ghost of his own lynched father with a
scratchy pen in the night, practicing As and Bs....

willi aD
ao on

:Druptly,
ilie�e do

�now lli
Now a

oc �leepi
!inoDe�s,

�lowly,
mi�nt nay
1ranoD,a
iliem�elve
1I'0ro,

But right about now, here come Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan rid­
ing up over some low hills and down into the village they've been
looking for. The people are gathered in a circle: there's been a feast all
day. Fires are smoldering. In the middle of the crowd a small space has
been cleared, and two young voices can be heard even at this distance.

It is an ajtys-a singing-duel. The boy and girl stand in the eye of the
village carrying on a mocking well-I-sort-of-like-you-even-if-there's-one­
or-two-weird-things-about-you-for-instance-kind of game while the
tune darts in and out of qobyz and dombra strummed and plucked. The
people laugh at the good lines. You have to be on your toes for this: you
trade four-line stanzas, first, second, and last lines all have to rhyme
though the lines don't have to be any special length, just breathable.
Still, it's tricky. It gets insulting too. There are villages where some part­
ners haven't spoken to each other for years after an ajtys. As Tchitcher­
ine and Dzaqyp Qulan ride in, the girl is making fun of her opponent's
horse, who is just a little-nothing serious, but kind of heavy-set . . .
well, fat, really. Really fat. And it's getting to the kid. He's annoyed. He
zips back a fast one about bringing all his friends around and demol­
ishing her and her family too. Everybody sort of goes hmm. No laughs.
She smiles, tightly, and sings:

AnolliK
llie fea�t �
�ille �d� t

¥oo,Th
,\Iianlilen

"Ale)'o
"In �ten I

You've been drinking a lot of qumys,
I must be hearing the words of qumys­
For where were you the night my brother
Came looking for his stolen qumys?

Oh-oh. The brother she mentioned is laughing fit to bust. The kid
singing is not so happy.

"This could go on for a while." Dzaqyp Qulan dismounts, and sets
about straightening his knee joints. "That's him, over there."

A very old aqyn-a wandering Kazakh singer-sits with a cup of
qumys, dozing near the fire.

"Are you sure he'll-"
"He'll sing about it. He's ridden right through that country. He'd be­

tray his profession if he didn't."
They sit down and are passed cups of the fermented mare's milk,

356



I,Helak

with a bit of lamb, lepeshka, a few strawberries. . . .
The boy and girl

go on battling with their
voices-and Tchitcherine understands,

abruptly, that soon someone will come out
and begin to write some of

these down in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame . .
. and this

is how they will be lost.
Now and then he glances over at the old aqyn, who only appears

to

be sleeping. In fact he radiates for the singers
a sort of guidance. It is

kindness. It can be felt as unmistakably as the heat from the
embers.

Slowly, turn by turn, the couple's insults get gentler,
funnier. What

might have been a village apocalypse
has gone on now into

comic coop­

eration, as between a pair of vaudeville
comedians. They are out of

themselves, playing it all for the listeners to enjoy.
The girl has the last

word.

Did I hear you mention a marriage?
Here there has been a marriage­
This warm circle of song,
Boisterous, loud as any marriage. .

And I like you, even if there are
one or two things- For a little while

the feast gathers momentum. Drunks holler
and women talk, and the

little kids totter in and out of the huts, and the wind
has picked up some

speed. Then the wandering singer begins
to tune his dombra, and the

Asian silence comes back.

"Are you going to get it all?" asks Dzaqyp Qulan.
"In stenography," replies Tchitcherine, his g

a little glottal.

THE AQYN'S SONG

I have come from the edge of the world.
I have come from the lungs of the wind,
With a thing I have seen so awesome
Even Dzambul could not sing it.
With a fear in my heart so sharp
It will cut the strongest of metals.

In the ancient tales it is told

In a time that is older than Qorqyt,
Who took from the wood of Syrghaj
The first qobyz, and the first song­
It is told that a land far distant

Is the place of the Kirghiz Light.
357

Iff"

� V 'II �



-� , �
-

��.� _ •.•.. ". ..' . . .. L
� ---

In a place where words are unknown,
And eyes shine like candles at night,
And the face of God is a presence
Behind the mask of the sky-
At the tall black rock in the desert,

HGoIn the time of the final days.
a�n�If the place were not so distant,
rre)enIf words were known, and spoken, And

Then the God might be a gold ikon, winK)i
Or a page in a paper book. Teni
But It comes as the Kirghiz Light-

aOJ1l,aThere is no other way to know It. will )p
The roar of Its voice is deafness, �eater
The flash of Its light is blindness. �aeK, as
The floor of the desert rumbles,
And Its face cannot be borne.
And a man cannot be the same, Wnl,
After seeing the Kirghiz Light. renee o�
For I tell you that I have seen It

a rur�e,
\villnarIn a place which is older than darkness,

ButiWhere even Allah cannot reach.
m�, He1As you see, my beard is an ice-field,

I walk with a stick to support me,
But this light must change us to children.
And now I cannot walk far,
For a baby must learn to walk.
And my words are reaching your ears
As the meaningless sounds of a baby.
For the Kirghiz Light took my eyes,
Now I sense all Earth like a baby.
It is north, for a six-day ride,

�tman, aThrough the steep and death-gray canyons,
Then across the stony desert �n�lill
To the mountain whose peak is a white dzurt. �e�)o (
And if you have passed without danger, �run: fie
The place of the black rock will find you. mllilie,

I �ili!But if you would not be born, iliem hI:Then stay with your warm red fire, Dnille p
358



And stay with your wife, in your tent,
And the Light will never find you,
And your heart will grow heavy with age,
And your eyes will shut only to sleep.

"Got it," sez Tchitcherine. "Let's ride, comrade." Off again,
the fires

dying at their backs, the sounds of string music,
of village carousing,

presently swallowed behind the wind.
And on into the canyons. Far away to the north, a white mountaintop

winks in the last sunlight. Down here, it is already shadowed evening.
Tchitcherine will reach the Kirghiz Light, but not his birth. He is no

aqyn, and his heart was never ready. He
will see It just before dawn. He

will spend 12 hours then, face-up on the desert,
a prehistoric city

greater than Babylon lying in stifled mineral sleep
a kilometer below his

back, as the shadow of the tall rock, rising to a point,
dances west to

east and Dzaqyp Qulan tends him, anxious as child
and doll, and drying

foam laces the necks of the two horses. But someday, like the
moun­

tains, like the young exiled women in
their certain love, in their inno­

cence of him, like the morning earthquakes and the cloud-driving wind,

a purge, a war, and
millions after millions of souls gone behind him, he

will hardly be able to remember It.
But in the Zone, hidden inside the summer Zone, the

Rocket is wait­

ing. He will be drawn the same way again.
. . .

D D D D D D D

Last week, in the British sector someplace, Slothrop, having
been ass­

hole enough to drink out of an ornamental pond
in the Tiergarten, took

sick. Any Berliner these days knows enough to
boil water before drink­

ing, though some then proceed to brew it
with various things for tea,

such as tulip bulbs, which is not good. Word is out
that the center of the

bulb is deadly poison. But they keep doing it. Once Slothrop-or
Rock­

etman, as he is soon to be known-thought he might warn
them about

things like tulip bulbs. Bring in a little
American enlightenment. But he

gets so desperate with them, moving
behind their scrims of European

pain: he keeps pushing aside gauze after wavy gauze
but there's always

still the one, the impenetrable. . . .
So there he is, under the trees in summer leaf, in flower, many

of

them blasted horizontal or into chips and splinters-fine dust from
the

bridle paths rising in the sunrays by itself, ghosts
of horses still taking

359

I

� [
r1. 7'

.
III. ,



their early-morning turns through the peacetime park. Up all night and
thirsty, Slothrop lies on his stomach and slurps up water, just an old sad­
dle tramp at the water hole here. . . . Fool. Vomiting, cramps, diarrhea,
and who's he to lecture about tulip bulbs? He manages to crawl as far as
an empty cellar, across the street from a wrecked church, curls up and
spends the next days feverish, shivering, oozing shit that burns like acid
-lost, alone with that sovereign Nazi movie-villain fist clamping in his
bowels ja-you vill shit now, ja? Wondering if he'll ever see Berkshire
again. Mommy, Mommy! The War's over, why can't I go home now?
Nalline, the reflection from her Gold Star brightening her chins like a
buttercup, smirks by the window and won't answer....

A terrible time. Hallucinating Rolls Royces and bootheels in the
night, coming to get him. Out in the street women in babushkas are
lackadaisically digging trenches for the black iron water pipe that's
stacked along the curbside. All day long they talk, shift after shift, into
evening. Slothrop lies in the space where sunlight visits his cellar for
half an hour before going on to others with mean puddles of warmth­
sorry, got to go now, schedule to keep, see you tomorrow if it doesn't
rain, heh heh. . . .

Once Slothrop wakes to the sound of an American work detail march­
ing down the street, cadence being counted by a Negro voice-yo lep,
yo lep, yo lep 0 right 0 lep . . . kind of little German folk tune with
some sliding up-scale on the word "right"-Slothrop can imagine his
mannered jog of arm and head to the left as he comes down hard on
that heel, the way they teach it in Basic . . . can see the man's smile.
For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the
street and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in
America. But he's too weak. In his stomach, in his heart. He lies, listen­
ing the tramping and the voice out of earshot, the sound of his country
fading away. . . . Fading like the WASP ghosts, the old-time DPs trail­
ing rootless now down the roads out of his memory, crowding the roof­
tops of the freights of forgetfulness, knapsacks and poor refugee pockets
stuffed with tracts nobody'd read, looking for another host: given up for
good on Rocketman here. Somewhere between the burning in his head
and the burning in his asshole, if the two can be conveniently separated,
and paced to that dying cadence, he elaborates a fantasy in which En­
zian, the African, finds him again-comes to offer him a way out.

Because it seems a while back that they did meet again, by the reedy
edge of a marsh south of the capital. Unshaven, sweating, stinking Rock­
etman restlessly tripping out to the suburbs, among his people: there is
haze over the sun, and a rotting swamp odor worse than Slothrop's own.

360

Oni
on ill
lions

looK:
civilia
InoW,

Acapt
woen

rin un
�com

Tnou�
ltule,
cantlO

Toe

Winte�
meaoo



and
sad·

rhea,
far as

p ano

Only two or three hours' sleep
in the last couple of days. He stumbles

on the Schwarzkommando, busy dredging for pieces
of rocket. Forma­

tions of dark birds are cruising in the sky. The
Africans have a partisan

look: pieces here and there of old
Wehrmacht and SS uniform, tattered

civilian clothes, only one insigne in common,
worn wherever it will

show, a painted steel device in red,
white and blue, thus:

Adapted from insignia the
German troopers wore in

South-West Africa

when they came in 1904 to crush the
Herero Rebellion-it was used to

pin up half the brim of a
wide-awake hat. For the Zone-Hereros it has

become something deep, Slothrop gathers, maybe
a little mystical.

Though he recognizes the letters-Klar,
Enthiftung, Ziindung, Vor­

stufe, Hauptstufe, the five positions
of the launching switch in the A4

control car-he doesn't let on to Enzian.

They sit on a hillside eating
bread and sausages. Children

from the

town move by in every direction.
Someone has set up an army tent,

someone has brought beer in kegs. A scratch band,
a dozen brasses in

tasseled, frayed gold and red uniforms play
selections from Der Meist­

ersinger. Fat-smoke drifts
in the air. Choruses of drinkers in the

distance

break from time to time into laughter or a song.
It's a Rocket-raising: a

festival new to this country. Soon it will
come to the folk-attention how

close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox,
and the

same German impulse that once rolled
flower-boats through the towns

and staged mock battles between young Spring
and deathwhite old

Winter will be erecting strange floral
towers out in the clearings and

meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate
will be going round and

round with old Gravity or some such buffoon,
and the children will be

tickled, and laugh. . . .
Schwarzkommando struggle knee-deep in mud, engaged entirely

with the salvage, with the moment.
The A4 they're about to uncover

was used in the last desperate battle for
Berlin-an abortive firing, a

warhead that didn't explode. Around its grave they're driving
in planks

for shoring, sending back mud in
buckets and wood casks along a

human chain to be dumped on shore, near where
their rifles and kits are

stacked.

"So Marvy was right. They didn't
disarm you guys."

"They didn't know where to
find us. We were a surprise. There are

even now powerful factions in Paris
who don't believe we exist. And

most of the time I'm not so sure myself."



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"How's that?"
"Well, 1 think we're here, but only in a statistical way. Something likethat rock over there is just about 100% certain-it knows it's there, so

does everybody else. But our own chances of being right here right now
are only a little better than even-the slightest shift in the probabilitiesand we're gone-schnapp! like that."

"Peculiar talk, Oberst."
"Not if you've been where we have. Forty years ago, in Siidwest, we

were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand
that? No reason. We couldn't even find comfort in the Will of God
Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in
blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-de­
stroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came
down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha.
The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.

"We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten
to be bad. Mba-kayere. You may find that it will work for you. Mba­
kayere. It means 'I am passed over.' To those of us who survived von
Trotha, it also means that we have learned to stand outside our historyand watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid. A sense for the
statistics of our being. One reason we grew so close to the Rocket, 1
think, was this sharp awareness of how contingent, like ourselves, the
Aggregat 4 could be-how at the mercy of small things ... dust that
gets in a timer and breaks electrical contact ... a film of grease youcan't even see, oil from a touch of human fingers, left inside a liquid­
oxygen valve, flaring up soon as the stuff hits and setting the whole thingoff-I've seen that happen ... rain that swells the bushings in the ser­
vos or leaks into a switch: corrosion, a short, a signal grounded out,Brennschluss too soon, and what was alive is only an Aggregat again, anAggregat of pieces of dead matter, no longer anything that can move, orthat has a Destiny with a shape-stop doing that with your eyebrows,Scuffling. 1 may have gone a bit native out here, that's all. Stay in theZone long enough and you'll start getting ideas about Destiny yourself."A cry from down in the marsh. Birds swirl upward, round and black,
grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky. Little kids come
skidding to a halt, and the brass band fall silent in mid-bar. Enzian is on
his feet and loping down to where the others are gathering."Was ist los, meinen Sumpfmenschen?" The others, laughing, scoopup fistfuls of mud and start throwing them at their Nguarorerue, whoducks, dodges, grabs him some of that mud and starts flinging it back.

362

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ilities

The Germans on shore stand blinking, politely aghast at this
lack of dis­

cipline.
Down in the plank enclosure, a couple of muddy

trim-tabs poke up

now out of the marsh, with twelve feet of mud
between them. Enzian,

spattered and dripping, his white grin preceding
him by several meters,

vaults over the shoring and into the hole, and grabs a.
shovel. The mo­

ment has become roughly ceremonial: Andreas and
Christian have

moved up to either side to help him scrape
and dig till about a foot of

one fin-surface is exposed. The Determination of the
Number. The Ngu­

arorerue crouches and brushes away mud, revealing part
of a slash­

mark, a white 2, and a 7.
"Outase." And glum faces on the others.

Slothrop's got a hunch. "You expected
der Fiinffachnullpunkt," he

proposes to Enzian
a little later, "the quintuple zero, right?

Haa-aaahl"

Gotcha, gotcha-
Throwing up his hands, "It's

insane. 1 don't believe there is one."

"Zero probability?"
"I think it will depend on the number of

searchers. Are your people

after it?"
"I don't know. 1 only heard by accident. 1 don't

have any people."

"Schwarzgerat, Schwarzkommando. Scuffling: suppose
somewhere

there were an alphabetical list, someone's list, an input
to some intelli­

gence arm, say. Some country,
doesn't matter. But suppose that on this

list, the two names, Blackinstrument,
Blackcommand, just happened to

be there, juxtaposed. That's all, an alphabetical
coincidence. We

wouldn't have to be real, and neither would it,
correct?"

The marshes streak away, patched with light under
the milk overcast.

Negative shadows flicker white
behind the edges of everything. "Well,

this is all creepy enough here, Oberst," sez Slothrop.
"You're not help­

ing."
Enzian is staring into Slothrop's face,

with something like a smile

under his beard.

"O.K. Who is after it, then?" Being enigmatic, won't
ansWer-is this

bird looking to be needled? "That Major Marvy," opines
Slothrop,

"a-and that Tchitcherine, too!"

Ha! That did it. Like a salute, a boot-click,
Enzian's face snaps into

perfect neutrality. "You would oblige me,"
he begins, then settles for

changing the subject. "You were
down in the Mittelwerke. How did

Marvy's people seem to be getting along
with the Russians?"

"Ace buddies, seemed like."



"I have the feeling that the occupying Powers have just aboutreached agreement on a popular front against the Schwarzkommando. Idon't know who you are, or how your lines are drawn. But they'retrying to shut us down. I'm just back from Hamburg. We had trouble. Itwas made to look like a DP raid, but the British military governmentwas behind it, and they had Russian cooperation."''I'm sorry. Can I help?"
"Don't be reckless. Let's all wait and see. All anyone knows about

you is that you keep showing up."
Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in thebranches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds,branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twit­tering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message. . . .Later in Berlin, down in the cellar among fever-dreams with shit leak­ing out of him at gallons per hour, too weak to aim more than tokenkicks at the rats running by with eyes fixed earnestly noplace, trying tomake believe they don't have a newer and dearer status among the Ber­liners, at minimum points on his mental health chart, when the sun is

gone so totally it might as well be for good, Slothrop's dumb idling heartsez: The Schwarzgerat is no Grail, Ace, that's not what the G in Imipo­lex G stands for. And you are no knightly hero. The best you can com­pare with is Tannhauser, the Singing Nincompoop--you've been underone mountain at Nordhausen, been known to sing a song or two withuke accompaniment, and don'tcha feel you're in a sucking marshland ofsin out here, Slothrop? maybe not the same thing William Slothrop,vomiting a good part of 1630 away over the side of that Arbella, meantwhen he said "sin." ... But what you've done is put yourself on some­body else's voyage-some Frau Holda, some Venus in some mountain­playing her, its, game ... you know that in some irreducible way it's anevil game. You play because you have nothing better to do, but thatdoesn't make it right. And where is the Pope whose staff's gonna bloomfor you?
As a matter of fact, he is also just about to run into his Lisaura: some­one he will be with for a while and then leave again. The Minnesingerabandoned his poor woman to suicide. What Slothrop will be leavingGreta Erdmann to is not so clear. Along the Havel in Neubabelsberg shewaits, less than the images of herself that survive in an indeterminatenumber of release prints here and there about the Zone, and even acrossthe sea. . . . Every kind technician who ever threw a magenta gelacross her key light for her has gone to war or death, and she is leftnothing but God's indifferent sunlight in all its bleaching and terror.
364

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· .. Eyebrows plucked to pen-strokes, long
hair streaked with gray,

hands heavy with rings of all colors, opacities
and uglinesses, wearing

her dark prewar Chanel suits, no hat, scarves, always
a flower, she is

haunted by Central European night-whispers
that blow, like the skin

curtains of Berlin, more ghostly around her fattening,
wrecked beauty

the closer she and Slothrop draw. . . .

This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is
out raiding a vegetable

garden in the park.
Thousands of people living in the open. He

skirts

their fires, stealthy- All he wants is a
handful of greens here, a carrot

or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep him going.
When they see him they

throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade
that didn't

go off but
made him shit where he stood.

This evening he is orbiting someplace
near the Grosser Stern. It is

long after curfew. Odors
of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city.

Among pulverized heads
of stone margraves and electors,

reconnoi­

tering a likely-looking cabbage patch,
all of a sudden Slothrop picks up

the scent of an unmistakable no
it can't be yes it is it's a

REEFER!

A-and it's burning someplace close by.
Goldshot green of the Rif's

slant

fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous
and summery, charm his

snoot on

through bushes and matted grass,
under the blasted trees and whatever

sits in their branches.

Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended
trunk, long roots fringing

the scene like a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop
finds one Emil ("Saure")

Bummer, once the Weimar Republic's
most notorious cat burglar and

doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing
around a cheerful little

orange star. The depraved
old man. Slothrop's on top of them

before

they notice. Bummer smiles,
reaches up an arm, offering the

remainder

of what they've been smoking to Slothrop,
who receives it in long dirty

fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers
down.

"Was ist los?" sez Saure. "We've
had a windfall of kif. Allah has

smiled on us, well actually he was smiling
at everybody, we just hap­

pened to be in his direct line
of sight....

"

His nickname, which means

"acid" in German, developed back in the twenties,
when he was

carrying around a little
bottle of schnapps which, if he got

in a tight

spot, he would bluff people
into thinking was fuming nitric

acid. He

comes out now with another fat
Moroccan reefer. They light up off of

Slothrop's faithful Zippo.
Trudi, the blonde, and Magda, the sultry

Bavarian, have spent the

day looting a stash of Wagnerian opera
costumes. There is a pointed

helmet with horns, a full cape of green velvet,
a pair of buckskin trou-

and terror. sers.



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"Saaaay," sez Slothrop, "that rig looks pretty sharp!"
"They're for you," Magda smiles.
"Aw ... no. You'd get a better deal at the Tauschzentrale.
But Saure insists. "Haven't you ever noticed, when you're this Blitzedand you want somebody to show up, they always do?"
The girls are moving the coal of the reefer about, watching its reflec­

tion in the shiny helmet changing shapes, depths, grades of color . . .hmm. It occurs to Slothrop here that without those horns on it, why thishelmet would look just like the nose assembly of the Rocket. And if he
could find a few triangular scraps of leather, figure a way to sew them
on to Tchitcherine's boots ... yeah, a-and on the back of the cape puta big, scarlet, capital R- It is as pregnant a moment as when Tonto,after the legendary ambush, attempts to-

"Raketemensch!" screams Saure, grabbing the helmet and unscrew­
ing the horns off of it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the actof naming....

"You had the same idea?" Oh, strange. Saure carefully reaches upand places the helmet on Slothrop's head. Ceremonially the girls drapethe cape around his shoulders. Troll scouting parties have already sent
runners back to inform their people.

"Good. Now listen, Rocketman, I'm in a bit of trouble."
"Hah?" Slothrop has been imagining a full-scale Rocketman Hype, inwhich the people bring him food, wine and maidens in a four-color dis­

pensation in which there is a lot of skipping and singing "La, la, la, la,"and beefsteaks blossoming from these strafed lindens, and roast turkeysthudding down like soft hail on Berlin, sweet potatoes a-and meltedmarshmallows, bubbling up out of the ground. . . ."Do you have any armies?" Trudi wants to know. Slothrop, or Rock­etman, hands over half a withered pack.
The reefer keeps coming around: darts and stabs through this rootshelter. Everybody forgets what it is they've been talking about. There'sthe smell of earth. Bugs rush through, aerating. Magda has lit one of Slo­throp's cigarettes for him and he tastes raspberry lipstick. Lipstick?Who's got lipstick these days? What are all these people here into, any­way?
Berlin is dark enough for stars, the accustomed stars but never so

clearly arranged. It is possible also to make up your own constellations."Oh," Saure recalls, "I had this problem ... "
"I'm really hungry," it occurs to Slothrop.Trudi is telling Magda about her boy friend Gustav, who wants to liveinside the piano. "All you could see was his feet sticking out, he kept

366

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saying, 'You all hate me, you hate this piano!'
"

They're giggling now.

"Plucking on the strings," sez Magda, "right?
He's so paranoid."

Trudi has these big, blonde Prussian legs. Tiny blonde
hairs dance up

and down in the starlight, up under her skirt and back, all through
the

shadows of her knees, around under the hollows behind them,
this

starry jittering. . . . The stump towers
above and cups them all, a giant

nerve cell, dendrites extended into the city, the night. Signals coming
in

from all directions, and from back in time too, probably, if not
indeed

forward ....

Saure, who is never able entirely to layoff business, rolls,
flows to his

feet, clutching on to a root till his head decides
where it is going to

come to rest. Magda, her ear at its entrance, is banging on
Rocketman's

helmet with a stick. It gongs in chords. The separate
notes aren't right

on pitch, either: they sound very odd together.
. . .

"I don't know what time it is," Saure Bummer gazing
around.

"Weren't we supposed to be at the Chicago Bar?
Or was that last

night?"
"I forget," Trudi giggles.
"Listen, Kerl, I really have to talk to that American."

"Dear Emil," Trudi whispers, "don't worry. He'll be at the Chicago."

They decide on an intricate system of disguise.
Saure gives Slothrop

his jacket. Trudi wears the green cape. Magda puts
on Slothrop's boots,

and he goes in his socks, carrying her
own tiny shoes in his pockets.

They spend some time gathering plausible items, kindling
and greens, to

fill the helmet with, and Saure carries that. Magda and Trudi help
stuff

Slothrop into the buckskin pants, both girls
down on pretty knees,

hands caressing his legs and ass. Like the ballroom
in St. Patrick's Ca­

thedral, there is none in these trousers here,
and Slothrop's hardon, en­

larging, aches like thunder.
"Fine for you folks." The girls are laughing.

Grandiose Slothrop limps

along after everybody, a network of clear interweaving ripples
now like

rain all through his vision, hands turning to stone,
out of the Tiergarten,

past shellstruck lime and chestnut trees,
into the streets, or what is serv­

ing for them. Patrols of all nations keep coming by,
and this mindless

quartet have to hit the dirt often, trying
not to laugh too much. Slo­

throp's sox are sodden with dew. Tanks
manoeuvre in the street, chew­

ing parallel ridges of asphalt and
stonedust. Trolls and dryads play in

the open spaces. They were blasted back
in May out of bridges, out of

trees into liberation, and are now long citified. "Oh, that drip," say
the

subdeb trolls about those who are not as hep, "he just isn't
out-of-the­

tree about anything." Mutilated statues lie under
mineral sedation:



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frock-coated marble torsos of bureaucrats fallen pale in the gutters. Yes,hmm, here we are in the heart of downtown Berlin, really, uh, a little,
Jesus Christ what's that-

"Better watch it," advises Saure, "it's kind of rubbery through here.""What is that?"
Well, what it is-is? what's "is"?-is that King Kong, or some crea­

ture closely allied, squatting down, evidently just, taking a shit, right inthe street! and everything! a-and being ignored, by truckload aftertruckload of Russian enlisted men in pisscutter caps and dazed smiles,
grinding right on by-"Hey!" Slothrop wants to shout, "hey lookit that
giant ape! or whatever it is. You guys? Hey ...

"

But he doesn't, luck­
ily. On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the
Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery blackon all blastward curves and projections, chalked over its hard-echoingcarbon insides with Cyrillic initials, and many names of comrades killed
in May.

Berlin proves to be full of these tricks. There's a big chromo of Stalinthat Slothrop could swear is a girl he used to date at Harvard, the mus­tache and hair only incidental as makeup, damn if that isn't what's her
name . . . but before he can quite hear the gibbering score of littlevoices-hurry, hurry, get it in place, he's almost around the corner­here, laid side by side on the pavement, are these enormous loaves ofbread dough left to rise under clean white cloths-boy, is everybodyhungry: the same thought hits them all at once, wow! Raw dough!loaves of bread for that monster back there . . . oh, no that's right, thatwas a building, the Reichstag, so these aren't bread ... by now it'sclear that they're human bodies, dug from beneath today's rubble, eachinside its carefully tagged GI fartsack. But it was more than an opticalmistake. They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows,with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we'll be feed­

ing on by Xmas?
What the notorious Femina is to cigarette-jobbing circles in Berlin,the Chicago is to dopers. But while dealing at the Femina usually getsunder way around noon, the Chicago here only starts jiving after the10:00 curfew. Slothrop, Saure, Trudi and Magda come in a back en­trance, out of a great massif of ruins and darkness lit only here andthere, like the open country. Inside, M.O.s and corpsmen run hither andthither clutching bottles of fluffy white crystalline substances, smallpink pills, clear ampoules the size of pureys. Occupation and Reichs­marks ruffle and flap across the room. Some dealers are all chemical en­thusiasm, others all business. Oversize photos of John Dillinger, alone or
368



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e crea.

right in
dafter

THE DOPER'S DREAM

here,"

posed with his mother, his pals, his tommygun, decorate the walls.

Lights and arguing are kept low, should the military police happen by.
On a wire-backed chair, blunt hair hands picking quietly at a guitar,

sits an American sailor with an orangutan look to him. In 314 time and

shit-kicking style, he is singing:

Last night I dreamed I was plugged right in
To a bubblin' hookah so high,
When all of a sudden some Arab jinni
Jump up just a-winkin' his eye.
"I'm here to obey all your wishes," he told me,
As for words I was trying to grope.
"Good buddy," I cried, "you could surely oblige me

By turnin' me on to some dope!"
With a bigfat smile he took ahold of my hand,
And we flew down the sky in a flash,
And the first thing I saw in the land where he took me
Was a whole solid mountain of hash!

All the trees was a-bloomin' with pink 'n' purple pills,
Whur the Romilar River flowed by,
To the magic mushrooms as wild as a rainbow,
So pretty that I wanted to cry.
All the girls come to greet us, so sweet in slow motion,
Morning glories woven into their hair,
Bringin' great big handfuls of snowy cocaine,
All their dope they were eager to share.
Well we dallied for days, just a-ballin' and smokin',
In the flowering Panama Red,
Just piggin' on peyote and nutmeg tea,
And those brownies so kind to your head.

Now I could've passed that good time forever,
And I really was fixing to stay,
But you know that

jinni turned out, t'be a narco man,
And he busted me right whur I lay.
And he took me back, to this cold, cold world,
'N' now m' prison's whurever I be ...
And I dream of the days back in Doperland
And I wonder, will I ever go free?

kalen·
lone or



The singer is Seaman Bodine, of the U.S. destroyer fohn E. Badass,and he's the contact Saure is here to see. The Badass is docked in Cux­haven and Bodine is semi-AWOL, having hit Berlin night before last forthe first time since the early weeks of American occupation. "Things areso tight, man," he's groaning, "Potsdam, I couldn't believe it over there.Remember how the Wilhelmplatz used to be? Watches, wine, jewels,cameras, heroin, fur coats, everything in the world. Nobody gave a shit,right? You ought to see it now. Russian security all over the place. Bigmean customers. You couldn't get near it."
"Isn't there supposed to be something going on over there?" sez Slo­throp. He's heard scuttlebutt. "A conference or some shit?"
"They're deciding how to cut up Germany," sez Saure, "All the Pow­ers. They should call in the Germans, Kerl, we've been doing that forcenturies. "
"You couldn't get a gnat in there now, man," Seaman Bodine shakinghis head, dexterously rolling a reefer one-handed on a cigarette paper hehas first torn, with straightfaced bravura, in half.
"Ah," smiles Saure, flinging an arm over Slothrop, "but what if Rock­etman can?"
Bodine looks over, skeptical. "That's Rocketman?"
"More or less," sez Slothrop, "but I'm not sure I want to go into thatPotsdam, right now. . . ."
"If you only knew!" cries Bodine. "Listen, Ace, right this minute,hardly 15 miles away, there is six kilos! of pure, top-grade Nepalesehashish! Scored it from my buddy in the CBI, government seals 'n' ev­erything, buried it myself back in May, so safe nobody'Il ever find itwithout a map. All you got to do is fly over there or whatever it is youdo, just go in and get it."
"That's all."
"A kilo for you," offers Saure.
"They can cremate it with me. All those Russians can stand aroundthe furnace and get loaded."
"Perhaps," the most decadent young woman Slothrop has ever seenin his life, wearing fluorescent indigo eye-shadow and a black leathersnood, comes slithering past, "the pretty American is not a devotee ofthe Green Hershey Bar, mm? ha-ha-ha. "
"A million marks," Saure Sighs.
"Where are you going to get_"
Holding up an elfin finger, leaning close, "I print it."Sure enough, he does. They all' troop out of the Chicago, half a mile

370

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Ilofur�



Saure to and fro, bloodshot and nagging, with a wreathing pot of tea.

Slothrop's alone in bed. The Rocketman costume waits on a table, along
arouna with Seaman Bodine's treasure map-oh. Oh, boy. Is Slothrop really

going to have to go through with this?
r seen Outside, birds whistle arpeggios up the steps, along the morning.

leailier Trucks and jeeps sputter in the distances. Slothrop sits drinking tea and
tee of trying to scrape dried sperm off of his trousers while Saure explains

the

layout. The package is stashed under an ornamental bush outside a
villa

at 2 Kaiserstrasse, in Neubabelsberg, the old movie capital of Germany.
That's across the Havel from Potsdam. It seems prudent to stay off the
Avus Autobahn. "Try to get past the checkpoint just after Zehlendorf

a mue instead. Come up on Neubabelsberg by canal."

tfRed·

,)iliat

minute,

e�ele
nero

finalt I
Ilrou

down through rubble piles, over pathways twisting invisible in the dark
to all but Saure, down at last into a houseless cellar with filing cabinets,
a bed, an oil-lamp, a printing-press. Magda cuddles close to Slothrop,
her hands dancing over his erection. Trudi has formed an inexplicable
attachment to Bodine. Saure begins to crank his clattering wheel, and
sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder,
thousands on thousands. "All authentic plates and paper, too. The only
detail missing is a slight ripple along the margins. There was a special
stamp-press nobody managed to loot."

"Uh," Slothrop sez.
"Aw, come on," sez Bodine. "Rocketman, jeepers. You don't want to

do nothing no more."
They help jog and square the sheets while Saure chops them up with

a long glittering cutter blade. Holding out a fat roll of 100S, "You could
be back tomorrow . No job is too tough for Rocketman."

A day or two later, it will occur to Slothrop that what he should have
said at that point was, "But I wasn't Rocketman, until just a couple
hours ago." But right now he is beguiled at the prospect of 2.2 pounds
of hashish and a million nearly-real marks. Nothing to walk away from,
or fly or whatever it is, right? So he takes a couple thousand in front

and

spends the rest of the night with round and moaning Magda on
Saure's

bed, while Trudi and Bodine lark in the bathtub, and Saure slips back
on some other mission, out into the three-o'clock waste that presses,

oceanic, against their buoyed inner space. . . .

D D D D D D D

371



"How come?"
"No civilians allowed on VIP Road-here, this one, that runs on

across the river to Potsdam."
"Come on. I'll need a boat, then."
"Hal You expect improvisation from a German? No, no, that's-that's

Rocketman's problem! ha-ha!"
"Unnhh." Seems the villa fronts on the Griebnitz See. "Why don't Ihit it from that side?"
"You'll have to go under a couple of bridges first, if you do. Heavilyguarded. Plunging fire. Maybe-maybe even mortars. It gets very nar­row opposite Potsdam. You won't have a chance." Oh, German humor's

a fine way to start the morning. Saure hands Slothrop an AGO card, a
trip ticket, and a pass printed in English and Russian. "The man who
forged these has been in and out of Potsdam on them a dozen times
since the Conference began. That's how much faith he has in them. The
bilingual pass is special, just for the Conference. But you mustn't spendtime gawking like a tourist, asking celebrities for autographs-""Well say look Emil, if you've got one of these and they're so good,why don't you go?"

"It's not my specialty. I stick to dealing. Just an old bottle of acid­and even that's make-believe. Buccaneering is for Rocketmen."
"Bodine, then."
"He's already on his way back to Cuxhaven. Won't he be upset, whenhe comes back next week, only to find that Rocketman, of all people,has shown the white feather."
"Oh." Shit. Slothrop stares awhile at that map, then tries to memorizeit. He puts on his boots, groaning. He bundles his helmet in that cape,and the two, conner and connee, set out through the American sector.Mare's-tails are out seething across the blue sky, but down here theBerliner Luft hangs still, with the odor of death inescapable. Thousandsof corpses fallen back in the spring still lie underneath these mountainsof debris, yellow mountains, red and yellow and pale.Where's the city Slothrop used to see back in those newsreels andthat National Geographic? Parabolas weren't all that New German Ar­chitecture went in for-there were the spaces-the necropolism ofblank alabaster in the staring sun, meant to be filled with human har­vests rippling out of sight, making no sense without them. If there issuch a thing as the City Sacramental, the city as outward and visiblesign of inward and spiritual illness or health, then there may have been,even here, some continuity of sacrament, through the terrible surface ofMay. The emptiness of Berlin this morning is an inverse mapping of the
372

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nan,k
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annar­
lliere!l
r!l!ole'
been,

ace of
oftne

white and geometric capital before the destruction-the fallow and

long-strewn fields of rubble, the same weight of too much featureless
concrete . . . except that here everything's been turned inside out. The

straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding
pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, re­

sponding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort. The civilians are
outside now, the uniforms inside. Smooth facets of buildings have given
way to cobbly insides of concrete blasted apart, all the endless-pebbled
rococo just behind the shuttering. Inside is outside. Ceilingless rooms

open to the sky, wall-less rooms pitched out over the sea of ruins
in

prows, in crew's-nests. . . . Old men
with their tins searching the

ground for cigarette butts wear their lungs on their breasts. Advertise­
ments for shelter, clothing, the lost, the taken, once classified, folded

biirgerlich inside newspapers to be read at one's ease in the lacquered
and graceful parlors are now stuck with Hitler-head stamps of blue, or­

ange, and yellow, out in the wind, when the wind comes,
stuck to trees,

door-frames, planking, pieces of wall-white and fading scraps, writing
spidery, trembling, smudged, thousands unseen, thousands

unread or

blown away. At the Winterhilfe one-course Sundays you sat outside
at

long tables under the swastika-draped winter trees, but
outside has been

brought inside and that kind of Sunday lasts all week long.
Winter is

coming again. All Berlin spends the daylight trying to
make believe it

isn't. Scarred trees are back in leaf, baby birds hatched and learning to

fly, but winter's here behind the look of summer-Earth
has turned

over in its sleep, and the tropics are reversed....
Like the walls of the Chicago Bar brought outside, giant photographs

are posted out in the Friedrichstrasse-faces higher than a
man. Slo­

throp recognizes Churchill and Stalin all right, but isn't sure
about the

other one. "Emil, who's that guy in the glasses?"
"The American president. Mister Truman."

"Quit fooling. Truman is vice-president. Roosevelt is president."
Saure raises an eyebrow. "Roosevelt died back in the spring. Just be-

fore the surrender."

They get tangled in a bread queue. Women in worn plush coats,
little

kids holding on to frayed hems, men in caps and dark
double-breasted

suits, unshaven old faces, foreheads white as a nurse's leg. . . . Some­

body tries to grab Slothrop's cape, and there's a brief tugging
match.

"I'm sorry," Sauro offers, when they're clear again.
"Why didn't anybody tell me?" Slothrop was going

into high school
when FDR was starting out in the White House. Broderick Slothrop

professed to hate the man, but young Tyrone thought
he was brave,

373



with that polio and all. Liked his voice on the radio. Almost saw him
once too, in Pittsfield, but Lloyd Nipple, the fattest kid in Minge­borough, was standing in the way, and all Slothrop got to see was a cou­
ple wheels and the feet of some guys in suits on a running-board. Hoo­
ver he'd heard of, dimly-something to do with shack towns or vacuum
cleaners-but Roosevelt was his president, the only one he'd known. It
seemed he'd just keep getting elected, term after term, forever. But
somebody had decided to change that. So he was put to sleep, Slo­throp's president, quiet and neat, while the kid who once imaged hisface on Lloyd's T-shirted shoulderblades was jiving on the Riviera, or in
Switzerland someplace, only half aware of being extinguished him­self....

"They said it was a stroke," Saure sez. His voice is arriving from some
quite peculiar direction, let us say from directly underneath, as the wide
necropolis begins now to draw inward, to neck down and stretch out
into a Corridor, one known to Slothrop though not by name, a deforma­tion of space that lurks inside his life, latent as a hereditary disease. Aband of doctors in white masks that cover everything but eyes, bleakand grown-up eyes, move in step down the passage toward where Roo­sevelt is lying. They carry shiny black kits. Metal rings inside the blackleather, rings as if to speak, as if a ventriloquist were playing a trick,help-let-me-out-of-here.... Whoever it was, posing in the black capeat Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed beautifully the sense ofDeath's wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared a nationof starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a beingThey would dismantle. . . .

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows allgoing the right way and lengthening with the day-but no, Saure can'tbe real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues forsome hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), thedozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement soamazingly detailed-They sure must have the budget, all right. Look atthis desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body­size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-re­membered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffedon the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumpingits giant atomizer. . . .
(By Saute's black-market watch, it's nearly noon. From 11 to 12 inthe morning is the Evil Hour, when the white woman with the ring ofkeys comes out of her mountain and may appear to you. Be careful,then. If you can't free her from a spell she never specifies, you'll be pun-

374



sa cou.

d, H()().
vacuUlJ]

nown,]t

'ier� ori�
nea nim.

!o12in•

ring 01
careM
be pun·

ished. She is the beautiful maiden offering the Wonderflower, and the

ugly old woman with long teeth who found you in that
dream and said

nothing. The Hour is hers.)
Black P-38s fly racketing in formation, in moving openwork against

the pale sky. Slothrop and Saure find a cafe on the sidewalk,
drink wa­

tered pink wine, eat bread and some cheese. That crafty
old doper

breaks out a "stick" of "tea" and they sit in the sun handing it back and

forth, offering the waiter a hit, who can tell? that's how you
have to

smoke armies too, these days. Jeeps, personnel carriers, and bicycles go
streaming by. Girls in fresh summer frocks, orange and green

as fruit

ices, drift in to sit at tables, smiling, smiling, checking the area
continu­

ously for early business.
Somehow Saure has got Slothrop to talking about the Rocket. Not

at

all Saute's specialty, of course, though he's been keeping an ear
tuned.

If it's wanted, then it has a price. "I could never see the fascination.
We

kept hearing so much about it on the radio. It
was our Captain Midnight

Show. But we grew disillusioned. Wanting to believe,
but nothing we

saw giving us that much faith. Less and less
toward the end. All I know

is it brought disaster down on the cocaine market,
Kerl."

"How's that?"

"Something in that rocket needed potassium permanganate, right?"
"Turbopump.

"

"Well, without that Purpurstoff you can't deal cocaine honestly.
For­

get honesty, there just wasn't any reality. Last
winter you couldn't find

a cc of permanganate in the whole fucking Reich, Kerl.
Oh you

should've seen the burning that was going on. Friends, understand.
But

what friend hasn't wanted to-in terms you can recognize-push a pie
in your face? eh?"

"Thank you." Wait a minute. Is he talking about us?
Is he getting

ready to-
"So," having continued, "there crept over Berlin a gigantic

Laurel

and Hardy film, silent, silent . . . because of the permanganate
short­

age. I don't know what other
economies may have been affected by the

A4. This was not just pie-throwing, not just anarchy
on a market, this

was chemical irresponsibility! Clay, talcum, cement, even, it got
this

perverse, flour! Powdered milk, diverted
from the stomachs of little

sucklings! Look-alikes that were worth even more
than cocaine-but

the idea was that someone should get a sudden noseful of milk,
hahaha­

hah!" breaking up here for a minute, "and that was
worth the loss!

Without the permanganate there was no way to tell anything for
sure. A

little novocain to numb the tongue, something bitter for the taste, and

375

II! / e: "-/ II! � __



you could be making enormous profits off of sodium bicarbonate. Per­
manganate is the touchstone. Under a microscope, you drop some onthe substance in question, which dissolves-then you watch how it
comes out of solution, how it recrystallizes: the cocaine will appear first,at the edges, then the vegetable cut, the procaine, the lactose at otherwell-known positions-a purple target, with the outer ring worth themost, and the bull's-eye worth nothing. An anti-target. Certainly not theA4's idea of one, eh, Rocketman. That machinery of yours was not ex­actly the doper's friend. What do you want it for? Will your country useit against Russia?"

"I don't want it. What do you mean, 'my country'?""J'm sorry. I only meant that it looks like the Russians want it badlyenough. I've had connections all over the city taken away. Interrogated.None of them know any more about rockets than I do. But Tchitcherinethinks we do."
"Oboy. Him again?"
"Yes he's in Potsdam right now. Supposed to be. Set up a headquar-ters in one of the old film studios."
"Swell news, Emil. With my luck ...

"

"You don't look too good, Rocketman."
"Think that's horrible? Try this!" and Slothrop proceeds to ask ifSaure has heard anything about the Schwarzgerat,Saure does not exactly scream Aiyee! and run off down the street oranything, but squeeeak goes a certain valve all right, and something isrouted another way. "I'll tell you what," nodding and shifting in hisseat, "you talk to der Springer. Ja, you two would get on fine. I am onlya retired cat burglar, looking to spend my last several decades as theSublime Rossini did his: comfortable. Just don't mention me at all, O.K.,Joe?"

"Well, who is that der Springer, and where do I find him, Emil?""He is the knight who leaps perpetually-""Wow."
"-across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is. Just as Rocketmanflies over obstacles today." He laughs nastily. "A fine pair. How do Iknow where he is? He could be anyplace. He is everywhere.""Zorro? The Creen Hornet?"
"Last I heard, a week or two ago, he was up north on the Hanseaticrun. You will meet. Don't worry." Abruptly Saure stands up to go,shaking hands, slipping Rocketman another reefer for later, or for luck."I have medical officers to see. The happiness of a thousand customersis on your shoulders, young man. Meet me at my place. Chick."

376

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nitcherinr

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ketman

011'001

anseatic
to �O, ,

or lucK.
tamers

So the Evil Hour has worked its sorcery. The wrong word was

Schwarzgerat. Now the mountain has closed again thundering
behind

Slothrop, damn near like to crush his heel, and it might just be
centuries

before that White Woman appears again. Shit.
The name on the special pass is "Max Schlepzig." Slothrop, feeling

full of pep, decides to pose as a vaudeville
entertainer. An illusionist. He

has had a good apprenticeship with Katje, her damask tablecloth
and

magical body, a bed for her salon, a hundred soirees fantastiques.
. . .

He's through Zehlendorf by midafternoon, inside his Rocketman rig
and ready to cross. The Russian sentries wait under a wood archway
painted red, toting Suomis or Degtyarovs, oversize

submachine guns

with drum magazines. Here comes also a Stalin tank now, lumbering
in

low, soldier in earflapped helmet standing up in the 76 mm mount yell­

ing into walkie-talkie . . . uh, well. . . . On
the other side of the arch is

a Russian jeep with a couple officers, one talking earnestly into
the mike

of his radio set, and the air between quickens with spoken Russian at

the speed of light weaving a net to catch Slothrop.
Who else? He

sweeps his cape back with a wink, tips his helmet
and smiles. In a conju­

ror's flourish he's out with card, ticket 'n' bilingual pass, giving them

some line about a command performance in that Potsdam.

One of the sentries takes the pass and nips into his kiosk to make a

phone call. The others stand staring at
Tchitcherine's boots. No one

speaks. The call is taking a while. Scarred leather, day-old beards,
cheekbones in the sun. Slothrop's trying to think of a few card tricks he

can do, sort of break the ice, when the sentry sticks his head
out. "Stie­

feln, bitte."
Boots? What would they want with-yaaahhh! Boots, indeed, yes.

We know beyond peradventure who has to be on the other end,
don't

we. Slothrop can hear all the man's metal parts jingling
with glee. In the

smoky Berlin sky, somewhere to the left of the
Funkturm in its steel­

wool distance, appears a full-page photo in Life magazine: it is of
Slo­

throp, he is in full Rocketman attire, with what appears
to be a long,

stiff sausage of very large diameter being stuffed into his mouth,
so forci­

bly that his eyes are slightly crossed, though the hand or agency actually
holding the stupendous wiener is not visible in the photo.

A SNAFU FOR

ROCKETMAN, reads the caption-"Barely off the ground, the Zone's new­

est celebrity 'fucks up.'
"

We-e-e-ll, Slothrop slides off the boots, the sentry takes them
inside to

the telephone-the others lean Slothrop up against the arch
and shake

him down, finding nothing but the reefer Saure gave him,
which they

expropriate. Slothrop waits in his socks, trying
not to think ahead.

377



Glancing around for cover, maybe. Nothing. Clear field of fire for 360
degrees. Smells of fresh asphalt patch and gun oil. The jeep, crystal ver­digris, waiting: the road back to Berlin, for the moment, deserted. . . .
Providence, hey Providence, what'd you do, step out for a beer or some­
thing?

Not at all. The boots reappear, smiling sentry right behind them.
"Stimmt, Herr Schlepzig." What does irony sound like in Russian?
These birds are too inscrutable for Slothrop. Tchitcherine would've
known enough not to arouse any suspicion by asking to see those boots.
Nah, it couldri't've been him on the phone. This was probably some rou­tine search for that contraband, was all. Slothrop is being seized rightnow by what the Book of Changes calls Youthful Folly. He swirls his
green cape a few more times, chisels a stubby Balkan army off of one ofthe tommyguns, and moseys away, southward. The officers' jeep stays ronwhere it is. The tank has vanished.

lli�i
rnovJubilee Jim, just a-peddlin' through the country, ID�Winkin' at the ladies from Stockbridge up to Lee- �Buy your gal a brooch for a fancy gown,

Buggy-whip rigs for just a dollar down,
Hey come along ev'rybody, headin' for the Jubi-lee!

Two miles down the road, Slothrop hits that canal Saure mentioned: IDm�takes a footpath down under the bridge where it's wet and cool for aminute. He sets off along the bank, looking for a boat to hijack. Girls in lom�halters and shorts lie sunning, brown and gold, all along this dreaming 11m�grass slope. The clouded afternoon is mellowed to wind softened edges, ��jchildren kneeling beside the water with fishing lines, two birds in a llit\�chase across the canal soaring down and up in a loop into the suspended oilliestorm of a green treetop, where they sit and begin to sing. With dis- it'latance the light gathers a slow ecru haze, girls' flesh no longer bleached itall�by the zenith sun now in gentler light reawakening to warmer colors, �in�1faint shadows of thigh-muscles, stretched filaments of skin cells saying l�mictouch ... stay.... Slothrop walks on-past eyes opening, smiles Therbreaking like kind dawns. What's wrong with him? Stay, sure. But whatkeeps him passing by?
There are a few boats, moored to railings, but always somebody withan eye out. He finally comes on a narrow flat-bottomed little rig, oars inthe locks and ready to go, nothing but a blanket upslope, a pair of highheels, man's jacket, stand of trees nearby. So Slothrop climbs right in,

378



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and casts off. Have fun-a little nasty here-I can't, but I can
steal your

boat! Hal
He hauls till sundown, resting for long stretches, really out of

condi­

tion, cape smothering him in a cone of sweat so bad he
has to take it off

finally. Ducks drift at a wary distance, water dripping
off of bright or­

ange beaks. Surface of the canal ripples with evening wind,
sunset in his

eyes streaking the water red and gold: royal colors.
Wrecks poke up out

of the water, red lead and rust ripening in this light, bashed gray hull­

plates, flaking rivets, unlaid cable pointing hysterical
strands to all

points of the compass, vibrating below any hearing
in the breeze.

Empty barges drift by, loose and forlorn. A stork flies over, going
home,

below him suddenly the pallid arch of the Avus overpass
ahead. Any

farther and Slothrop's back in the American sector. He angles
across the

canal, debarking on the opposite bank, and heads south, trying
to skirt

the Soviet control point the map puts someplace to his right.
Massive

movement in the dusk: Russian guardsmen, green-capped elite, march­

ing and riding, pokerfaced, in trucks, on
horseback. You can feel the im­

pedance in the fading day, the crowding, jittering
wire loops, Potsdam

warning stay away . . . stay away. . ..
The closer it comes, the denser

the field around that cloaked international gathering across the Havel.

Bodine's right: a gnat can't get in. Slothrop knows it,
but just keeps on

skulking along, seeking less sensitive axes of suspicion, running zigzags,
aimed innocuously south.

Invisible. It becomes easier to believe in the longer he can keep

going. Sometime back on Midsummer Eve,
between midnight and one,

fern seed fell in his shoes. He is the invisible youth, the armored change­

ling. Providence's little pal. Their preoccupation
is with forms of danger

the War has taught them-phantoms they may be
doomed now, some

of them, to carry for the rest of their lives.
Fine for Slothrop, though­

it's a set of threats he doesn't belong to. They are still back in geograph­
ical space, drawing deadlines and authorizing personnel,

and the only

beings who can violate their space are safely caught
and paralyzed in

comic books. They think. They don't know about
Rocketman here.

They keep passing him and he remains alone,
blotted to evening by vel­

vet and buckskin-if they do see him his image is shunted immediately
out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in

exile with other

critters of the night. . . .
Presently he cuts right again, toward the sunset.

There's still that big

superhighway to get across. Some Germans
haven't been able to get

home for 10, 20 years because they were caught on the wrong
side of

379



some Autobahn when it went through. Nervous and leadfooted now,
Slothrop comes creeping up to the Avus embankment, listening to
traffic vacuuming by above. Each driver thinks he's in control of his
vehicle, each thinks he has a separate destination, but Slothrop knows
better. The drivers are out tonight because They need them where they
are, forming a deadly barrier. Amateur Fritz von Opels all over the
place here, promising a lively sprint for Slothrop-snarling inward to­
ward that famous S-curve where maniacs in white helmets and dark
goggles once witched their wind-faired machinery around the banked
brick in shrieking drifts (admiring eyes of colonels in dress uniforms,
colonels' ladies in Garbo fedoras, all safe up in their white towers yet
belonging to the day's adventure, each waiting for his own surfacing of
the same mother-violence underneath ... ).

Slothrop frees his arms from the cape, lets a lean gray Porsche whir
by, then charges out, the red of its taillights flashing along his down­
stream leg, headlights of a fast-coming Army truck now hitting the up­
stream one and touching the grotto of one eyeball to blue jigsaw. He
swings Sideways as he runs, screaming, "Hauptstufe!" which is the
Rocketman war-cry, raises both arms and the sea-green fan of the cape's
silk lining, hears brakes go on, keeps running, hits the center mall in a
roll, scampering into the bushes as the truck skids past and stops. Voices
for a while. Gives Slothrop a chance to catch his breath and get the
cape unwound from around his neck. The truck finally starts off again.
The southbound half of the Avus is slower tonight, and he can jog across
easy, down the bank and uphill again into trees. Hey! Leaps broad high­
ways in a single bound!

Well, Bodine, your map is perfect here, except for one trivial detail
you sort of, uh, forgot to mention, wonder why that was. . . . It turns
out something like 150 houses in Neubabelsberg have been comman­
deered and sealed off as a compound for the Allied delegates to the
Potsdam Conference, and Jolly Jack Tar has stashed that dope right in
the middle of it. Barbed wire, searchlights, sirens, security who've for­
gotten how to smile. Thank goodness, which is to say Saure Bummer,
for this special pass here. Stenciled signs with arrows read ADMIRALTY,
F.O., STATE DEPARTMENT, CHIEFS OF STAFF.... The whole joint is lit up
like a Hollywood premiere. Great coming and going of civilians in suits,
gowns, tuxedos, getting in and out of BMW limousines with flags of all
nations next to the windscreens. Mimeographed handouts clog the
stones and gutters. Inside the sentry boxes are piles of confiscated cam­
eras.

They must deal here with a strange collection of those showbiz types.
380

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Nobody seems too upset at the helmet, cape, or mask.
There are ambig­

uous shrugging phone calls and the odd feeble question,
but they do let

Max Schlepzig pass. A gang of American newspapermen
comes through

in a charabanc, clutching on to bottles of liberated Moselle,
and they

offer him a lift part way. Soon they have fallen to arguing
about which

celebrity he is. Some think he is Don Ameche, others
Oliver Hardy. Ce­

lebrity? what is this? "Come on," sez Slothrop, "you just
don't know me

in this getup. I'm that Errol Flynn." Not everybody
believes him, but he

manages to hand out a few autographs anyhow.
When they part com­

pany, the newshounds
are discussing the candidates for Miss Rheingold

1946. Dorothy Hart's advocates are the loudest,
but Jill Darnley has a

majority on her side. It's all gibberish to Slothrop-it
will be months yet

before he runs into a beer advertisement featuring the six beauties, and

find himself rooting for a girl named Helen Riickert: a
blonde with a

Dutch surname who will remind him dimly of someone. . . .

The house at 2 Kaiserstrasse is styled in High Prussian Boorish and

painted a kind of barf brown, a color the
ice-cold lighting doesn't im­

prove. It is more heavily guarded than any
other in the compound. Gee,

Slothrop wonders why. Then he sees the sign
with the place's stenciled

alias on it.

"Oh, no. No. Quit fooling." For a while he stands
in the street shiver­

ing and cursing that Seaman
Bodine for a bungler, villain, and agent of

death. Sign sez THE WHITE HOUSE. Bodine
has brought him straight to

the dapper, bespectacled stranger who gazed
down the morning

Friedrichstrasse-to the face that has silently dissolved in to replace the

one Slothrop never saw and now never will.
The sentries with slung rifles are still as himself. The

folds of his cape

are gone to corroded
bronze under the arc-lighting. Behind the villa

water rushes. Music strikes up inside and
obliterates the sound. An en­

tertainment. No wonder he got in so easy. Are they expecting this magi­

cian, this late guest? Glamour, fame. He could run in
and throw himself

at somebody's feet, beg for amnesty. End up getting
a contract for the

rest of his life with a radio network, o-or even a movie
studio! That's

what mercy is, isn't it? He turns, trying to
be casual about it, and goes

moseying out of the light, looking for a way
down to that water.

The shore of the Griebnitz See is dark, starlit, strung with wire,
alive

with roving sentries. Potsdam's lights, piled
and scattered, twinkle

across the black water. Slothrop has to go in up to his ass a few
times to

get past that wire, and wait
for the sentries to gather around a cigarette

at one end of their beat before he can make a dash, cape-flapping
and

soggy, up to the villa.
Bodine's hashish is buried along one side of the

381

I
/ ff

"�"

r ;/ '/",



house, under a certain juniper bush. Slothrop squats down and starts
scooping up dirt with his hands.

Inside it is some do. Girls are singing "Don't Sit Under the AppleTree," and if it ain't the Andrews Sisters it may as well be. They are ac­companied by a dance band with a mammoth reed section. Laughing,sounds of glassware, multilingual chitchat, your average weekday nighthere at the great Conference. The hash is wrapped in tinfoil inside a
moldering ditty bag. It smells really good. Aw, jeepers-why'd he forgetto bring a pipe?

Actually, it's just as well. Above Slothrop, at eye level, is a terrace,and espaliered peach trees in milky blossom. As he crouches, hefting thebag, French windows open and someone steps out on this terrace for
some air. Slothrop freezes, thinking invisible, invisible. . . . Footstepsapproach, and over the railing leans-well, this may sound odd, but it'sMickey Rooney. Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy's freck­led madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-Iosing-my­mind face. Mickey Rooney stares at Rocketman holding a bag of hash­ish, a wet apparition in helmet and cape. Nose level with Mickey Roo­ney's shiny black shoes, Slothrop looks up into the lit room behind-seessomebody looks a bit like Churchill, lotta dames in evening gowns cutso low that even from this angle you can see more tits than they got atMinsky's . . . and maybe, maybe he even gets a glimpse of that Presi­dent Truman. He knows he is seeing Mickey Rooney, though MickeyRooney, wherever he may go, will repress the fact that he ever saw Slo­throp. It is an extraordinary moment. Slothrop feels he ought to saysomething, but his speech centers have failed him in a drastic way.Somehow, "Hey, you're Mickey Rooney," seems inadequate. So theystay absolutely still, victory's night blowing by around them, and thegreat in the yellow electric room scheming on oblivious.
Slothrop breaks it first: puts a finger to his mouth and scuttles away,back around the villa and down to the shore, leaving Mickey Rooneywith his elbows on that railing, still watching.Back around the wire, avoiding sentries, close to the water's edge,swinging the ditty bag by its drawstring, some vague idea in his headnow of finding another boat and just rowing back up that Havel-sure!Why not? It isn't till he hears distant conversation from another villathat it occurs to him he might be straying into the Russian part of thecompound.

"Hmm," opines Slothrop, "well in that case I had better-"Here comes that wiener again. Shapes only a foot away-they mighthave risen up out of the water. He spins around, catches sight of a
382

:� st
"Ye,

)ilie
,fee



A soft night, smeared full of golden stars, the kind of night
back on the

pampas that Leopoldo Lugones liked to write
about. The U-boat rocks

quietly on the surface. The only sounds are the chug
of the "billy-goat,"

�utting in now and then below decks, pumping
out the bilges, and El

Nato back on the fantail with his guitar, playing Buenos Aires tristes

ey Roo· and milongas. Belaustegui is down working
on the generator. Luz and

O-leel Felipe are asleep.
\\]lCut By the 20 mm mounts, Graciela Imago

Portales lounges wistfully. In

y�otat her day she was the urban idiot of B.A., threatening nobody,
friends

t Prell·
' with everybody across the spectrum, from Cipriano Reyes,

who inter-

�licKe,v vened for her once, to Accion Argentina,
which she worked for before it

\I'�h got busted. She was a particular favorite of
the literati. Borges is said to

have dedicated a poem to her CEllaberinto de tu
incertidumbrel Me

trama con la disquietante luna ... ").
The crew that hijacked this U-boat are here out of all

kinds of Argen­
tine manias. El Nato goes around talking in rqth-century gaucho slang

-cigarettes are "pitos," butts are "puchos," it isn't
cafia he drinks but

"la tacuara," and when he's drunk he's "mamao."
Sometimes Felipe has

to translate for him. Felipe is a difficult young poet with any
number of

unpleasant enthusiams, among them romantic
and unreal notions about

the gauchos. He is always sucking up to El
Nato. Belaustegui, acting

ship's engineer, is from Entre Rios, and a positivist
in the regional tradi-

sure! tion. A pretty good knife-hand for a prophet
of science too, which is one

eni�a reason El Nato hasn't made a try yet
for the godless Mesopotamian Bol-

ofilie shevik. It is a strain on
their solidarity, but then it's only one of several.

Luz is currently with Felipe, though she's supposed
to be Squalidozzi's

girl-after Squalidozzi disappeared on his trip
to Zurich she took up

mi�nt with the poet
on the basis of a poignant recitation of Lugones's "Pavos

t of a Reales,"
one balmy night lying to off Matosinhos. For this crew,

nostal-

383

star�

Apple
are ac·

ughin&
y ni�nt
insioea
e for�et

broad, clean-shaven face, hair combed lionlike straight back, glimmer­
ing steel teeth, eyes black and soft as that Carmen

Miranda's->

"Yes," no least accent to his English whispering, "you were followed
all the way." Others have grabbed Slothrop's arms. High in the left

one

he feels something sharp, almost painless, very familiar.
Before his

throat can stir, he's away, on the Wheel, clutching in terror to
the dwin­

dling white point of himself, in the first windrush of anaesthesia,
hov­

ering coyly over the pit of Death....

o 0 0 0 0 0 0



gia is like seasickness: only the hope of dying from it is keeping them
alive.

Squalidozzi did show up again though, in Bremerhaven. He had just
been chased across what was left of Germany by British Military Intelli­
gence, with no idea why.

"Why didn't you go to Geneva, and try to get through to us?"
"I didn't want to lead them to Ibargiiengoitia. I sent someone else."
"Who?" Belaustegui wanted to know.
"I never got his name." Squalidozzi scratched his shaggy head.

"Maybe it was a stupid thing to do."
"No further contact with him?"
"None at all."

"They'll be watching us, then," Belaustegui sullen. "Whoever he is,
he's hot. You're a fine judge of character."

"What did you want me to do: take him to a psychiatrist first? Weigh
options? Sit around _for a few weeks and think about it?"

"He's right," EI Nato raising a large fist. "Let women do their think­
ing, their analyzing. A man must always go forward, looking Life di­
rectly in the face."

"You're disgusting," said Graciela Imago Portales. "You're not a man,
you're a sweaty horse."

"Thank you," EI Nato bowing, in all gaucho dignity.
Nobody was yelling. The conversation in the steel space that nightwas full of quiet damped ss and palatal ys, the peculiar, reluctant poign­

ancy of Argentine Spanish, brought along through years of frustrations,
self-censorship, long roundabout evasions of political truth-of bringingthe State to live in the muscles of your tongue, in the humid intimacyjust inside your lips . . . pero che, no sos argentino. . . .In Bavaria, Squalidozzi was stumbling through the outskirts of a
town, only minutes ahead of a Rolls Royce with a sinister dome in the
roof, green Perspex you couldn't see through. It was just after sunset.All at once he heard gunshots, hoofbeats, nasal and metallic voices in
English. But the quaint little town seemed deserted. How could this be?
He entered a brick labyrinth that had been a harmonica factory.Splashes of bell-metal lay forever unrung in the foundry dirt. Against ahigh wall that had recently been painted white, the shadows of horsesand their riders drummed. Sitting watching, from workbenches and
crates, were a dozen individuals Squalidozzi recognized right away asgangsters. Cigar-ends glowed, and molls whispered back and forth inGerman. The men ate sausages, ripping away the casings with whiteteeth, well cared for, that flashed in the light from the movie. They

384

/



were sporting the Caligari gloves which now enjoy a summer vogue in
the Zone: bone white, except for the four lines in deep violet fanning up
each gloveback from wrist to knuckles. All wore suits nearly as light-col­
ored as the teeth. It seemed extravagant to Squalidozzi, after Buenos
Aires and Zurich. The women crossed their legs often: they were tense
as vipers. In the air was a grassy smell, a smell of leaves burning, that
was strange to the Argentine who, terminally homesick, had only the
smell of freshly brewed mate after a bitter day at the racetrack to con­
nect it with. Crowned window frames gave out on the brick factory
courtyard where summer air moved softly. The filmlight flickered blue
across empty windows as if it were breath trying to produce a note. The

images grew blunt with vengeance. "Yay!" screamed all the zootsters,
white gloves bouncing up and down. Their mouths and eyes were as
wide as children's.

The reel ended, but the space stayed dark. An enormous figure in a
white zoot suit stood, stretched, and ambled right over to where Squali­
dozzi was crouching, terrified.

'They after you, amigo?"
"Please-"

amm, "No, no. Come on. Watch with us. It's a Bob Steele. He's a good old

boy. You're safe in here." For days, as it turned out, the gangsters had
known Squalidozzi was in the neighborhood: they could infer to his

ni�nt path, though he himself was invisible to them, by the movements of the

�i�· police, which were not. Blodgett Waxwing-for it was he-used
the

analogy of a cloud chamber, and the vapor trail a high-speed particle
leaves....

"I don't understand."

them

heaa,

r he�

trunK·
"fern·

"Not sure I do either, pal. But we have to keep an eye on everything,
and right now all the hepcats are going goofy over something called 'nu­
clear physics.'

"

After the movie, Squalidozzi was introduced to Gerhardt von Coll,
also known by his nom de pegre, "Der Springer." Seems von Coll's peo­
ple and Waxwing's were in the course of a traveling business confer­
ence, rumbling the roads of the Zone in convoy, changing trucks and
busses so often there was no time for real sleep, only cat-naps-in the
middle of the night, the middle of a field, no telling when, you'd have to

pile out, switch vehicles and take off again along another road. No desti-

I'a)'� nations,
no fixed itinerary. Most of the transportation was furnished

rtll in through the expertise of veteran automotive jobber Edouard
Sank-

white twolke, who could hot-wire anything on wheels or caterpillar
tracks-

Tner ., even packed around a
custom-built ebony case full of the rotor arms,

385



each in its velvet recess, to every known make, model, and year, in case
the target's owner had removed that vital part.

Squalidozzi and von Coll hit it off right away. This film director
turned marketeer had decided to finance all his future movies out of his
own exorbitant profits. "Only way to be sure of having final cuts,
�verdad? Tell me, Squalidozzi, are you too pure for this? Or could your
anarchist project use a little help?"

"It would depend what you wanted from us."
"A film, of course. What would you like to do? How about Martin

Fierro?"

Keep the customer happy. Martin Fierro is not just the gaucho hero
of a great Argentine epic poem. On the U-boat he is considered an anar­
chist saint. Hernandez's poem has figured in Argentine political think­
ing for years now-everybody's had his own interpretation, quotingfrom it often as vehemently as politicians in rqth-century Italy used to
from I Promessi Sposi. It goes back to the old basic polarity in Argen­
tina: Buenos Aires vs. the provinces, or, as Felipe sees it, central govern­
ment vs. gaucho anarchism, of which he has become the leading theore­
tician. He has one of these round-brim hats with balls hanging from it,he has taken to lounging in the hatchways, waiting for Graciela-"Good
evening, my dove. Haven't you got a kiss for the Gaucho Bakunin?"

"You look more like a Gaucho Marx," Graciela drawls, and leaves
Felipe to _go back to the treatment he's working on for von Coll,
using El Nato's copy of Martin Fierro, which has long been thumbed
i!lto separate loose pages, and smells of horses, each of whose names El
Nato, tearfully rnamao, can tell you....

A shadowed plain at sundown. An enormous flatness. Camera angle iskept low. People coming in, slowly, singly or in small groups, workingtheir way across the plain, in to a settlement at the edge of a little river.
Horses, cattle, fires against the growing darkness. Far away, at the hori­
zon, a solitary figure on horseback appears, and rides in, all the way in,as the credits come on. At some point we see the guitar slung on hisback: he is a payador, a wandering singer. At last he dismounts and goesto sit with the people at the fire. After the meal and a round of cafia he
reaches for his guitar and begins to strum his three lowest strings, thebordona, and sing:

.fu
!t

,\ll

\\'�

Aqui me pongo a cantar
al com pas de la viguela,
que el hombre que 10 desvela
una pena estrordinaria,

I



nc�

irector
tofnB
I cu�
Id }'our

.\farll�

romil.
"GooJ

n�le�
orb��
rirer. •

e �on·
'ar i�,

onM

O�f*1
na �e

,ilie.

como la ave solitaria

con el cantar se consuela.

So, as the Gaucho sings, his story unfolds-a montage of his early life
on the estancia. Then the army comes and conscripts him. Takes him

out to the frontier to kill Indians. It is the period of General Boca's cam­

paign to open the pampas by exterminating the people who live there:

turning the villages into labor camps, bringing more of the country
under the control of Buenos Aires. Martin Fierro is soon sick of it. It's

against everything he knows is right. He deserts. They send out a posse,
and he talks the sergeant in command over to his side. Together they
flee across the frontier, to live in the wilderness, to live with the Indians.

That's Part I. Seven years later, Hernandez wrote a Return of Martin
Fierro, in which the Gaucho sells out: assimilates back into Christian so­

ciety, gives up his freedom for the kind of constitutional
Gesellschaft

being pushed in those days by Buenos Aires. A very moral ending, but

completely opposite to the first.
"What should I do?" von Coll seems to want to know. "Both parts, or

just Part I?"
"Well," begins Squalidozzi.
"I know what you want. But I might get better mileage out of two

movies, if the first does well at the box office. But will it?"

"Of course it will."

"Something that anti-social?"
"But it's everything we believe in," Squalidozzi protests.
"But even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out, you know. That's

how things are."
That's how Gerhardt von Coll is, anyway. Graciela knows the man:

there are lines of liaison, sinister connections of blood and of wintering
at Punta del Este, through Anilinas Alemanas, the IG branch in Buenos

Aires, on through Spottbilligfilm AG in Berlin (another IG outlet) from
whom von Coll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially
on the peculiar and slow-moving "Emulsion J," invented by Laszlo

Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to
render

the human skin transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the
face just beneath the surface. This emulsion was used extensively

in von

Coll's immortal Alpdriicken, and may even come to figure in Martin
Fierro. The only part of the epic that really has von Coll fascinated is

a

singing-duel between the white gaucho and the dark EI
Moreno. It

seems like an interesting framing device. With Emulsion J he could dig
beneath the skin colors of the contestants, dissolve back and forth be-



tween J and ordinary stock, like sliding in and out of focus, or wipe­how he loved wipes! from one to the other in any number of clever
ways. Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone,
leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the
phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot last winter in England for
Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a con­
trolled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has some­
how brought them into being. "It is my mission," he announces to
Squalidozzi, with the profound humility that only a German movie di­
rector can summon, "to sow in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical
moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My images, some­how, have been chosen for incarnation. What I can do for the Schwarz­
kommando I can do for your dream of pampas and sky. . . . I can takedown your fences and your labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to theGarden you hardly remember.... "

His madness clearly infected Squalidozzi, who then eventually re­turned to the U-boat and infected the others. It seemed what they hadbeen waiting for. "Africans!" daydreamed the usually all-business Be­
laustegui at a staff meeting. "What if it's true? What if we've reallycome back, back to the way it was before the continents drifted apart?""Back to Gondwanaland," whispered Felipe. "When Rio de la Plata
was just opposite South-West Africa . . . and the mesozoic refugeestook the ferry not to Montevideo, but to Liideritzbucht.... "

The plan is to get somehow to the Liineburg Heath and set up a smallestancia. Von Coll is to meet them there. By the gun-mounts tonight,Graciela Imago Portales dreams. Is von Coll a compromise they can tol­erate? There are worse foundations than a film. Did Prince Potemkin'sfake villages survive Catherine's royal progress? Will the soul of theGaucho survive the mechanics of putting him into light and sound? Orwill someone ultimately come by, von Coll or another, to make a PartII, and dismantle the dream?
Above and beyond her the Zodiac glides, a north-hemisphere arrayshe never saw in Argentina, smooth as an hour-hand.... Suddenly �there's a long smash of static out of the P.A., and Belaustegui is scream- I<i�ing, "Der Aal! Der Aal!" The eel, wonders Graciela, the eel? Oh, yes, mlthe torpedo. Ah, Belaustegui is as bad as El Nato, he feels his own weird I�ajobligation to carry on in German submariner slang, it is just precisa­mente a seagoing Tower of Babel here-the torpedo? why is he scream­ing about the torpedo?

For the good reason that the U-boat has just appeared on the radarscreen of the U.S.S. fohn E. Badass (smile, U-boat!), as a "skunk" or un-
388

I



aeon·

alm�

oni�n!.
antol·
mhn')
oftne

na:Or I
a Part

arra,v
ddenl,v
ream·

n,}e), •
werra

reella·

ream·

radar
or un·

identified pip, and the Badass, in
muscular postwar reflex, is now

lunging in at flank speed. Reception tonight
is perfect, the green return

"fine-grained as a baby's skin," confirms Spyros ("Spider") Telangiec­

stasis, Radarman znd Class. You can see
clear out to the Azores. It is a

mild, fluorescent summer evening on the sea.
But what's this on the

screen now, moving fast, sweep by sweep, broken as a drop
of light

from the original pip, tiny but unmistakable, in
toward the unmoving

center of the sweep, closer now-

"Bakerbakerbaker!" hollers somebody down in Sonar, loud and

scared, over the phones. It means hostile torpedo
on the way. Coffee

messes go crashing, parallel rulers and
dividers sliding across the glass

top of the dead-reckoning
tracer as the old tin can goes heeling over

around onto an evasion pattern that was already obsolete during
the

Coolidge administration.
Der Aal's pale tunnel of wake is set to intersect

the Badass's desper­

ate sea-squirm about midships. What
intervenes is the drug Oneirine, as

the hydrochloride. The machine from
which it has emerged is the coffee

urn in the mess hall of the John E. Badass. Playful
Seaman Bodine­

none other-has seeded tonight's grounds with a massive
dose of Laszlo

Jamf's celebrated intoxicant, scored
on Bodine's most recent trip to Ber­

lin.
The property of time-modulation peculiar

to Oneirine was one of the

first to be discovered by investigators. "It is experienced,"
writes Shetz­

line in his classic study, "in a subjective sense . . .
uh ... well. Put it

this way. It's like stuffing wedges of
silver sponge, right, into, your

brain!" So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight,
the two fatal courses

do intersect in space, but not in
time. Not nearly in time, heh heh. What

Behiustegui fired his torpedo at was a
darkrust old derelict, carried pas­

sively by currents and wind, but bringing
to the night something of the

skull: an announcement of metal emptiness, of shadow,
that has

spooked even stronger positivists
than Belaustegui. And what passed

into visual recognition from the small speeding pip
on the Badass's

radar screen proved to be a corpse, dark in color, perhaps
a North Afri­

can, which the crew on the destroyer's aft 3-inch gun
mount spent half

an hour blowing to pieces as the gray warship
slid by at a safe distance,

fearful of plague.
Now what sea is this you have crossed, exactly, and

what sea is it you

have plunged more than once to the
bottom of, alerted, full of adren­

alin, but caught really, buffaloed under
the epistemologies of these

threats that paranoid you so down and out, caught
in this steel pot, soft­

ening to devitaminized mush
inside the soup-stock of your own words,



your waste submarine breath? It took the Dreyfus Affair to get the Zion­
ists out and doing" finally: what will drive you out of your soup-kettle?
Has it already happened? Was it tonight's attack and deliverance? Will
you go to the Heath, and begin your settlement, and wait there for your
Director to come?

Under a tall willow tree beside a canal, in a jeep, in the shade, sit
Tchitcherine and his driver Dzabajev, a teenage Kazakh dope fiend
with pimples and a permanently surly look, who combs his hair like the
American crooner Frank Sinatra, and who is, at the moment, frowning
at a slice of hashish and telling Tchitcherine, "Well, you should have
taken more than this, you know."

"I only took what his freedom is worth to him," explains Tchitcher­
ine. "Where's that pipe, now?"

"How do you know what his freedom is worth to him? You know
what I think? I think you're going a little Zone-happy out here." This
Dzabajev is more of a sidekick, really, than a driver, so he enjoys immu­
nity, up to a point, in questioning Tchitcherine's wisdom.

"Look, peasant, you read the transcript in there. That man is one un­
happy loner. He's got problems. He's more useful running around the
Zone thinking he's free, but he'd be better off locked up somewhere. He
doesn't even know what his freedom is, much less what it's worth. So I
get to fix the price, which doesn't matter to begin with."

"Pretty authoritarian," sneers young Dzabajev. "Whore's the
matches?"

It's sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. He feels that, in any nor­
mal period of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up
in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre-not to mention the sort of per­
sonality disorder-that he admires. When he was a little boy, back in
Leningrad, Tchitcherine's mother sewed by hand a costume for him to .'�I
wear in a school entertainment. Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute
he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. ';\1
He was the wolf.

:;]
The Sodium Amytal session nags at the linings of Tchitcherine's brain �

as if the hangover were his own. Deep, deep--further than politics, ']1than sex or infantile terrors . . . a plunge into the nuclear blackness. i�1
. Black runs all through the transcript: the recurring color black.
390

o 0 0 0 0 0 0



Or your

Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkom­
mando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerat. And he also coupled
"schwarz-" with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that
came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. . . . The new
coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper
than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop's Blackwords only appear
to flower separately? Or has he by way of the language caught the Ger­
man mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, ana­
lyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bring­
ing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established
nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist
whose molecules are words. . . .

Well, the man is a puzzle. When Geli Tripping first sent word of his

presence in the Zone, Tchitcherine was only interested enough to keep
a routine eye on him, along with the scores of others. The only strange
item, which grew stranger as surveillance developed, was that he
seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded, tagged, dis­
covered, or liberated a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence. He

reports neither to SPOG, CIOS, BAFO, TI, nor any American
counter­

part-indeed, to no known Allied office. Yet he is one of the Faithful:
the scavengers now following industriously the fallback routes of A4
batteries from the Hook of Holland all across Lower Saxony. Pilgrims
along the roads of miracle, every bit and piece a sacred relic, every
scrap of manual a verse of Scripture.

But the ordinary hardware doesn't interest Slothrop. He is holding
out, saving himself for something absolutely unique. Is it the Black­
rocket? Is it the ooooo? Enzian is looking for it, and for the mysterious
Schwarzgerat. There is a very good chance that Slothrop, driven by his
Blackphenomenon, responding to its needs though they be hidden from
him, will keep returning, cycle after cycle, to Enzian, until the mission
is resolved, the parties secured, the hardware found. It's a strong hunch:

nothing Tchitcherine will ever put into writing. Operationally he's
alone as Slothrop is out here-reporting, if and when, direct to Malen­
kov's special committee under the Council of People's Commissars (the
TsAGI assignment being more or less a cover). But Slothrop is his boy.
He'll be followed, all right. If they lose him why they'll find him again.
Too bad he can't be motivated personally to go get Enzian. But
Tchitcherine is hardly fool enough to think that all Americans are as

easy to exploit as Major Marvy, with his reflexes about blackness. . . .
It's a shame. Tchitcherine and Slothrop could have smoked hashish

ade, �it
enena
like the

hitcher·

brain
litic�,

Knesl,

black
391



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

together, compared notes on Geli and other girls of the ruins. He could �I'�r
have sung to the American songs his mother taught him, Kiev lullabies, ('rno
tarlight, lovers, white blossoms, nightingales. . . . ,\

"Next time we run across that Englishman," Dzabajev looking curi- m�t
ously at his hands on the steering-wheel, "or American, or whatever he �rr�
is, find out, will you, where he got this shit?" It'la

"Make a note of that," orders Tchitcherine. They both start cackling 11re
insanely there, under the tree. �eaa,

llie�
wn

Slothrop comes to in episodes that fade in and out of sleep, measured
and serene exchanges in Russian, hands at his pulse, the broad green
back of someone just leaving the room .... It's a white room, a perfect
cube, though for a while he can't recognize cubes, walls, lying horizon­
tal, anything too spatial. Only the certainty that he's been shot up yet
again with that Sodium Amytal. That feeling he knows.

He's on a cot, still in Rocketman garb, helmet on the floor down next
to the ditty bag of hash-oh-oh. Though it requires superhuman cou­
rage in the face of doubts about whether or not he can really even
move, he manages to flop over and check out that dope. One of the tin­
foil packages looks smaller. He spends an anxious hour or two undoing
the top to reveal, sure enough, a fresh cut, raw green against the muddy
brown of the great chunk. Footsteps ring down metal stairs outside, and
a heavy door slides to below. Shit. He lies in the white cube, feeling
groggy, feet crossed hands behind head, doesn't care especially to go
anyplace.... He dozes off and dreams about birds, a close flock of
snow buntings, blown in a falling-leaf of birds, among the thickly falling
snow. It's back in Berkshire. Slothrop is little, and holding his father's
hand. The raft of birds swings, buffeted, up, Sideways through the
storm, down again, looking for food. "Poor little guys," sez Slothrop,
and feels his father squeeze his hand through its wool mitten. Broderick
smiles. "They're all right. Their hearts beat very, very fast. Their blood
and their feathers keep them warm. Don't worry, son. Don't
worry....

"

Slothrop wakes again to the white room. The quiet. Raises
his ass and does a few feeble bicycle exercises, then lies slapping on new
flab that must've collected on his stomach while he was out. There is an
invisible kingdom of flab, a million cells-at-Iarge, and they all know who
he is-soon as he's unconscious, they start up, every one, piping in high
horrible little Mickey Mouse voices, hey fellas! hey c'mon, let's all go

392



'ng tun.
teverlli

over to Slothrop's, the big sap ain't doing anything but laying on his ass,
c'rnon, oboy! "Take that," Slothrop mutters, "a-and that!"

Arms and legs apparently working, he gets up groaning, puts his hel­
met on his head, grabs the ditty bag and leaves by the door, which shud­
ders all over, along with the walls, when he opens it. Aha! Canvas flats.
It's a movie set. Slothrop finds himself in a dilapidated old studio, dark
except where yellow sunlight comes through small holes in the over­
head. Rusted catwalks, creaking under his weight, black burned-out
klieg lights, the fine netting of spider webs struck to graphwork by the
thin beams of sun. . . . Dust has drifted into corners, and over the re­

mains of other sets: phony-gemiitlich love nests, slant-walled and palm­
crowded nightclubs, papier-rnache Wagnerian battlements, tenement
courtyards in stark Expressionist white/black, built to no human scale,
all tapered away in perspective for the rigid lenses that stared here
once. Highlights are painted on to the sets, which is disturbing to Slo­
throp, who keeps finding these feeble yellow streaks, looking up sharply,
then all around, for sources of light that were never there, getting more
agitated as he prowls the old shell, the girders 50 feet overhead almost
lost in shadows, tripping over his own echoes, sneezing from the dust he
stirs. The Russians have pulled out all right, but Slothrop isn't alone in
here. He comes down a metal staircase through shredded webs, angry
spiders and their dried prey, rust crunching under his soles, and at the
bottom feels a sudden tug at his cape. Being still a little foggy from that
injection, he only flinches violently. He is held by a gloved hand, the
shiny kid stretched over precise little knuckles. A woman in a black Pa­
risian frock, with a purple-and-yellow iris at her breast. Even damped
by the velvet, Slothrop can feel the shaking of her hand. He stares into
eyes rimmed soft as black ash, separate grains of powder on her face
clear as pores the powder missed or was taken from by tears. This is
how he comes to meet Margherita Erdmann, his lightless summer
hearth, his safe-passage into memories of the Inflationszeit stained with
dread-his child and his helpless Lisaura.

She's passing through: another of the million rootless. Looking for her

daughter, Bianca, bound east for Swinemiinde, if the Russians and Poles
will let her. She's in Neubabelsberg on a sentimental side-trip-hasn't
seen the old studios in years. Through the twenties and thirties she
worked as a movie actress, at Templehof and Staaken too, but this place
was always her favorite. Here she was directed by the great Gerhardt
von Coll through dozens of vaguely pornographic horror movies. "I
knew he was a genius from the beginning. 1 was only his creature."
Never star material, she admits freely, no Dietrich, nor vamp it la Bri-

393



gitte Helm. A touch of whatever it was they wanted, though-they (Slo­
throp: "They?" Erdmann: "I don't know.... ") nicknamed her the
Anti-Dietrich: not destroyer of men but doll-languid, exhausted.
"I watched all our films," she recalls, "some of them six or seven times. I
never seemed to move. Not even my face. Ach, those long, long gauze
close-ups . . . it could have been the same frame, over and over. Even
running away-I always had to be chased, by monsters, madmen, crimi­
nals-still 1 was so-" bracelets flashing-"stolid, so ... monumental.
When 1 wasn't running 1 was usually strapped or chained to something.
Come. I'll show you." Leading Slothrop now to what's left of a torture
chamber, wooden teeth snapped from its rack wheel, plaster masonry
peeling and chipped, dust rising, dead torches cold and lopsided in their
sconces. She lets wood chains, most of the silver paint worn away now,
slither clattering through her kid fingers. "This was a set for Alpdriicken.
Gerhardt in those days was still all for exaggerated lighting." Silver-gray
collects in the fine wrinkles of her gloves as she dusts off the rack, and
lies down on it. "Like this," raising her arms, insisting he fasten the tin
manacles to her wrists and ankles. "The light came from above and
below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain's and
Abel's, Gerhardt told us. It was at the height of his symbolist period.
Later on he began to use more natural light, to shoot more on location."
They went to Paris, Vienna. To Herrenchiemsee, in the Bavarian Alps.
Von Coll had dreamed of making a film about Ludwig II. It nearly gothim blacklisted. The rage then was all for Frederick. It was considered
unpatriotic to say that a German ruler could also be a madman. But the
gold, the mirrors, the miles of Baroque ornament drove von Gall himself
a little daft. Especially those long corridors.... "Corridor metaphys­ics," is what the French call this condition. Oldtime corridor hepcatswill chuckle fondly at descriptions of von Gall, long after running out offilm, still dollying with a boobish smile on his face down the golden vis­tas. Even on orthochromatic stock, the warmth of it survived in black
and white, though the film was never released, of course. Vas Wiitend
Reich, how could they sit still for that? Endless negotiating, natty little
men with Nazi lapel pins trooping through, interrupting the shooting,walking facefirst into the glass walls. They would have accepted any­thing for "Reich," even "Konigreich," but von Gall stood fast. He
walked a tightrope. To compensate he started immediately on Good So­ciety, which it's said delighted Goebbels so much he saw it three times,
giggling and punching in the arm the fellow sitting next to him, who
may have been Adolf Hitler. Margherita played the lesbian in the cafe,"the one with the monocle, who's whipped to death at the end by the

394

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transvestite, remember?" Heavy legs in silk stockings shining now with
a hard, machined look, slick knees sliding against each other as the
memory moves in, exciting her. Slothrop too. She smiles up at his
tautening deerskin crotch. "He was beautiful. Both ways, it didn't mat­
ter. You remind me of him a little. Especially . . . those boots. . . .
Good Society was our second film, but this one," this one? "Alpdrucken,
was our first. I think Bianca is his child. She was conceived while we

were filming this. He played the Grand Inquisitor who tortured me. Ah,
we were the Reich's Sweethearts-Greta Erdmann and Max Schlepzig,
Wonderfully Together-"

"Max Schlepzig," repeats Slothrop, goggling, "quit fooling. Max
Schlepzigj"

"It wasn't his real name. Erdmann wasn't mine. But anything with
Earth in it was politically safe-Earth, Soil, Folk . . . a code. Which
they, staring, knew how to decipher.... Max had a very Jewish name,
Something-sky, and Gerhardt thought it more prudent to give him a
new one."

"Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name me Max
Schlepzig." He shows her the pass he got from Saure Bummer.

She gazes at it, then at Slothrop briefly. She's begun to tremble again.
Some mixture of desire and fear. "I knew it."

"Knew what?"

Looking away, submissive. "Knew he was dead. He disappeared in
'38. They've been busy, haven't They?"

Slothrop has picked up, in the Zone, enough about European pass-
�l port-psychoses to want to comfort her. "This is forged. The name's just
tar�!} a random alias. The guy who made it probably remembered Schlepzig

he��� from one of his movies."

�out:. "Random." A tragic, actressy smile, beginnings
of a double chin, one

oenl1 knee drawn up as far as these leg irons will let her. "Another fairy-tale
D�(� word. The signature on your card is Max's. Somewhere in Stefania's

house on the Vistula I have a steel box full of his letters. Don't you think

I know that Latin z, crossed engineer-style, the flower he made out of
the g at the end? You could hunt all the Zone for your 'forger.' They
wouldn't let you find him. They want you right here, right now."

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of

solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new
world of flowing shadows, interferences. . . . "'Want me here'? What

.
\l't� for?"

ecrur "For me." Whispering out of scarlet lips, open,
wet.... Hmm. Well,

oJ'tIt there's this hardon,
here. He sits on the rack, leans, kisses her, presently

n,r'

umen�

me�
atort\!

malOw,

in�

395



unlacing his trousers and peeling them down far enough to release his
cock bounding up with a slight wobble into the cool studio. "Put your
helmet on."

"O.K."
((

Are you very cruel?"
"Don't know."
"Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little.

Just for the warmth." Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. He rum­
mages around through inquisitional props, gyves, thumbscrews, leather
harness, before coming up with a miniature cat-o'<nine-tails, a Black
Forest elves' whip, its lacquered black handle carved in a bas-relief
orgy, the lashes padded with velvet to hurt but not to draw blood. "Yes,
that's perfect. Now on the insides of my thighs ....

"

But somebody has already educated him. Something . . . that dreams
Prussian and wintering among their meadows, in whatever cursive lash­
marks wait across the flesh of their sky so bleak, so incapable of any
sheltering, wait to be summoned. . . . No. No-he still says "their," but
he knows better. His meadows now, his sky ... his own cruelty.

All Margherita's chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled
back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the sus­
penders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the pe­
nises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the Sight of this singu­
lar point at the top of a lady's stocking, this transition from silk to bare
skin and suspender! It's easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian
conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth
his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here-there is a
cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical
kisses ... singularities! Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the
crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away thetrack you didn't take ... mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such
as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden ... the edges of steel ra­
zors, always holding potent mystery ... rose thorns that prick us by
surprise . . . even, according to the Russian mathematician Friedmann,the infinitely dense point from which the present Universe expanded .
. . . In each case, the change from point to no-point carries a luminosityand enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw infright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky-just before the last firing­switch closes-watching that singular point at the very top of theRocket, where the fuze is. . . . Do all these points imply, like the Rock­et's, an annihilation? What is that, detonating in the sky above the ca­thedral? beneath the edge of the razor, under the rose?

396

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And what's waiting for Slothrop, what unpleasant surprise, past
the

tops of Greta's stockings here? laddering suddenly,
the pallid streak

flowing downthigh, over intricacies of knee and out of sight.
. . . What

waits past this whine and crack of velvet lashes against
her skin, long

red stripes on the white ground, her moans, the
bruise-colored flower

that cries at her breast, the jingling of the hardware holding her down?

He tries not to tear his victim's stockings, or whip too close to her

stretched vulva, which shivers, unprotected, between thighs agape and

straining, amid movements of muscle erotic, subdued,
"monumental" as

any silver memory of her body on film. She comes once,
then perhaps

again before Slothrop puts the whip down and
climbs on top, covering

her with the wings of his cape, her Schlepzig-surrogate,
his latest re­

minder of Katje . . . and they commence fucking, the old phony
rack

groaning beneath them, Margherita whispering
God how you hurt me

and Ah, Max . . . and just as Slothrop's about to come, the name
of her

child: strained through her perfect teeth, a clear extrusion of pain
that is

not in play, she cries, Bianca....

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

... yes, bitch-yes, little bitch-poor helpless
bitch you're coming

can't stop yourself now I'll whip you again whip
till you bleed. . . .

Thus Pokler's whole front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight's

image of the delicious victim bound
on her dungeon rack, filling the

movie screen-close-ups of her twisting face, nipples under
the silk

gown amazingly erect, making lies of her
announcments of pain-bitch!

she loves it ... and Leni no longer solemn wife, embittered source of

strength, but Margherita Erdmann underneath him,
on the bottom for a

change, as Pokler drives in again, into her again, yes,
bitch, yes. . . .

Only later did he try to pin down the time.
Perverse curiosity. Two

weeks since her last period. He had come out of the Ufa theatre
on the

Friedrichstrasse that night with an erection, thinking like everybody
else only about getting home, fucking somebody, fucking

her into some

submission.. . God, Erdmann was beautiful. How many
other men,

shuffling out again into depression Berlin,
carried the same image back

from Alpdrucken to some drab fat excuse for
a bride? How many

shadow-children would be fathered on Erdmann that night?
It was never a real possibility for Pokler that Leni might get pregnant.

But looking back, he knew that had to be the night, Alpdriicken night,
that Ilse was conceived. They fucked so seldom any more. It was

not

397



hard to pinpoint. That's how it happened. A film. How else? Isn't that
what they made of my child, a film?

He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped
N ikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the
great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and good-night cigarettes.
Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms-white whistling, tears
never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe
paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a
moon newly calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its
mother-glacier. His heart shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expecta­
tion. He's waiting for lIse, for his movie-child, to return to Zwolfkinder,
as she has every summer at this time.

Storks are asleep among two- and three-legged horses, rusted gear­
work and splintered roof of the carousel, their heads jittering with air­
currents and yellow Africa, dainty black snakes a hundred feet below
meandering in the sunlight across the rocks and dry pans. Oversize crys­
tals of salt lie graying, drifted in the cracks of the pavement, in the
wrinkles of the dog with saucer eyes in front of the town hall, the beard
of the goat on the bridge, the mouth of the troll below. Frieda the pig
hunts a new place to nestle and snooze out of the wind. The plaster
witch, wire mesh visible at her breasts and haunches, leans near the
oven, her poke at corroded Hansel in perpetual arrest. Gretel's eyes
lock wide open, never a blink, crystal-heavy lashes batting at the land­
ings of guerrilla winds from the sea.

If there is music for this it's Windy strings and reed sections standing
in bright shirt fronts and black ties all along the beach, a robed organist
by the breakwater-itself broken, crusted with tides-whose languets
and flues gather and shape the resonant spooks here, the candleflame
memories, all trace, particle and wave, of the sixty thousand who
passed, already listed for taking, once or twice this way. Did you ever go
on holiday to Zwolfkinder? Did you hold your father's hand as you rodethe train up from Lubeck, gaze at your knees or at the other children
like you braided, ironed, smelling of bleach, boot-wax, caramel? Did
small-change jingle in your purse as you swung around the Wheel, did
you hide your face in his wool lapels or did you kneel up in the seat,
looking over the water, trying to see Denmark? Were you frightenedwhen the dwarf tried to hug you, was your frock scratchy in the warm­
ing afternoon, what did you say, what did you feel when boys ran bysnatching each other's caps and too busy for you?

She must have always been a child on somebody's list. He onlyavoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disap-
398



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pearance in her drawn face, her
reluctant walk, and if he hadn't needed

her protection so much he might have seen in
time how little she could

protect anything, even their mean
nest. He couldn't talk to her-it was

arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago,
the same idealism, the

adolescent fury-items that had charmed him once-a
woman with

spirit!-but which he came to see as
evidence of her single-mindedness,

even, he could swear, some desire to
be actually destroyed....

She went out to her street-theatre each time expecting
not to come

back, but he never really knew that. Leftists and Jews
in the streets, all

right, noisy, unpleasant to look at,
but the police will keep them chan­

neled, she's in no danger unless she wants to be
.... Later, after she

left, he got a little drunk one forenoon,
a little sentimental, and went

out at last, his first and last time, hoping that
somehow the pressures of

Fate or crowd hydrodynamics might bring them together again.
He

found a street full of tan and green uniforms, truncheons,
leather, pla­

cards fluttering unstable in all modes but longitudinal,
scores of pan­

icked civilians. A policeman aimed a blow at him, but
Pokler dodged,

and it hit an old man instead, some bearded old
unreconstructed geezer

of a Trotskyite . . . he saw the strands
of steel cable under black rubber

skin, a finicky smile on the policeman's
face as he swung, his free hand

grasping his opposite lapel in some
feminine way, the leather glove of

the hand with the truncheon unbuttoned
at the wrist, and his eyes

flinching at the last possible moment,
as if the truncheon shared his

nerves and might get hurt against the old
man's skull. Pokler made it to

a doorway, sick with fear. Other police
came running as some dancers

run, elbows close to sides, forearms thrusting
out at an angle. They used

firehoses to break up the crowd, finally. Women
slid like dolls along the

slick cobbles and on tram rails, the thick gush catching
them by belly

and head, its brute white vector dominating
them. Any of them might

have been Leni. Pokler shivered in his doorway and
watched it. He

couldn't go out in the street.
Later he thought about its texture, the

net­

work of grooves between the paving
stones. The only safety there was

ant-scaled, down and running the streets of
Ant City, bootsoles crashing

overhead like black thunder, you and your crawling neighbors
in traffic

all silent, jostling, heading down the gray darkening
streets. . . . Pokler

knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas
and ordinates of

graphs: finding the points he needed
not by running the curve itself,

not

up on high stone and vulnerability,
but instead tracing patiently the xs

and ys, P (atii), W (m/sec), T, (0 K), moving always by
safe right angles

along the faint lines. . . .
When he began to dream about the

Rocket with some frequency, it

399



would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was
in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid
that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear
in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over the years, as the Rocket
neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched
from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and
range of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of
his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly
along a certain compass-bearing his prayer would be heard: he'd be
safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade. It was the only light in
the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing people
slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. He went to
switch on a light-but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the
room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned every­
thing out, everything. . . .

The A4 operational-at-last hadn't crept up on him. Its coming true
was no climax. That hadn't ever been the point.

"They're using you to kill people," Leni told him, as clearly as shecould. «That's their only job, and you're helping them."
"We'll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend."
She laughed. <Transcend," from Pokler?
"Someday," honestly trying, "they won't have to kill. Borders won't

mean anything. We'll have all outer space....
"

"Oli you're blind," spitting it as she spat his blindness at him everyday, that and "Kadavergehorsamkeit," a beautiful word he can no
longer imagine in any voice but hers. . . .

But really he did not obey like a corpse. He was political, up to apoint-there was politics enough out at the rocket field. The ArmyWeapons Department was showing an ever-quickening interest in theamateur rocketeers of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt, and the VfR had
recently begun making available to the Army records of their experi­ments. The corporations and the universities-the Army said-didn'twant to risk capital or manpower on developing anything as fantastic asa rocket. The Army had nowhere to turn but to private inventors andclubs like the VfR.

"Shit," said Leni. <They're all in on it together. You really can't seethat, can you."
Within the SOCiety, the lines were drawn clear enough. Withoutmoney the VfR was suffocating-the Army had the money, and was al­ready financing them in roundabout ways. The choice was between

400



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between

building what the Army wanted-practical
hardware-or pushing on in

chronic poverty, dreaming of expeditions to Venus.
"Where do you think the Army's getting the money?"

Leni asked.

"What does it matter? Money is money."
"Nor'

Major Weissmann was one of
several gray eminences around

the

rocket field, able to talk, with every appearance of sympathy
and rea­

son, to organized thinker and maniac idealist
alike. All things to all men,

a brand-new military type, part salesman, part scientist. Pokler,
the all­

seeing, the unmoving, must have
known that what went on in the VfR

committee meetings was the same game being played
in Leni's violent

and shelterless street. All his training had encouraged an eye
for analo­

gies-in equations, in theoretical models-yet
he persisted in thinking

the VfR was special, preserved against the time.
And he also knew at

first hand what happens to dreams with no money to support
them. So,

presently, Pokler found that by refusing
to take sides, he'd become

Weissmann's best ally. The major's eyes always changed
when he

looked at Pokler: his slightly prissy face to relax into what
Pokler had

noticed, in random mirrors and display windows,
on his own face when

he was with Leni. The blank look of one
who is taking another for

granted. Weissmann was as sure of
Pokier's role as Pokler was of Leni's.

But Leni left at last. Pokler might not have had the will.

He thought of himself as a practical
man. At the rocket field they

talked continents, encirclements-seeing years
before the General Staff

the need for a weapon to break ententes,
to leap like a chess knight over

Panzers, infantry, even the Luftwaffe.
Plutocratic nations to the west,

communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies.
Not much pas­

sion or ideology. Practical men. While the military
wallowed in victories

not yet won, the rocket engineers
had to think non-fanatically, about

German reverses, German defeat-the
attrition of the Luftwaffe and its

decline in power, the withdrawals
of fronts, the need for weapons with

longer ranges. . . . But others had the money,
others gave the orders­

trying to superimpose their lusts
and bickerings on something that had

its own vitality, on a technologique they'd
never begin to understand. As

long as the Rocket was in research and development,
there was no need

for them to believe in it. Later, as the A4 was going operational,
as they

found themselves with a real rocket-in-being, the struggles
for power

would begin in earnest. Pokler could see
that. They were athletic, brain­

less men without vision, without imagination. But they had power,
and

it was hard for him not to think of them as superior,
even while holding

them in a certain contempt.

401

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But Leni was wrong: no one was using him. Pokler was an extensionof the Rocket, long before it was ever built. She'd seen to that. Whenshe left him, he fell apart. Pieces spilled into the Hinterhof, down thedrains, away in the wind. He couldn't even go to the movies. Onlyrarely did he go out after work and try to fish lumps of coal from theSpree. He drank beer and sat in the cold room, autumn light reachinghim after impoverishments and fadings, from gray clouds, off courtyardwalls and drainpipes, through grease-darkened curtains, bled of all hopeby the time it reached where he sat shivering and crying. He cried everyday, some hour of the day, for a month, till a sinus got infected. He wentto bed and sweated the fever out. Then he moved to Kummersdorf, out­side Berlin, to help his friend Mondaugen at the rocket field.
Temperatures, velocities, pressures, fin and body configurations, sta­bilities and turbulences began to slip in, to replace what Leni had runaway from. There were pine and fir forests out the windows in themorning, instead of a sorrowful city courtyard. Was he giving up theworld, entering a monastic order?
One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signsweaved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along likehunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that washis only relapse.
At first he helped out in the propulsion group. No one was specializ­ing yet. That came later, when the bureaus and paranoias moved in, andthe organization charts became plan-views of prison cells. KurtMondaugen, whose field was radio electronics, could come up with so­lutions to cooling problems. Pokler found himself redesigning instru­mentation for measuring local pressures. That came in handy later atPeenemiinde, when they often had to lead over a hundred measuringtubes from a model no more than 4 or 5 centimeters' diameter. Poklerhelped in working out the Halbmodelle solution: bisecting the modellengthwise and mounting it flat-side to the wall of the test chamber,bringing the tubes through that way to all the manometers outside. ABerlin slum-dweller, he thought, knew how to think in half-rations . . .but it was a rare moment of pride. No one could really claim credit100% for any idea, it was a corporate intelligence at work, specializationhardly mattered, class lines even less. The social spectrum ran from vonBraun, the Pruss ian aristocrat, down to the likes of Pokler, who wouldeat an apple in the street-yet they were all equally at the Rocket's 1�mercy: not only danger from explosions or falling hardware, but also itsdumbness, its dead weight, its obstinate and palpable mystery. . . . itIn those days, most of the funding and attention went to the propul- �Qe402



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sion group. Problem was just to get something off the ground without
having it blow up. There were minor disasters-aluminum motor cas­
ings would burn through, some injector designs would set up resonant
combustion, in which the burning motor would try to shriek itself to
pieces-and then, in '34, a major one. Dr. Wahmke decided to mix per­
oxide and alcohol together before injection into the thrust chamber, to
see what would happen. The ignition flame backed up through the con­
duit into the tank. The blast demolished the test stand, killing Dr.
Wahmke and two others. First blood, first sacrifice.

Kurt Mondaugen took it as a sign. One of these German mystics who
grew up reading Hesse, Stefan George, and Richard Wilhelm, ready to
accept Hitler on the basis of Demian-metaphysics, he seemed to look at
fuel and oxidizer as paired opposites, male and female principles uniting
in the mystical egg of the combustion chamber: creation and destruc­
tion, fire and water, chemical plus and chemical minus-

"Valency," Pokler protested, "a condition of the outer shells, that's
all."

"Think about it," said Mondaugen.
There was also Fahringer, an aerodynamics man, who went out in the

pine woods at Peenemiinde with his Zen bow and roll of pressed straw
to practice breathing, draw and loosing, over and over. It seemed rather
rude at a time when his colleagues were being driven insane by what
they called "Folgsamkeitfaktor," a problem with getting the Rocket's
long axis to follow the tangent, at all points, to its trajectory. The
Rocket for this Fahringer was a fat Japanese arrow. It was necessary in
some way to become one with Rocket, trajectory, and target-"not to
will it, but to surrender, to step out of the role of firer. The act is undi­
vided. You are both aggressor and victim, rocket and parabolic path
and ...

"

Pokler never knew what the man was talking about. But
Mondaugen understood. Mondaugen was the bodhisattva here, re­
turned from exile in the Kalahari and whatever light had found him
there, returned to the world of men and nations to carryon in a role
he'd chosen deliberately, but without ever explaining why. In Siidwest
he had kept no journals, written no letters home. There had been an
uprising by the Bondelswaartz in 1922, and general turmoil in the coun­
try. His radio experiments interrupted, he sought refuge, along with a
few score other whites, in the villa of a local landowner named Foppl.
The place was a stronghold, cut off on all sides by deep ravines. After a
few months of siege and debauchery, "haunted by a profound disgust
for everything European," Mondaugen went out alone into the bush,
ended up living with the Ovatjimba, the aardvark people, who are the

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poorest of the Hereros. They accepted him with no questions. Hethought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind,and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least
no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as
the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personalhistory bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow
between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals-sense­data, feelings, memories relocating-are put onto the grid, and modu­late the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing withtime, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity isit possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero."In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?" said Pok­ler.

"Yes, that's good," Mondaugen smiled.
Closest to the zero among them all, perhaps, was the African Enzian,the protege of Major Weissmann. At the Versuchsanstalt, behind hisback, he was known as Weissmann's Monster, probably less out of rac­ism than at the picture the two of them made, Enzian towering a footover Weissmann, who was balding, scholarly, peering up at the Africanthrough eyeglass lenses thick as bottles, skipping now and then to keepup as they stalked over the asphalt and through the labs and offices, En­zian dominating every room and landscape of those early Rocket days.. . . Pokier's clearest memory of him is his first, in the testing room atKummersdorf, surrounded by electric colors-green nitrogen bottles, athick tangle of red, yellow and blue plumbing, Enzian's own copperface with the same kind of serenity that now and then drifted intoMondaugen's-watching in one of the mirrors the image of a rocket en­gine beyond the safety partition: in the stale air of that room snappingwith last-minute anxieties, nicotine craving, unreasonable prayer, En­zian was at peace....

Pokler moved to Peenemiinde in 1937, along with some 90 others.They were invading Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laiddown. Never in his life, not even as a laborer in Berlin, did Pokier workso hard. The vanguard spent the spring and summer converting a littleisland, the Greifswalder Oie, into a testing station: resurfacing road,stringing cable and telephone line, putting up living quarters, latrinesand storage sheds, excavating bunkers, mixing concrete, endlessly steve­doring in crates of tools, bags of cement, drums of fuel. They used anancient ferryboat for cargo runs between the mainland and the Oie.Pokler remembers the worn red plush and scratched lacquer inside thedim cabins, the neglected brightwork, the asthmatic cry of her steam-
404



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whistle, odors of sweat, cigarette smoke and Diesel fuel, the trembling
of arm and leg muscles, the tired joking, the exhaustion toward the end
of each day, his own new calluses struck to gold by the late sun....

The sea was mostly calm and blue that summer, but in the autumn
the weather turned. Rain swept in from the north, the temperature

plunged, wind tore into storage tents, giant waves boomed all night
long. The water was white for fifty meters out from shore. Spray feath­
ered landward off the curls of the big breakers. Pokier, billeted at a
fisherman's cottage, came in from his evening walks behind a fine mask

of salt. Lot's wife. What disaster had he dared to look back on? He

knew.
He reverted that season to childhood, to the wounded dog. During

those wet and solitary walks he brooded about Leni: he concocted sce­
narios in which they would meet again, in some elegant or dramatic set­

ting-ministry' theatre lobby-two or three jeweled and beautiful
women hanging to him, generals and industrialists springing to light his
American cigarettes and listening to his offhand solutions to problems
Leni would only vaguely understand. The most satisfying of these fan­
tasies would come while Pokler was on the toilet-he'd tap his feet, fan­

fares would whisper through his lips as he felt that pleasant anticipa­
tion....

But the burden of his poor Berlin self lingered. He had spoken to it,
listened, probed, and yet it would not dissolve or flee, it persisted, beg­
gar in all the doorways of his life, beseeching silently with eyes, with
hands quite sure of their guiltmaking craft. Busywork at Peenemiinde
and good company at Herr Halliger's inn on the Oie-all marking time
till good firing weather-and Pokler more vulnerable than he'd ever
been. His cold and womanless nights, the card and chess games, the all­
male beer-drinking sessions, the nightmares he had to find his own way
up out of because there was no other hand now

to shake him awake, no­

body to hold him when the shadows came on the window shade-all

caught up with him that November, and maybe he allowed it to. A pro­
tective reflex. Because something scary was happening. Because once or

twice, deep in the ephedrine pre-dawns nodding [a, ja, stimmt, ja, for
some design you were carrying not in but on your head and could feel

bobbing, out past your side-vision, bobbing and balanced almost-he
would become aware of a drifting-away . . . some assumption of Pokler
into the calculations, drawings, graphs, and even what raw hardware
there was . . . each time, soon as it happened, he would panic, and
draw back into the redoubt of waking Pokler, heart pounding, hands
and feet aching, his breath catching in a small voiced hunh- Some-

I .
-_

r ./ II; ( _



thing was out to get him, something here, among the paper. The fear of
extinction named Pokler knew it was the Rocket, beckoning him in. If
he also knew that in something like this extinction he could be free of
his loneliness and his failure, still he wasn't quite convinced.... So he
hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, be­
tween the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation.
Mondaugen saw it all. He could see into Pokier's heart. In his compas­
sion, not surprisingly, he had no free advice for his friend. Pokler would
have to find his own way to his zero signal, his true course.

By '38 the Peenemunde facility was taking shape, and Pokler moved
over to the mainland. With hardly more to go on than Stodda's treatise
on steam turbines, and helpful data now and then frorr universities at
Hannover, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Dresden, the propulsion group were
testing a rocket engine of 1 h tons' thrust, 10 atmospheres' combustion
pressure, and 60 seconds' duration. They were getting exhaust velocities
of 1800 meters per second, but the value they were aiming for was
2000. They called it the magic number, and they meant it literally. As
some gamblers on the stock market know when to place stop orders,
feeling by instinct not the printed numbers but the rates of change,
knowing from first and second derivatives in their skin when to come in,
stay or go, so there are engineering reflexes tuned always to know, at
any moment, what, given the resources, can be embodied in workinghardware-what is «feasible." On the day that a 2000 m/ sec exhaust
became feasible, the A4 itself suddenly came in reach. The danger thenlay in being seduced by approaches that were too sophisticated. No one
was immune. Hardly a designer there, including Pokler, didn't come upwith at least one monster rig, some Gorgon's head writhing with pipes,tubes, complicated folderol for controlling pressures, solenoids on top ofpilot valves on auxiliary valves on backup valves-hundreds of pages onvalve nomenclature were printed as appendices to these weird propos-als, all promising huge pressure differences between the inside of the
chamber and the nozzle exit-beautiful, as long as you didn't care muchabout those millions of moving parts behaving together too reliably. But .Jillto get a dependable working motor, one the military could use in the 100field to kill people, the real engineering problem now was to keep thingsas simple as possible.

:�The model currently being fired was the A3, christened not with l�!champagne, but with flasks of liquid oxygen by the playful technicians. '�tEmphasis had begun to shift from propulsion to guidance. Telemetry onthe flight tests was still primitive. Thermometers and barometers were ���sealed in a watertight compartment with a movie camera. During flights ij�\
406

I



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him in"
befree

, , '�I
Zero, �

the camera photographed the needles swinging on the gauges. After the
flight the film was recovered, and the data played back. Engineers sat
around looking at movies of dials. Meantime Heinkels were also drop­
ping iron models of the Rocket from 20,000 feet. The fall was photo­
graphed by Askania cinetheodolite rigs on the ground. In the daily
rushes you would watch the frames at around 3000 feet, where the
model broke through the speed of sound. There has been this strange
connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of succes­
sive stills to counterfeit movement, for at least two centuries-since

Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to
break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air. And now Pok­
ler was about to be given proof that these techniques had been ex­
tended past images on film, to human lives.

He had returned to his quarters about sundown, too tired or preoccu­
pied to be much affected by the furnace of colors in the flower gardens,
the daily changes to the skyline of the Station, even the absence of noise
today from the testing stands. He smelled the ocean, and could almost
imagine himself as someone who lives year-round at a seaside resort, but
seldom gets to the beach. Now and then, over in Peenemiinde-West, a

fighter plane took off or landed, the motors softened by distance to tran­
quil purring. A late sea-breeze flickered. He had no warning other than
a smile from a colleague who lived a few cubicles away and was coming
down the barracks stairs as Pokler was going up. He entered his own cu­
bicle and saw her sitting on the bed, her toes pointed in next to a flow­
ered carpetbag, skirt pulled over her knees and eyes anxiously, fatally,
looking into his.

"Herr Pokler? I am your-"
"Ilse, Ilse. . . ."
He must have picked her up, kissed her, drawn the curtain. Some

reflex. She was wearing in her hair a ribbon of brown velvet. He remem­
bered her hair as lighter, shorter-but then it does grow, and darken.
He looked slantwise into her face, all his emptiness echoing. The vac­
uum of his life threatened to be broken in one strong inrush of love. He
tried to maintain it with seals of suspicion, looking for resemblances to
the face he'd last seen years ago over her mother's shoulder, eyes still

puffy from sleep angled down across Leni's raincoated back, going out a
door he'd thought closed for good-pretending not to find resem­
blances. Perhaps pretending. Was it really the same face? he'd lost so
much of it over the years, that fat, featureless child's face. . . . He was
afraid now even to hold her, afraid his heart would burst. He said,
"How long have you been waiting?"



"Since lunchtime." She'd eaten in the canteen. Major Weissmann
had brought her up on the train from Stettin, and they had played
che s. Major Weissmann was a slow player, and they hadn't finished the
game. Major Weissmann had bought her sweets, and had asked her to
ay hello and sorry he couldn't stay long enough to see Pokler­

Weissmann? What was this? A blinking, tentative fury grew in Pok­
ler. They must have known everything-all this time. His life was se­
cretless as this mean cubicle, with its bed, commode and reading-light.

So, to stand between him and this impossible return, he had his
anger-to preserve him from love he couldn't really risk. He could set­
tle for interrogating his daughter. The shame he felt was acceptable, the
shame and coldness. But she must have picked it up, for she sat now
very still, except for nervous feet, her voice so subdued he missed parts
of her answers.

They had sent her here from a place in the mountains, where it was
chilly even in summer-surrounded by barbed wire and bright hooded
lights that burned all night long. There were no boys-only girls, moth­
ers, old ladies living in barracks, stacked up in bunks, often two to a pal­
let. Leni was well. Sometimes a man in a black uniform came into the
barracks and Mutti would go away with him, and stay away for several
days. When she came back she didn't want to talk, or even to hug Use
the way she usually did. Sometimes she cried, and asked Use to leave
her alone. Ilse would go off and play with Johanna and Lilli underneath
the barracks next door. They had scooped a hideout there in the dirt,
furnished with dolls, hats, dresses, shoes, old bottles, magazines with
pictures, all found out near the barbed wire, the treasure pile, they
called it, a huge refuse dump that always smoldered, day and night: you
could see its red glow out the window from the top bunk where she
slept with Lilli, nights when Leni was away....

But Pokler was hardly listening, he had the only datum with any
value: that she was somewhere definite, with a location on the map and
authorities who might be contacted. Could he find her again? Fool.
Could he somehow negotiate her release? Some man, some Red, must
have got her into this. . . .

Kurt Mondaugen was the only one he could trust, though Pokierknew before they spoke that the role Mondaugen had chosen would
keep him from helping. "They call them re-education camps. They're
run by the SS. I could talk to Weissmann, but it might not work."

He had known Weissmann in Siidwest. They had shared the months
of siege inside Foppl's villa: Weissmann was one of the people who haddriven Mondaugen, finally, away to live in the bush. But they had found

408



a rapprochement here, among the rockets, either for sunblasted holy­
man reasons it was not for Pokler to understand or because of some

deeper connection which had always been there. . . .

They stood on the roof of one of the assembly buildings, the Oie
across the water six miles away clearly visible, which meant a change in
the weather tomorrow. Steel was being hammered somewhere out in
the sunlight, hammered in cadences, purified as the song of some bird.
Blue Peenemiinde shivered around them in all directions, a dream of

concrete and steel masses reflecting the noon heat. The air rippled like

camouflage. Behind it something else seemed to carryon in secret. At

any moment the illusion they stood on would dissolve and they
would

fall to earth. Pokler stared across the marshes, feeling helpless. "I have
to do something. Don't I?"

"No. You have to wait."

"It's not right, Mondaugen."
"No."
"Wh'at about Ilse? Will she have to go back?"
"I don't know. But she's here now."

So, as usual, Pokler chose silence. Had he chosen something else,
back while there was time, they all might have saved themselves. Even
left the country. Now, too late, when at last he wanted to act,

there was

nothing to act on.
Well, to be honest, he didn't spend much time brooding about past

neutralities. He wasn't that sure he'd outgrown them, anyway.

They took walks, he and Ilse, by the stormy shore-fed ducks,
ex­

plored the pine forests. They even allowed her to watch a launching.
It

was a message to him, but he didn't understand till
later what it meant.

It meant that there was no violation of security: there was no one she

could tell who mattered. The noise of the Rocket ripped at them. For
the first time then she moved close, and held him. He felt that he was

holding on to her. The motor cut off too soon, and the Rocket
crashed

somewhere over in Peenemiinde-West, in Luftwaffe territory. The dirty
pillar of smoke drew the screaming fire engines and truckloads of

work­

ers by in a wild parade. She took in a deep breath, and squeezed
his

hand. "Did you make it do that, Papi?"
"No, it wasn't supposed to. It's supposed to fly in a big curve," mo­

tioning with his hand, the parabola trailing behind encompassing testing
stands, assembly buildings, drawing them together as the crosses priests
make in the air quarter and divide the staring congregations

behind

them....
"Where does it go?"



���/
•• , ••••,--:--

•

• _.A. �� /

"Wherever we tell it to."
"May I fly in it someday? I'd fit inside, wouldn't I?"
She asked impossible questions. "Someday," Pokler told her. "Per­

haps someday to the Moon."
"The Moon ...

"

as if he were going to tell her a story. When none
followed she made up her own. The engineer in the next cubicle had a
map of the Moon tacked to his fiberboard wall, and she spent hours
studying it, deciding where she wanted to live. Passing over the bright
rays of Kepler, the rugged solitude of the Southern Highlands, the spec­tacular views at Copernicus and Eratosthenes, she chose a small prettycrater in the Sea of Tranquillity called Maskelyne B. They would build
a house right on the rim, Mutti and she and Pokler, gold mountains out
one window and the wide sea out the other. And Earth green and blue
in the sky....

Should he have told her what the "seas" of the Moon really were?
Told her there was nothing to breathe? His ignorance frightened him,
his ineptitude as a father. ... Nights in the cubicle, with Ilse curled a
few feet away in a canvas army cot, a little gray squirrel under her blan­
ket, he'd wonder if she wasn't really better off as ward of the Reich.
He'd heard there were camps, but saw nothing sinister in it: he took the
Government at their word, "re-education." I've made such a mess of ev­
erything . . . they have qualified people there . . . trained personnel
. . . they know what a child needs . . . staring up at the electric scatter
from this part of Peenemiinde mapping across his piece of ceiling
priorities, abandoned dreams, favor in the eyes of the master fantasists
in Berlin, while sometimes Ilse whispered to him bedtime stories about
the moon she would live on, till he had transferred silently to a world
that wasn't this one after all: a map without any national borders, inse­
cure and exhilarating, in which flight was as natural as breathing-butI'll fall . . . no, rising, look down, nothing to be afraid of, this time it's
good . . . yes, firmly in flight, it's working . . . yes. . . .

Pokler may be only witnessing tonight-or he may really be part of it.
He hasn't been shown which it is. Look at this. There is about to be ex­
pedited, for Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, his dream of 1865,
the great Dream that revolutionized chemistry and made the IG possi­ble. So that the right material may find its way to the right dreamer, ev­
eryone, everything involved must be exactly in place in the pattern. It
was nice of Jung to give us the idea of an ancestral pool in which every­
body shares the same dream material. But how is it we are each visited
as individuals, each by exactly and only what he needs? Doesn't that
imply a switching-path of some kind? a bureaucracy? Why shouldn't the

410

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IG go to seances? They ought to be quite at home with the
bureaucra­

cies of the other side. Kekule's dream here's being routed now past
points which may arc through the silence, in bright

reluctance to live in­

side the moving moment, an imperfect, a human light, over
here inter­

fering with the solemn binary decisions of these agents, who
are now al­

lowing the cosmic Serpent, in the violet splendor of its scales, shining
that is definitely not human, to pass-without feeling, without

wonder

(after you get a little time in-whatever that means over
here-one of

these archetypes gets to look pretty much like any other, oh you
hear

some of these new hires, the seersucker crowd come in the first day,
"Wow! Hey-that's th-th' Tree 0' Creation! Huh? Ain't it! Je-eepers!"
but they calm down fast enough, pick up the reflexes

for Intent to

Gawk, you know self-criticism's an amazing technique,
it shouldn't

work but it does. . . . Here, here's the rundown on Kekule's problem.
Started out to become an architect, turned out instead to be one of

the

Atlantes of chemistry, most of the organic wing of that useful
edifice

bearing down on top of his head forever-not just
under the aspect of

IG, but of World, assuming that's a distinction you observe, heh,
heh.

. . .
Once again it was the influence of Liebig, the great professor

of

chemistry on whose name-street in Munich
Pokler lived while he at­

tended the T.H. Liebig was at the University of Giessen when
Kekule

entered as a student. He inspired the young man to change his field. So

Kekule brought the mind's eye of an architect over
into chemistry. It

was a critical switch. Liebig himself seems to have occupied the
role of

a gate, or sorting-demon such as his younger contemporary
Clerk Max­

well once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into
one favored

room of the Creation at the expense of everything else (later witnesses

have suggested that Clerk Maxwell intended his
Demon not so much as

a convenience in discussing a thermodynamic idea as a parable
about

the actual existence of personnel like Liebig ... we may gain an indi­

cation of how far the repression had grown by that time, in the degree
to which Clerk Maxwell felt obliged to code his warnings . . .

indeed

some theorists, usually the ones who find sinister meaning
behind even

Mrs. Clerk Maxwell's notorious "It is time to go home, James, you
are

beginning to enjoy yourself," have made
the extreme suggestion that the

Field Equations themselves contain an
ominous forewarning-they cite

as evidence the disturbing intimacy of the Equations with the
behavior

of the double-integrating circuit in the guidance system of
the A4

rocket, the same double-summing of current
densities that led architect

EtzelOlsch to design for architect Albert Speer an underground factory

at Nordhausen with just that symbolic shape . . . ). Young
ex-architect

411



Kekule went looking among the molecules of the time for the hiddenshapes he knew were there, shapes he did not like to think of as realphysical structures, but as "rational formulas," showing the relation­ships that went on in "metamorphoses," his quaint 19th-century way ofsaying "chemical reactions." But he could visualize. He saw the fourbonds of carbon, lying in a tetrahedron-he showed how carbon atomscould link up, one to another, into long chains. . . . But he was stumpedwhen he got to benzene. He knew there were six carbon atoms with ahydrogen attached to each one-but he could not see the shape. Notuntil the dream: until he was made to see it, so that others might be se­duced by its physical beauty, and begin to think of it as a blueprint, abasis for new compounds, new arrangements, so that there would be afield of aromatic chemistry to ally itself with secular power, and findnew methods of synthesis, so there would be a German dye industry tobecome the 1 G. . . .
Kekule dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth,the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness,the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that an­nounces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-re­turning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violatethe Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity"and" earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing fromthe rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tinydesperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity­most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the

process. The System mayor may not understand that it's only buyingtime. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to
anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash toits death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest ofthe World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along thechain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country ina bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiableenough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker, "Goodmorning folks, this is Heidelberg here we're coming into now, you knowthe old refrain, 'I lost my heart in Heidelberg,' well 1 have a friend wholost both his ears here! Don't get me wrong, it's really a nice town, thepeople are warm and wonderful-when they're not dueling. Seriouslythough, they treat you just fine, they don't just give you the key to thecity, they give you the bung-starter!" u.s.w. On you roll, across a coun­tryside whose light is forever changing-castles, heaps of rock, moons ofdifferent shapes and colors come and go. There are stops at odd hours of



the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get
out to stretch

in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the
table under

enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the
an­

cient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps
major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus

is idling, wait­

ing-passengers will now reclaim their seats and
much as you'd like to

stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age
around this quiet

table, it's no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed
uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID

and

travel papers, and it's the wands of enterprise
that dominate tonight

... as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane,
com­

mitted eyes, and you remember then, for a
terrible few heartbeats, that

of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity-but
there is meanwhile this trip to be on ... over your own seat,

where

there ought to be an advertising plaque, is instead a quote
from Rilke:

"Once, only once ...
"

One of Their favorite slogans. No return, no

salvation, no Cycle-that's not what They, nor Their brilliant employee
Kckule, have taken the Serpent to mean. No: what the Serpent

means

is-how's this-that the six carbon atoms of benzene are in
fact curled

around into a closed ring, just like that snake with its tail
in its mouth,

GET IT? "The aromatic Ring we know today," Pokler's old prof,
Laszlo

Jamf, at this point in the spiel removing
from his fob a gold hexagon

with the German forrnee cross in the center, a medal of
honor from IG

Farben, joking, in his lovable-old-fart manner, that
he likes to think of

the cross not as German so much as standing for the tetravalency
of car- f

bon-"but who," lifting his open hands on each beat, like a bandleader,

"who, sent, the Dream?" It is never clear how
rhetorical any of Jamf' s

questions are. "Who sent this new serpent
to our ruinous garden, al­

ready too fouled, too crowded to qualify
as any locus of innocence­

unless innocence be our age's neutral, our silent passing into
the

machineries of indifference-something that Kekule's Serpent had

come to-not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . .
we had been

given certain molecules, certain
combinations and not others . . . we

used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps-but

the Serpent whispered, 'They can be changed,
and new molecules as­

sembled from the debris of the given. . . .' Can anyone tell
me what

else he whispered to us? Come-who
knows? You. Tell me, Pokler-"

His name fell on him like a thunderclap, and of course it
wasn't Prof.­

Dr. Jamf after all, but a colleague
from down the hall who had pulled

reveille duty that morning. Ilse was brushing
her hair, and smiling at

him.

413



His daytime work had started to go better. Others were not so dis­tant, and more apt to look in his eyes. They'd met Use, and beencharmed. If he saw anything else in their faces, he ignored it.Then one evening he returned from the Oie, a little drunk, a littleanxious-elated over a firing the next day, and found his cubicle empty.Isle, her flowered bag, the clothing she usually left strewn on the cot,had all vanished. Nothing left but a wretched sheet of log paper (whichPokler found so useful for taming the terror of exponential curves intothe linear, the safe), the same kind she'd drawn pictures of her Moon­house on. "Papi, they want me back. Maybe they'll let me see youagain. I hope so. I love you. Use."
Kurt Mondaugen found Pokler lying on her cot breathing what heimagined were odors of her hair on the pillow. For a while then he wenta little insane, talked of killing Weissmann, sabotaging the rocket pro­gram, quitting his job and seeking asylum in England. . . . Mondaugensat, and listened to all of it, touched Pokler once or twice, smoked hispipe, till at last, at two or three in the morning, Pokler had talkedthrough a number of unreal options, cried, cursed, punched a hole intohis neighbor's cubicle, through which he heard the man snoring on obli­vious. Cooled by then to a vexed engineer-elitism-"They are fools,they don't even know what sine and cosine are and they're trying to tellme"-he agreed that yes, he must wait, and let them do what theywould do....

"If I set up a meeting with Weissmann," Mondaugen did suggest,"could you be graceful? calm?"
"No. Not with him. . . . Not yet."
"When you think you are ready, let me know. When you're ready,you'll know how to handle it." Had he allowed himself a tone of com­mand? He must have seen how much Pokler needed to be at someone'scommand. Leni had learned to subdue her husband with her face, knewwhat cruel lines he expected of her mouth, what tones of voice heneeded . . . when she left him she left an unemployed servant who'd gowith the first master that called, just a

VICTIM IN A VACUUM!

Nur ... ein ... Op-fer!
Sehr ins Vakuum,

("Won't somebody take advantage of me?")Wird niemand ausnut-zen mich, auch?
("Just a slave with nobody to slave for,")

pI

W�

or

) ab
roD

Qe�
jo�
SO

pIal
lonl
her
slo

wh�
Un
ilie
tos

Irutl
1\



t SO mI.
nd been

Nur ein Sklave, ohne Her-rin, (ya-ta ta-ta)
("A-and who th' heck wants ta be, free?")

Wer zum Teufel die Freiheit, braucht?

(All together now, all you masochists out there, specially
those of you don't have a partner tonight, alone with

those

fantasies that don't look like they'll ever come true-want

you just to join in here with your brothers
and sisters, let

each other know you're alive and sincere, try to break

through the silences, try to reach through
and con­

nect....)

Aw, the sodium lights-aren't, so bright in Berlin,
I go to the bars dear, but nobody's in!
Oh, I'd much rather bee
In a Greek trage-dee,
Than be a VICTIM IN A VACUUM to-nite!

Days passed, much like one another to
Pokler. Identical morning

plunges into a routine dreary as winter now. He
learned to keep an out­

ward calm, at least. Learned to feel the gathering, the moving
toward

war that is unique to weapons programs. At first it
simulates depression

or non-specific anxiety. There may be esophagal spasms
and unrecover­

able dreams. You find you are writing notes to yourself, first thing
in the

morning: calm, reasoned assurances to
the screaming mental case in­

side-I. It is a combination. 1.1 It is a scalar quantity. 1.2. Its negative

aspects are distributed isotropically. 2.
It is not a conspiracy. 2.1 It is

not a vector. 2.11 It is not aimed at anybody. 2.12 It is not aimed
at me

... U.S.w. The coffee begins to taste more and more metallic.
Each

deadline is now a crisis, each is more intense than the last.
Behind this

job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something
terminal,

something growing closer, each day, to
manifestation.... ("The new

planet Pluto," she had whispered long ago, lying
in the smelly dark, her

long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night
as the moon that ruled

her, "Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws.
It moves slowly, so

slowly and so far away . . . but it
will burst out. It is the grim phoenix

which creates its own holocaust . . . deliberate
resurrection. Staged.

Under control. No grace, no interventions by God. Some are calling
it

the planet of National Socialism,
Brunhiibner and that crowd, all trying

to suck up to Hitler now. They don't
know they are telling the literal

truth.... Are you awake? Franz.
. . .")

As war drew closer, the game of priorities and politicking grew
more



��--L__/
---

/,�.,.. -

earnest, Army vs. Luftwaffe, the Weapons Department vs. the Ministryof Munitions, the SS, given their aspirations, vs. everybody else, and
even a simmering discontent that was to grow over the next few yearsinto a palace revolt against von Braun, because of his youth and a num­ber of test failures-though heaven knew, there were always enough ofthose, they were the raw material of all testing-station politics. . . . In OJgeneral, though, the test results grew more and more hopeful. It was im­
possible not to think of the Rocket without thinking of Shicksal, of
growing toward a shape predestined and perhaps a little otherworldly.The crews launched an uncontrolled series of Ass, bringing some ofthem down by parachute, reaching a height of five miles and nearly tothe speed of sound. Though the guidance people had still a long way to u
go, they had by this point switched over to vanes made of graphite, 10brought the yaw oscillations down to five degrees or so, and grown 0measurably happier about the Rocket's stability.

At some point during the winter, Pokler came to feel that he could h
handle a meeting with Weissmann. He found the SS man on guard be- hIhind eyeglasses like Wagnerian shields, ready for unacceptable maxima o�
-anger, accusation, a moment of office-violence. It was like meeting a
stranger. They had not spoken since the days at Kummersdorf, at the
old Raketenflugplatz. In this quarter-hour at Peenemiinde, Pokler
smiled more than he had in the year previous: spoke of his admiration
for Poehlmann's work in devising a cooling system for the propulsion."What about the hot spots?" Weissmann asked. It was a reasonable
question, but also an intirnacy. nilIt came to Pokler that the man didn't give a damn about heating hproblems. This was a game, as Mondaugen had warned-ritualized as rojiu-jitsu. "We've got heat-flow densities," Pokler feeling as he usuallydid when he sang, "on the order of three million kcal/rn-h °C. Regener-ative cooling is the best interim solution right now, but Poehlmann has a till
new approach"-showing him with chalk and slate, trying for the pro-fessional manner-"he feels that if we use a film of alcohol on the inside
of the chamber, we can reduce the heat transfer by a considerableamount."

"You'll be injecting it."
"Correct."
"How much fuel is that going to reroute? How's it going to affect the

engine efficiency?"
Pokler had the figures. "Right now injection is a plumber's nightmare,but with the delivery schedules as they are-"
"What about the two-stage combustion process?"

416

••••••• '"' • ill! •••••••• _.---.......................• ,. • �'-

---II��/--_. - . �� ---- - I �/'
.

__ll11



"Gives us more volume, better turbulence, but there's also a non-iso­

tropic pressure drop, which cuts into our efficiency.... We're trying
any number of approaches. If we could depend on better funding-"

"Ah, Not my department. We could do with a more generous budget
ourselves." They both laughed then, gentleman scientists under a stingy
bureaucracy, suffering together.

Pokler understood that he had been negotiating for his child and for

Leni: that the questions and answers were not exactly code for some­

thing else, but in the way of an evaluation of Pokler personally.
He was

expected to behave a certain way-not just to playa role, but
to live it.

Any deviations into jealousy, metaphysics, vagueness
would be picked

up immediately: he would either be corrected
back on course, or al­

lowed to fall. Through winter and spring the sessions with
Weissmann

became routine. Pokler grew into his new disguise-Prematurely Aged
Adolescent Whiz-often finding that it could indeed take him over,

keeping him longer at reference books and firing data, speaking
lines for

him he could never have planned in advance: gentle, scholarly, rocket­

obsessed language that surprised him.
In late August he had his second visit. It should have

been "Ilse re­

turned," but Pokler wasn't sure. As before, she showed up alone,
unan­

nounced-ran to him, kissed him, called him Papi. But . . .

But her hair, for one thing, was definitely dark brown, and cut
dif­

ferently. Her eyes were longer, set differently, her complexion
less fair.

It seemed she'd grown a foot taller. But at that age, they shoot up
over­

night, don't they? If it was "that age....
"

Even as Pokler embraced

her, the perverse whispering began. Is it the same one?
Have they sent

you a different child? Why didn't you look
closer last time, Pokler?

This time he asked how long they were going to let her stay.
"They'll tell me. And I'll try to let you know."

And would there be

time for him to recalibrate from his little squirrel who dreamed of living
on the Moon to this dark, long-legged, Southern creature,

whose

awkwardness and need of a father were so touching, so clear even to

Pokler, at this their second (or was it first, or third?) meeting?

Hardly any news of Leni. They had been separated,
Ilse said, during

the winter. She'd heard a rumor that her mother
had been moved to a

different camp. So, so. Present a pawn,
withdraw the queen: Weiss­

mann, waiting to see how Pokler would
react. This time he had gone too

far: Pokler laced up his shoes and calmly enough
went out looking for

htmare, the SS man,
cornered him in his office, denounced him before a panel of

kindly, dim governmental figures, the speech eloquently climaxing
as he

threw chessboard and pieces all into Weissmann's arrogantly blinking



"�---�t�/
/

---

/, .. .,. ....

face. . . . Pokler's impetuous, yes, a rebel-but Generaldirektor it's his
kind of fire and honesty we need-

The child had suddenly come into his arms, to kiss him again. Forfree. Pokler forgot his troubles and held her to his heart for a long time,without speaking. . . .
But that night in the cubicle, only breathing-no moon-wishes this

year-from her cot, he was awake wondering, one daughter one impos­tor? same daughter twice? two impostors? Beginning to work out the
combinations for a third visit, a fourth. . . . Weissmann, those behind
him, had thousands of these children available. As the years passed, as
they grew more nubile, would Pokler even come to fall in love with one
-would she reach the king's row that way and become a queen-substi­tute for lost, for forgotten Leni? The Opponent knew that Pokler's sus­
picion would always be stronger than any fears about real incest. . . .
They could make up new rules, to complicate the game indefinitely. cHow could any man as empty as Pokler felt that night ever be flexible cl
enough for that?

p.Kat-it was ridiculous-hadn't he seen her go by from every angle in �ltheir old city rooms? Carried, asleep, crying, crawling, laughing, hun- tl
gry. Often he had come home too tired to make it to the bed, and had e\
lain on the floor with his head under the one wood table, curled, beaten,
wondering if he could even sleep. The first time Ilse noticed, she
crawled over and sat staring at him for a long time. She had never seen
him still, horizontal, with his eyes shut.... He drifted toward sleep.Ilse leaned over and bit him in the leg, as she bit crusts of bread, ciga-
rettes, shoes, anything that might be food. -I'm your father. -You're cI
inert and edible. Pokler screamed and rolled out of the way. Ilse began hIto cry. He was too tired to want to think about discipline. It was Leni hi
finally who calmed her down. hi

He knew all Ilse's cryings, her first attempts at words, the colors of IV
her shit, the sounds and shapes that brought her tranquillity. He oughtto know if this child was his own or not. But he didn't. Too much had
happened between. Too much history and dream. . . .

Next morning his group leader handed Pokler a furlough chit, and a
paycheck with a vacation bonus. No travel restrictions, but a time limit
of two weeks. Translation: Will you come back? He packed some
things, and they got on the train for Stettin. The sheds and assemblybuildings, the concrete monoliths and steel gantries that were the mapof his life flared backward, shadowing into great purplish chunks, iso­lated across the marshland one from another, in parallax away. Wouldhe dare not to come back? Could he think so far ahead?

..

'::._"
"

:
..• _.- , .,.

���



it's h�

ain. Pm

He'd left their destination up to Ilse. She chose
Zwolfkinder, It was

the end of summer, nearly the end of peacetime. The children knew
what was coming. Playing refugee, they crowded the railway carriages,
quieter, more solemn than Pokler had expected. He had to keep fighting
an urge to start babbling each time Ilse's eyes turned from

the window

toward his own. He saw the same thing in all their eyes: he was strange
to them, to her, and growing stranger, and he knew of no way to

reverse

it. . ..

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and
its

many uses. In developing an official version of innocence,
the culture of

childhood has proven invaluable. Games, fairy-tales, legends from his­

tory, all the paraphernalia of make-believe
can be adapted and even

embodied in a physical place, such as at Zwolfkinder, Over the years
it

had become a children's resort, almost a spa. If you were an adult, you
couldn't get inside the city limits without a child

escort. There was a

child mayor, a child city council of twelve.
Children picked up the pa­

pers, fruit peelings and bottles you left in the street,
children gave you

guided tours through the Tierpark, the Hoard
of the Nibelungen, cau­

tioning you to silence during the impressive
re-enactment of Bismarck's

elevation, at the spring equinox of 1871, to prince and imperial
chancel­

lor . . . child police reprimanded you if you were caught alone,
without

your child accompanying.
Whoever carried on the real business of the

town-it could not have been children-they were well hidden.

A late summer, a late, retrospective blooming.... Birds flew every­

where, the sea warmed, the sun shone on into the evenings.
Random

children took your shirt cuff by mistake, and trudged along
for minutes

before discovering you were not their adult, and then
wandered off with

backward smiles. The Glass Mountain twinkled rose and
white in the

hot sun, the elf king and his queen made a royal progress every
noon

with a splendid retinue of dwarves and sprites, handing
out cakes, ices

and candies. At each intersection or square,
bands played-marches,

folk-dances, hot jazz, Hugo Wolf. Children went streaming
like confetti.

At the drinking fountains, where soda water sparkled deep
inside the

fanged mouths of dragons, of wild lions
and tigers, the queues of chil­

dren waited, each for his moment of danger, leaning halfway
into the

shadow, into the smell of wet cement and old water,
into the mouth of

the beast, to drink. In the sky, the tall ferris wheel spun.
From Peene­

mimde they had come 280 kilometers,
which was to be, coincidentally,

the operational range of the Ai.
Among all there was to choose from, Wheel, myths, jungle

animals,

clowns, Ilse found her way to the
Antarctic Panorama. Two or three



��/
� ...."""

- - -

-
-

- _- - /

boys hardly older than she wandered through the imitation wilderness,
bundled up in sealskins, constructing cairns and planting flags in the
August humidity. Watching them made Pokler sweat. A few "sled dogs"
lay suffering in the shade of the dirty papier-mache sastrugi, on plaster
snow that had begun to crack. A hidden projector threw images of the
aurora on a white scrim. Half a dozen stuffed penguins also dotted the
landscape.

"So-you want to live at the South Pole. Have you given up so easily
on"-Kot-idiot, that was a slip-"on the Moon?" He'd been good up
till then about cross-examining. He couldn't afford to know who she
was. In the false Antarctic, in ignorance of what had attracted her
there, uneasy and dripping sweat, he waited for her answer.

She, or They, let him off. "Oh," with a shrug, "who wants to live on
the Moon?" They never brought it up again.

Back at their hotel, they were handed the key by an eight-year-old
desk clerk, rose in a whining elevator run by a uniformed child, to a
room still warm from the day's heat. She closed the door, took off her
hat and scaled it over to her bed. Pokler collapsed on his own bed. She
came over to take off his shoes.

"Papi," gravely unlacing, "may I sleep next to you tonight?" One of
her hands had come lightly to rest on the beginning of his bare calf.
Their eyes met for half a second. A number of uncertainties shifted then
for Pokler and locked into sense. To his shame, his first feeling was
pride. He hadn't known he was so vital to the program. Even in this ini­
tial moment, he was seeing it from Their side-every quirk goes in the
dossier, gambler, foot-fetishist or soccer fan, it's all important, it can all
be used. Right now we have to keep them happy, or at least neutralize
the foci of their unhappiness. You may not understand what their work
really is, not at the level of the data, but you're an administrator after
all, a leader, your job is to get results ... Pokler, now, has mentioned a
"daughter." Yes, yes we know it's disgusting, one never can tell what
they have locked up in there with those equations, but we must all put
off our judgments for now, there'll be time after the war to get back to
the Poklers and their dirty little secrets. . . .

He hit her upside the head with his open hand, a loud and terrible
blow. That took care of his anger. Then, before she could cry or speak,
he had dragged her up on the bed next to him, her dazed little hands al­
ready at the buttons of his trousers, her white frock already pulled
above her waist. She had been wearing nothing at all underneath, noth­
ing all day ... how I've wanted you, she whispered as paternal plow
found its way into filial furrow ... and after hours of amazing incest

420

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b

po
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ili

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ili�
an

lie

ha�
his

w

he

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he
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be�

.....

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ureon

they dressed in silence, and crept out into the leading edge
of faintest

flesh dawn, everything they would ever need packed inside
her flowered

bag, past sleeping children doomed to the end
of summer, past monitors

and railway guards, down at last to the water and
the fishing boats, to a

fatherly old sea-dog in a braided captain's hat,
who welcomed them

aboard and stashed them below decks, where she snuggled down in the

bunk as they got under way and sucked him for
hours while the engine

pounded, till the Captain called, "Come on up,
and take a look at your

new home!" Gray and green, through the mist, it was
Denmark. "Yes,

they're a free people here. Good luck to
both of you!" The three of

them, there on deck, stood hugging....
No. What Pokler did was choose to believe she

wanted comfort that

night, wanted not to be alone. Despite
Their game, Their palpable evil,

though he had no more reason to trust
"Ilse" than he trusted Them, by

an act not of faith, not of courage but of conservation, he
chose to be­

lieve that. Even in peacetime, with unlimited resources,
he couldn't

have proven her identity, not beyond the knife-edge
of zero tolerance

his precision eye needed. The years Ilse
would have spent between Ber­

lin and Peenemiinde were so hopelessly tangled, for all of Germany,

that no real chain of events could have been
established for sure, not

even Pokler's hunch that somewhere in the
State's oversize paper brain

a specific perversity had been assigned
him and dutifully stored. For

every government agency,
the Nazi Party set up a duplicate. Commit­

tees fissioned, merged, generated spontaneously, disappeared.
No one

would show a man his dossier-

It was not, in fact, even clear to him that he had
made a choice. But it

was in those humming moments in the room smelling
of a summer day,

whose light no one had lit yet, with her
round straw hat a frail moon on

the bedspread, lights of the Wheel slowly pouring
red and green over

and over outside in the dark, and a group of schoolboys singing
in the

street a refrain from before their time, their
sold-out and cruelly han­

dled time-Juch-heierasas-sa! 0 tempo-tempo-ra!-that
board and

pieces and patterns at least all
did come clear for him, and Pokier knew

that while he played, this would have to be Ilse-truly
his child, truly as

he could make her. It was the real
moment of conception, in which,

years too late, he became
her father.

Through the rest of the furlough, they
strolled about Zwolfkinder, al­

ways hand in
hand. Lanterns swaying from the trunks of elephants'

heads on top of tall pillars lit their way .
. . over spidery bridges looking

down at snow-leopards, apes, hyenas ... along the
miniature railway,

between the corrugated pipe legs of steel-mesh dinosaurs,
down to the

421



"- - ··1. i /
��---__-'

-- -

. -
- /........

patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous
natives attacked an encampment of General von Trotha's brave men in
blue, all the parts played by exuberant boys, and a great patriotic fa­
vorite with children of all ages ... up on the giant Wheel so naked, so
void of grace, there for only the clear mission: to lift and to
frighten....

On their last night-though he didn't know it, for they would take
her as abruptly and invisibly as before-they stood looking in again at
stuffed penguins and false snow, and around them the artificial aurora
flickered.

"Next year," squeezing her hand, "we'll come back here, if you like."
"Oh yes. Every year, Papi."
Next day she was gone, taken back into the coming war, leaving Po­

kler alone in a country of children, to go back to Peenemiinde after all,
alone....

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one
about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only
continuity has been her name, and Zwolfkinder, and Polder's love-love
something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create
for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these sum­
mertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a singlechild ... what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a
year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind-tunnel, or an oscil­
lograph whose turning drum you could speed or slow at will ... )?

Outside the Peenemiinde wind-tunnel, Pokler has come to stand at
night, next to the great sphere, 40 feet high, listening to the laboring
pumps as they evacuate the air from the white sphere, five minutes of
growing void-then one terrific gasp: 20 seconds of supersonic flow ...then the fall of the shutter, and the pumps starting up again . . . he has
listened, and taken it to imply his own cycle of shuttered love, growing
empty over the year for two weeks in August, engineered with the same
care. He has smiled, and drunk toasts, and traded barracks humor with
Major Weissmann, while all the time, behind the music and the gig­
gling, he could hear the flesh of pieces moved in darkness and winter
across the marshes and mountain chains of the board . . . watched run
after run the Halbmodelle results out of the wind tunnel, showing howthe net normal force would be distributed over the Rocket's length, forhundreds of different Mach numbers-seen the true profile of theRocket warped and travestied, a rocket of wax, humped like a dolphinat around caliber 2, necking down toward the tail which was then
stretched up, impossibly, in a high point with a lower shoulder aft of it

422

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-and seen how his own face might be plotted, not in light but in net
forces acting upon it from the flow of Reich and coercion

and love it

moved through . . . and known that it must suffer the same degrada­
tion, as death will warp face to skull. . . .

In '43, because he was away at Zwolfkinder, Pokler missed the British
air raid on Peenemiinde. Returning to the station, as soon as he came in

sight of the "foreign workers'" quarters at Trassenheide razed
and

smashed, bodies still being dug from the wreckage, a terrible suspicion
began, and would not be put down. Weissmann was saving

him for

something: some unique destiny. Somehow the man had known
the

British would bomb that night, known even in '39, and so arranged the
tradition of an August furlough, year after year but all toward pro­
tecting Pokler from the one bad night. Not quite balanced ...

a bit

paranoid, yes, yes . . . but the thought purred on in his brain,
and he

felt himself turning to stone.
Smoke seeped from the earth, charred trees fell, as he watched, at

no

more than a breath from the direction of the sea. Powdered dust rose up

at every footfall, turning clothes white, faces to
masks of dust. The far­

ther up the peninsula, the less damage. A strange gradient
of death and

wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and most helpless got
it

worst-as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London a

year later when the rockets began to fall. Most of
the casualties had

been among "foreign workers," a euphemism for
civilian prisoners

brought in from countries under German occupation.
The wind tunnel

and the measuring house were untouched, the pre-production
works

only slightly damaged. Pokler's colleagues were
outside Scientist Hous­

ing, which had been hit-phantoms moving
in morning fog still not

burned off, washing up in buckets of beer because the water
was still

out. They stared at Pokler, failing, enough of them, to keep
accusation

out of their faces.
"I wish I could have missed this."

"Dr. Thiel is dead."

"How was fairyland, Pokler?"
''I'm sorry," he said. It wasn't his fault. The others

were silent: some

watching, some still in shock from the night.
Mondaugen showed up then. "We're

exhausted. Could you come

with me to Pre-production? A lot has to be sorted out, we need a
hand."

They shufHed along, each in his own
dust-cloud. "It was terrible,"

Mondaugen said. "All of us have been under
some strain."

"They sounded like I'd done it."
"You feeling guilty because you weren't here?"

423



''I'm wondering why I wasn't here. That's all."
"Because you were in Zwolfkinder," replied the enlightened one.

"Don't invent complications."
He tried not to. That was Weissmann's job, wasn't it, Weissmann was

the sadist, he had responsibility for coming up with new game-varia­
tions, building toward a maximum cruelty in which Pokler would be un­
laid to nerves vessels and tendons, every last convolution of brain flat­
tened out in the radiance of the black candles, nowhere to shelter,
entirely his master's possession ... the moment in which he is defined
to himself at last. . . . This is what Pokler could feel waiting now, a
room he'd never seen, a ceremony he couldn't memorize in ad­
vance....

There were false alarms. Pokler was almost sure once during the
winter, during the test series at Blizna. They had moved east into Po­
land, to fire over land. The shots from Peenemiinde were all out to sea,
and there'd been no way to observe the re-entry of the At. Blizna was
almost exclusively an SS project: part of Maj.-Gen. Kamrnler's empire­
building. The Rocket at that point was plagued by an airburst problem
in its terminal phase-the vehicle blew apart before reaching the target.
Everyone had an idea. It might be an overpressure in the liquid-oxygen
tank. Perhaps, because the Rocket coming down was lighter by 10 tons
of fuel and oxidizer, the shift in the center of gravity was making it un­
stable. Or perhaps the insulation on the alcohol tank was at fault, some­
how allowing residual fuel to be burned on re-entry. This was Pokler's
reason for being there. By then he was no longer in the propulsion
group, or even working as a designer-he was in the Materials office, ex­
pediting the procurement of various plastics for insulation, shock ab­
sorption, gasketry-exciting stuff. The orders to Blizna were strange
enough to be Weissmann's work: the day Pokler went out to sit in the
Polish meadows at the exact spot where the Rocket was supposed to
come down, he was certain.

Green rye and low hills for miles all around: Pokler was by a small
trench, in the Sarnaki target area, pointing his binoculars south toward
Blizna like everybody else: waiting. Erwartung in the crosshairs, with
the just-sprung rye blowing, its gentler nap being brushed up by the
wind ... look down at this countryside, down through Rocket-miles of
morning space: the many shades of forest green, Polish farmhouses
white and brown, dark eels of rivers catching the sun at their curves
. . . and at the very center down there, in the holy X, Pokler, crucified,
invisible at first look, but in a moment . . . now beginning to resolve as
the fall gathers momentum-

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d ont
But how can he believe in its reality up there? Insects whine, the sun

is almost warm, he can gaze off at the red earth and
millions of blowing

stalks, and fall nearly into a light trance: in shirtsleeves, with his bony
knees pointing up, the gray suit jacket wrinkled years beyond

last

pressing bundled under his ass to soak up the dew. The
others he came

out with are dotted here about Ground Zero, blithe Nazi buttercups­
binoculars sway from slate-colored horsehide straps around

their necks,

the Askania crew fuss with their equipment, and one of the SS liaison

men (Weissmann isn't here) keeps looking at his watch, then at the sky,
then the watch, the crystal becoming, in brief flashes onloff, a nacreous
circle binding together the hour and the fleecy sky.

Pokler scratches at a graying 48-hour beard, bites at lips very
chapped, as if he has spent most of the late winter

outside: he has a

winter look. Around his eyes, over the years, has grown a
ruinous system

of burst capillaries, shadows, folds, crowsfeet, a ground that by now has

gathered in the simple, direct eyes of his younger and poorer days
. . .

no. Something was in them, even then, something others saw
and knew

they could use, and found how to. Something
Pokler missed. He's spent

enough of his life looking into mirrors. He really ought
to remem­

ber....
The airburst, if it happens, will be in visual range. Abstractions, math,

models are fine, but when you're down to it and everybody's hollering
for a fix, this is what you do: you go and sit exactly on the target with

in­

different shallow trenches for shelter, and you watch it in the silent fire­

bloom of its last few seconds, and see what you will see. Chances are as­

tronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that is why
one is safest at

the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be like artillery
shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse-the

El­

lipse of Uncertainty. But Pokler, though trusting
as much as any scien­

tist in uncertainty, is not feeling too secure here. It is after all his
own

personal ass whose quivering sphincter is
centered right on Ground

Zero. And there is more to this than ballistics. There is
Weissmann. Any

number of chemists and materials people know as much about insula­

tion as Pokler . . . why should he have been picked, unless . . . some­

where in his brain now two foci sweep together and become one . . .

zero ellipse. . . a single point. . . a live warhead, secretly loaded, spe­
cial bunkers for everyone else. . . yes that's

what he wants. . . all tol­

erances in the guidance cooperating toward a perfect shot, right
on top

of Pokler ... ah, Weissmann, your end game lacks finesse-but
there

were never spectators and judges not in all this time, and who
ever said

the end could not be this brutal? Paranoia has rushed Pokler,
drowned



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/

-

=-------.::b�__
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him to the temples and scalp. He may have shit, he can't tell. His pulsethuds in his neck. His hands and feet ache. The black-suited blond en­
forcers look on. Their metal insignia twinkle. Low hillsides lie under
early sun. All the field glasses stare south. The Aggregat is on route,
nothing can be changed. Noone else here cares for the penetralia of the
moment, or last mysteries: there have been too many rational years. The
paper has piled too thick and far. Pokler cannot reconcile, not really, hisdream of the perfectly victimized with the need bred into him to take
care of business-nor see how these may be one and the same. The A4
must, after all, go out in the field very soon, this failure rate must be
brought down, and so those who've come are here, and if there is a mas­
sive failure of vision this morning in the Polish meadow, if no one, not
even the most paranoid, can see anything at all beyond the stated Re­
quirements, certainly it's not unique to this time, this place, where the
eyes cupped against the black binoculars are looking only for the day's"reluctant virgin"-as the witty rocketeers have dubbed their problemrockets-to announce herself . . . to note where, forward to aft, the
trouble may be, the shape of a vapor trail, the sound of the burst, any­
thing that might help. . . .

At Sarnaki, as the records tell it, the rocket came down that day withthe usual double-blast, a streak of white condensation in the blue sky:another premature airburst. Steel fragments fell, a hundred feet awayfrom the Zero point, slashing into the rye like hail. Pokler saw the explo­
sion, no more than anyone else. He was never sent out again. The SS
people watched him get to his feet, and stretch, and slowly move offwith the others. Weissmann would get his report. New varieties of tor­
ture would be coming.

But inside Pokler's life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassedGerman soul, the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect
Rocket is still up there, still descending. He still waits-even now, alone
at Zwolfkinder waiting for "Use," for this summer's return, and with it
an explosion that will take him by surprise. . . .

In the spring, when the winds at Peenemiinde had shifted around to
the southwest, and the first birds were back, Pokler was transferred to
the underground factory at Nordhausen, in the Harz. Work at Peene­
miinde, after the British raid, had begun to fall off. The plan-againKammler's=-was now to disperse testing and production around Ger­
many, to prevent another and possibly fatal Allied attack. Pokler's du­
ties at the Mittelwerke were routine: materials, procurement. He sleptin a bunk next to a wall of dynamited stone painted white, with a bulb
over his head burning all night long. He dreamed that the bulb was a

426

rep
SOUl
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saw

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representative of Weissmann, a creature
whose bright filament was its

soul. They held long dream-dialogues whose
substance Pokler could

never remember. The bulb was explaining the plot to him in detail-it

was more grand and sweeping than Pokler could ever
have imagined, it

seemed many nights to be purely music, his
consciousness moving

through the soundscape at bay, observing, compliant,
still precariously

safe, but not for long.
At the time there were rumors of an estrangement growing

between

Weissmann and his "monster," Enzian. The
Schwarzkommando by

then had grown away from the SS structure,
much as the SS itself had

from the German Army. Their power now lay not in absolute weaponry
but in information and expertise. Pokler was happy to hear that

Weiss­

mann was having his troubles, but at a loss how to
use it to any advan­

tage. When his orders to
Nordhausen had come through, he'd had a

flash of despair. Was the game adjourned then?
He might never see Use

again. But a memo had come, telling
him to report to Weissmann in his

office.

The hair at Weissmann's temples was graying and disarranged.
Pokler

saw that one earpiece of his glasses was held on with
a paper clip. His

desk was a litter of documents, reports, reference
books. It was a sur­

prise to see him looking less
diabolical than harassed as any civil servant

under pressure. His eyes
were aimed in Pokler's direction, but the lenses

distorted them.

"You understand that this transfer to
Nordhausen is voluntary."

Pokler understood, with relief and two seconds of
actual love for his

protector, that the game
was still on. "It will be something new."

"Yes?" Partly a challenge, but partly
interested too.

"Production. We've been so involved here with the
research-and-de­

velopment end. It's not a weapon
for us so much as a 'flying laboratory,'

as Dr. Thiel said once-"

"Do you miss Dr.
Thiel?"

"Yes. He wasn't in my section. I
didn't know him well."

"A shame he got caught in the raid. We all
move in an Ellipse of Un­

certainty, don't we?"
Pokier allowed himself a look at the

cluttered desk, quick enough to

be taken either for nervousness or as
a comeback-Weissmann, looks

like you have your
own Ellipse all right-"Oh, I don't have

the time

usually to worry. At least the
Mittelwerke is underground."

"The tactical sites won't be."

"Do you think I might be sent-"
Weissmann shrugged and favored Pokler

with a big fake smile. "My



-. - I, i /,
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---

/......

dear Pokler, how can anyone predict where you'll go? We'll see how itall develops."
Later, in the Zone, with his guilt become a sensual thing, prickling athis eyes and membranes like an allergy, it would seem to Pokler that he

could not, even by that day in Weissmann's office, have been ignorantof the truth. That he had known the truth with his senses, but allowed
all the evidence to be misfiled where it wouldn't upset him. Known ev­
erything, but refrained from the only act that could have redeemed him.
He should have throttled Weissmann where he sat, corrugations of
skinny throat and Adam's apple sliding under Pokler's palms, thick eye­glasses sliding off as the weak little eyes go blearing helplessly after their
final darkener. ...

Pokler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen,
and the Dora camp: he could see-the starved bodies, the eyes of the
foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the
freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uni­forms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-educa­
tion camp. But it wasn't till August, when the furlough arrived as usual
in its blank kraft envelope, and Pokler rode northward through the graykilometers of a Germany he no longer recognized, bombed and burned,
the wartime villages and rainy purple heath, and found her at last wait­
ing in the hotel lobby at Zwolfkinder with the same darkness in her eyes(how had he missed it till now? such swimming orbits of pain) that hecould finally put the two data together. For months, while her father
across the wire or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoneronly a few meters away from him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . . If he
must curse Weissmann, then he must also curse himself. Weissmann's
cruelty was no less resourceful than Pokler's own engineering skill, the
gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as requiredbetween himself and the inconveniences of caring. They had sold him
convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting.

Trying, a bit late for it, to open himself to the pain he should havebeen feeling, he questioned her now. Did she know the name of her movi
camp? Yes, Ilse confirmed-or was told to answer-that it was Dora. tlee 0
The night before she left to come here she'd seen a hanging. Evening waswas the hour for the hangings. Did he want to hear about it? Did he seH�
want to hear about it. . . .

She was very hungry. They spent the first few days eating, whateverZwolfkinder had to sell. There was less than the year before, and it wasmuch more expensive. But the enclave of innocence still enjoyed a highpriority, so there was something.
428

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O\\'il Not so many children this year, though. The engineer
and girl had the

place practically to themselves. The Wheel and
most of the other rides

stood motionless. Petrol shortage, a child guard informed them.
Luft­

waffe flights roared overhead. Nearly every night the
sirens cried out,

and they watched the searchlights come on in
Wismar and in Lubeck,

and sometimes heard the bombs. What was Pokler doing in this
dream

world, this lie? His country waited to be crushed
between invaders from

east and west: back at Nordhausen the hysteria had risen to epic scale,

as the first rockets were about to go out into the field, about
to fulfill en­

gineering prophecies old as peacetime. Why,
at this critical moment,

had they let Pokler off? Who else these days was getting furloughs?
And

what was "Ilse" doing here, wasn't she supposed to be
too old by now

for fairy tales? her new breasts so visible now
beneath her frock, her

eyes so nearly empty drifting without
real interest toward random boys

destined for the Volkssturm, older boys, no more interested in her. They
dreamed of their orders, of colossal explosions and death-if they

even

saw her it was sidewise, sly . . . her Father will tame her . .
. her teeth

will bite the pole ... someday I will have a herd
'of them for myself

...
but first I must find my Captain ... somewhere

out in the War

. . .
first they must deliver me from this little place.

. . .

Who was that, going by just then-who was the
slender boy who

flickered across her path, so blond, so white he was nearly
invisible in

the hot haze that had come to settle over
Zwolfkinder? Did she see him,

and did she know him for her own second
shadow? She was conceived

because her father saw a movie called Alpdriicken one night
and got a

hardon. Pokler in his horny staring had missed the
Director's clever

Gnostic symbolism in the lighting scheme of the
two shadows, Cain's

and Abel's. But Ilse, some Ilse, has persisted beyond her
cinema mother,

beyond film's end, and so have the
shadows of shadows. In the Zone, all

will be moving under the Old Dispensation,
inside the Cainists' light

and space: not out of any precious Collerei,
but because the Double

Light was always there, outside
all film, and that shucking and jiving

moviemaker was the only one around at the time who happened
to no­

tice it and use it, although in deep ignorance, then and now,
of what he

was showing the nation of starers. . .
. So that summer Ilse passed her­

self by, too fixed at some shadowless
interior noon to mark the intersec­

tion, or to care.
She and Pokler hardly talked this time: it was their

mutest holiday to­

gether. She walked broodful,
her head down, her hair hooding her face,

brown legs kicking at refuse the
undermanned garbage detail hadn't

picked up. Was it her time
of life, or did she resent being under orders

ateler

jtw�

a fu��



��--_/
.....

to spend time with a dull and aging engineer at a place she'd outgrown
years ago?

"You don't really want to be here, do you?" They sat by a pollutedstream, throwing bread to ducks. Pokier's stomach was upset from er­satz coffee and tainted meat. His head ached.
"It's here or the camp," her face stubbornly aside. "1 don't reallywant to be anywhere. 1 don't care."
"Ilse."
"Do you like it here? Do you want to be back under your mountain?Do you talk to the elves, Franz?"
"No, 1 don't enjoy it where 1 am"-Franz?-"but 1 have, 1 have myjob. . . ."
"Yes. So do 1. My job is being a prisoner. I'm a professional inmate. 1know how to get favors, who to steal from, how to inform, how to-"
Any minute she'd say it . . . "Please-stop it Ilse-" this time Pokler

got hysterical and did slap her. Ducks surprised at the sharp reportabout-faced and waddled away. Ilse gazed back at him, no tears, eyesroom after room strung into the shadows of an old prewar house hecould wander for years, hearing voices and finding doors, hunting him­self, his life as it might have been. . . . He could not bear indifferencefrom her. Close to losing control, Pokler committed then his act of
courage. He quit the game.

"If you don't want to come back next year," even though "next year"meant so little by that point in Germany, "you don't have to. It wouldbe better if you didn't."
She knew immediately what he'd done. She pulled one knee up, andrested her forehead there, and thought. ''I'll come back," she said veryquietly.
"You?"
"Yes. Really."
He did, then, let everything go, every control. He veered into thewind of his long isolation, shuddering terribly. He cried. She took hishands. The floating ducks watched. The sea cooled under the hazy sun.An accordion played somewhere back in the town. From behind the

decaying mythical statues, sentenced children shouted to each other.Summer ended.
Back at the Mittelwerke he tried, and kept trying, to get into theDora camp and find Ilse. It didn't matter any more about Weissmann.The SS guards each time were courteous, understanding, impossible toget past.
The work load now was incredible. Pokler was getting less than two

430

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grolll hours' sleep a day. News of the war reached under the
mountain only as

rumors and shortages. Procurement philosophy had been "triangular"­
three possible sources for the same part, in case one was destroyed.

De­

pending what didn't come from where, or how late it was, you
knew

which factories had been bombed, which rail connections taken out.

Toward the end you had to try and fabricate many of the components

locally.
When Pokler had time to think, he was met by the growing enigma of

Weissmann's silence. To provoke him, or the memory of him, Pokler

went out of his way to talk to officers in Major Forschner's security
de­

tail, looking for news. None of them responded to
Pokler as anything

more than a nuisance. They'd heard rumors that Weissmann was no

longer here but in Holland, in command of his
own rocket battery. En­

zian had dropped out of sight, along with many key
Schwarzkommando.

Pokler grew more and more
certain that this time the game was really

over, that the war had caught them all, given new
life-death priorities

and no more leisure for torturing a minor engineer. He was able
to relax

some, move through the day's routine, wait for the end,
even allow him­

self to hope that the thousands in Dora would
soon be free, among them

Ilse, some acceptable Ilse. . . .
But in the spring, he did see Weissmann again.

He woke from a

dream of a gentle Zwolfkinder that was also Nordhausen,
a city of elves

producing toy moon-rockets, and there
was Weissmann's face at the

edge of his bunk, watching him. He
seemed to have aged ten years, and

Pokler hardly recognized him.
"There isn't much time," Weissmann whispered. "Come with

me."

They moved through the white, sleepless
bustle of the tunnels, Weiss­

mann walking slowly and stiffly, both men
silent. In one of the office

spaces, half a dozen
others were waiting, along with some SS and SD.

"We've already obtained permission from your groups,"
Weissmann

said, "to release you for work on a special project.
This will be the high­

est possible security. You'll be
billeted separately, eat separately, and

speak to no one who is not present
in this room." They all looked

around to see who that might be. No one they knew. They
looked back

at Weissmann.

He wanted a modification worked into
one rocket, only one. Its serial

number had been removed, and five zeros painted in. Pokler
knew im­

mediately that this was what
Weissmann had been saving him for: this

was to be his "special destiny." It made no sense to
him: he had to de­

velop a plastic fairing, of a certain size,
with certain insulating proper­

ties, for the propulsion section of the
rocket. The propulsion engineer

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431



was the busiest on the project, rerouting steam and fuel lines, relocatinghardware. Whatever the new device was, nobody saw it. According tothe rumor, it was being produced elsewhere, and was nicknamed the
Schwarzgerat, because of the high secrecy surrounding it. Even the
weight was classified. They were through inside of two weeks, andthe "Vorrichtung fur die Isolierung" was on its way to the field. Pokler
reported back to his regular supervisor, and the routine went on as be­
fore. He never saw Weissmann again.

The first week in April, with American units supposed to be arrivingat any moment, most of the engineers were packing, collecting ad­dresses of co-workers, drinking farewell toasts, drifting through theemptying bays. There was a graduation feeling in the air. It was hard
not to whistle "Gaudeamus igitur." Suddenly the cloistered life was
about to come to an end.

A young SS guard, one of the last to leave, found Pokler in the dustycafeteria, handed him an envelope, and left without a word. It was the
usual furlough form, superseded now by the imminent death of the
Government-and a travel permit to Zwolfkinder. Where the dates
should have been, someone had written, almost illegibly, "after hostili­ties end." On the back, in the same hand (Weissmann's?) a note to Po­kler. She has been released. She will meet you there. He understood that
this was payment for the retrofit work he'd done on the 00000. How
long had Weissmann been keeping him deliberately on ice, all so he'dhave a plastics man he could depend on, when the time came?

On the last day, Pokler walked out the south end of the main tunnels.
Lorries were everywhere, all engines idling, farewell in the spring air,tall trees sunlit green on the mountainsides. The Obersturmbannfuhrer
was not at his post when Pokler went into Dora. He was not looking forIlse, or not exactly. He may have felt that he ought to look, finally. Hewas not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but did notknow, with senses or heart. . . .

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathingof Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses beingcarried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the
crematoriums, the men's penises hanging, their toes clustering whiteand round as pearls . . . each face so perfect, so individual, the lipsstretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at thepunch line of the joke . . . and the living, stacked ten to a straw mat­
tress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers. . . . All his vacuums, his laby­rinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks
on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside

432

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Oca�
••• all this time. . . . Pokler vomited. He cried some.

The walls did

Tdin�' d I. not isso ve-no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding,
m� t on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are

ones he knows after all,

\'en: and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return
to that si­

eh, lence. . . . But what can he ever do about it? How can he ever keep
them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works

him terribly as run­

away heartbeating, and with hardly any chances
left him for good rage,

or for turning. . . .
Where it was darkest and smelled the worst, Pokler

found a woman

lying, a random woman. He sat for half
an hour holding her bone hand.

She was breathing. Before he left, he took off his gold wedding ring
and

put it on the woman's thin finger, curling
her hand to keep it from slid­

ing off. If she lived, the ring
would be good for a few meals, or a blan­

ket, or a night indoors, or a ride home. . . .

D D D D D D D

Back to Berlin, with a terrific thunderstorm blowing over
the city. Mar­

gherita has brought Slothrop to a rickety
wood house near the Spree, in

the Russian sector. A burned-out Konigstiger tank guards
the entrance,

its paint scorched, treads mangled
and blasted off of the drive sprocket,

its dead monster 88 angled down to point at the gray river, hissing
and

spiculed with the rain.
Inside are bats nesting in the rafters, remains

of beds with a moldy

smell, broken glass and bat shit on the bare
wood floor, windows

boarded up except where the
stove is vented through because the chim­

ney's down. On a rocking chair lies
a moleskin coat, a taupe cloud. Paint

from some long-ago artist is still visible over
the floor in wrinkled

splashes of aged magenta, saffron,
steel blue, reverse deformations of

paintings whose whereabouts
are unknown. Back in a corner hangs a

tarnished mirror, birds and flowers painted in white all
around its frame,

reflecting Margherita and Slothrop
and the rain out the open door. Part

of the ceiling, blown away when the King Tiger
died, is covered now

with soggy and stained
cardboard posters all of the same

cloaked figure

in the broad-brimmed hat, with its legend DER FEIND
HORT ZU. Water

drips through in half a dozen places.
Greta lights a kerosene lamp. It

warms the rainlight with a handful of

yellow. Slothrop builds a fire
in the stove while Margherita ducks down

under the house, where it turns out there's
a great stash of potatoes.

outsiO! Jeepers, Slothrop
hasn't seen a potato for months. There's

onions in a

433



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sack too, and even wine. She cooks, and they both sit there just piggingon those spuds. Later, without paraphernalia or talk, they fuck eachother to sleep. But a few hours later Slothrop wakes up, and lies there
wondering where he's going.

Well, to find that Saure Bummer, soon as this rain lets up, give theman his hashish. But what then? Slothrop and the S-Gerat and the
[amf/Imipolex mystery have grown to be strangers. He hasn't reallythought about them for a while. Hmm, when was that? The day he satwith Saure in the cafe, smoking that reefer ... oh, that was day beforeyesterday, wasn't it? Rain drips, soaking into the floor, and Slothrop per­ceives that he is losing his mind. If there is something comforting-reli­gious, if you want-about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia,where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us canbear for long. Well right now Slothrop feels himself sliding onto theanti-paranoid part of his cycle, feels the whole city around him goingback roofless, vulnerable, uncentered as he is, and only pasteboard im­

ages now of the Listening Enemy left between him and the wet sky.Either They have put him here for a reason, or he's just here. He isn't
sure that he wouldn't, actually, rather have that reason....

The rain lets up at midnight. He leaves Margherita to creep out in thecold city with his five kilos, having kept for himself the one Tchitcherine
plundered from. Russian troops are singing in their billets. The salt acheof accordion music cries on in back of them. Drunks materialize, merryand pissing in the center grooves of cobbled alleys. Mud occupies somestreets like flesh. Shell craters brim with rainwater, gleaming in thelights of midwatch work crews clearing debris. Shattered Biedermeier
chair, mateless boot, steel eyeglass frame, dog collar (eyes at the edgesof the twisting trail watching for sign, for blazing), wine cork, splinteredbroom, bicycle with one wheel missing, discarded copies of TiiglicheBundschau, chalcedony doorknob dyed blue long ago with ferrous fer­
rocyanide, scattered piano keys (all white, an octave on B to be exact­
or H, in the German nomenclature-the notes of the rejected Locrianmode), the black and amber eye from some stuffed animal. ... The
strewn night. Dogs, spooked and shivering, run behind walls whose topsare broken like fever charts. Somewhere a gas leak warps for a minuteinto the death and after-rain smells. Ranks of blackened window-sock­
ets run high up the sides of gutted apartment buildings. Chunks of con­crete are held aloft by iron reinforcing rod that curls like black spa­ghetti, whole enormous heaps wiggling ominously overhead at yourleast passing brush by.... The smooth-faced Custodian of the Nighthovers behind neutral eyes and smile, coiled and pale over the city,

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434

....

::: : _.-.-.................. .��



humming its hoarse lullabies. Young men spent the
Inflation like this,

alone in the street, no place to go into out of the black winters.
Girls

stayed up late on stoops or sitting on benches in lamplight by
the rivers,

waiting for business, but the young men had to
walk by, ignored, hunch­

ing overpadded shoulders, money with no
relation to anything it could

buy, swelling, paper cancer in their billfolds. . . .
The Chicago Bar is being guarded outside by two of their

descend­

ants, kids in George Raft suits, many sizes too big, too many
ever to

grow into. One keeps coughing, in
uncontrolled dying spasms. The

other licks his lips and stares at Slothrop. Gunsels. When he
mentions

Saure Bummer's name, they move together in front of the door, shaking
their heads. "Look, I'm supposed to deliver him a package."

"Don't know him."

"Can I leave a message?"
"He's not here." The cougher makes a lunge. Slothrop sweeps aside,

gives him a quick veronica with his cape,
sticks his foot out and trips the

kid, who lies on the ground cursing, all tangled up
in his long keychain,

while his pardner goes pawing inside of his flapping
suitcoat for what

Slothrop surmises to be a sidearm, so
him Slothrop kicks in the balls,

and screaming "Fickt nicht mit der
Raketemensch!" so they'll remem­

ber, kind of a hiyo Silver here, he flees into shadows, among
the heaps of

lumber, stone and earth.
He takes a trail he thinks Saure led them along the other night­

keeps losing it, wandering into
windowless mazes, tangles of barbed

wire holidayed by the deathstorms of last May,
then into a strafed and

pitted lorry-park he can't find his way
out of for half an hour, a rolling

acre of rubber, grease, steel, and spilled petrol, pieces
of vehicles

pointing at sky or earth no differently
than in a peacetime American

junkyard, fused into odd, brown Saturday' Evening
Post faces, except

that they are not folksy so much as downright
sinister . . . yes it's really

the Saturday Evening Post, all right: they
are the faces of the tricorned

messengers coming in from out of
the long pikes, down past the elms,

Berkshire legends, travelers lost at the edge of
the Evening. Come with

a message. They unwrinkle, though,
if you keep looking. They smooth

out into timeless masks that speak their entire meaning,
all of it right

out on the surface.

It takes an hour to find Saure's cellar.
But it's dark, and it's empty.

Slothrop goes in, lights the light.
Looks like either a bust or a gang war:

printing press vanished,
clothes tossed all around, and some very

strange clothes at that,
there is, for example, a wickerware suit, a yellow

wickerware suit actually, articulating along armpit, elbow,
knee and

re,Hrc

poutillt
ditctt�

435



" - I � i
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groinlines . . . oh, hmm, well, Slothrop runs a quick search of his ownhere, looking inside shoes, not really shoes, some of them, but footgloveswith individual toes, not, however, sewn but cast from some unpleasantvariegated resin such as bowling balls are made of . . . behind the peel­ing scraps of wallpaper, up in the rolled-up windowshade, among thehatchings of one or two phony Reichsmarks let spill by the looters­fifteen minutes of this, finding nothing . . . and the white object on thetable watching him out of its staring shadows the whole time. He feels
its stare before he spots it finally: a chesspiece two inches high. A whiteknight, molded out of plastic-a-and wait'll Slothrop finds out whatkind of plastic, boy!

It's a horse's skull: the eye-sockets are hollow far down into the base.Inside one of them is a tightly rolled cigarette paper with a messagefrom Saure. "Haketemenschl Der Springer asks me to give you this, hissymbol. Keep it-by it shall he know you. I am at J acobistrasse 12, 3erHof, number 7. As B/4, Me. I?" Now "As B/4" was John Dillinger's oldsignoff. Everybody in the Zone this summer is using it. It indicates to
people how you feel about certain things. . . .

Saure has included a map showing how to get to where he is. It'sclear back in the British sector. Groaning, Slothrop pushes on back outin the mud and early morning. Around the Brandenburg Gate, a slightdrizzle starts up again. Chunks of the Gate still lie around in the street
-leaning shell-spalled up in the rainy sky, its silence is colossal, haggardas he pads by flanking it, the Chariot gleaming like coal, driven and still,it is the 30th century and swashbuckling Rocketman has just landedhere to tour the ruins, the high-desert traces of an ancient Europeanorder....

The Jacobistrasse and most of its quarter, slums, survived the street­
fighting intact, along with its interior darkness, a masonry of shadowsthat will persist whether the sun is up or down. Number 12 is an entireblock of tenements dating from before the Inflation, five or six storiesand a mansarde, five or six Hinterhofe nested one inside the other­boxes of a practical joker's gift, nothing in the center but a last hollow
courtyard smelling of the same cooking and garbage and piss decadesold. Ha, hal

Slothrop moseys toward the first archway. Streetlight throws hiscaped shadow forward into a succession of these arches, each labeledwith a faded paint name, Erster-Hof, Zweiter-Hof, Dritter-Hof u.s.w.,shaped like the entrance to the Mittelwerke, parabolic, but more like an
open mouth and gullet, joints of cartilage receding waiting, waiting toswallow . . . above the mouth two squared eyes, organdy whites, irises

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pitch black, stare him down . . . it laughs
as it has for years without

stopping, a blubbery and percussive laugh, like heavy
china rolling or

bumping under the water in the sink. A
brainless giggle, just big old ge­

ometric me, nothin' t' be nervous about, c'mon in....
But the pain, the

twenty, twentyfive years of pain paralyzed
back in that long throat . . .

old outcast, passive, addicted to survival now, waiting
the years out,

waiting for vulnerable saps like Slothrop here
to expose itself to, laugh­

ing and crying and all in silence . . . paint peels
from the Face, burned,

diseased, long time dying and how can Slothrop just
walk down into

such a schizoid throat? Why, because it is what the guardian
and potent

Studio wants from him, natiirlich: Slothrop is the character juvenile
to­

night: what's kept him moving the whole night,
him and the others, the

solitary Berliners who come out only in
these evacuated hours, belong­

ing and going noplace, is Their unexplained
need to keep some marginal

population in these wan and preterite places, certainly
for economic

though, who knows, maybe emotional
reasons too. . . .

Saute's on the move too, though inside, prowling his dreams.
It looks

like one big room, dark, full of tobacco and
kif smoke, crumbled ridges

of plaster where walls have been knocked out,
straw pallets all over the

floor, a couple on one sharing a late, quiet cigarette, somebody
snoring

on another . . . glossy Bosendorfer Imperial concert grand piano
over

which Trudi, wearing only an army shirt, leans, a desperate muse,
bare

legs long and stretching, "Please
come to bed Gustav, it'll be light

soon." The only answer is a peevish strumming among
the lower strings.

Saure is on his side, quite still, a shrunken child,
face long worked at by

leaps from second-story windows,
"first rubdowns" under gloved and

womanish sergeants' fists in the precinct stations, golden light
in the aft­

ernoons over the racetrack at Karlshorst, black light from
the pave­

ments of boulevards at night finely wrinkled like leather
stretched over

stone, white light from satin dresses, glasses
stacked shining in front of

bar mirrors, sans-serif Us at the
entrances to underground stations

pointing in smooth magnetism
at the sky to bring down steel angels of

exaltation, of languid surrender-a face that
in sleep is awesomely old,

abandoned to its city's history. . . .
His eyes open-for an instant Slothrop

is only shadowed green folds,

highlighted helmet, light-values
still to be put together. Then comes the

sweet nodding smile, everything's O.K., ja, howdy
Rocketman, was ist

los? Though the unregenerate old doper
is not quite kindly enough to

keep from opening the ditty bag right away
and peering in, eyes like

two pissholes in a snowbank, to see
what he has.

"I thought you'd be in the slam
or something."

Euro�.

of U,l,i
re�e�
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e5,�

437



�l!�/ ,
--- /. ., ....

Out with a little Moroccan pipe and Saure sets to flattening a fatcrumb of that hashish, humming the popular rumba

"Oh. Well, Springer blew the whistle on our counterfeiting operation.Kind of a little temporary hitch, you understand."
"I don't. You're supposed to be ace buddies."
"Not nearly. And he moves in higher orbits." It is something verycomplicated having to do with American yellow-seal scrip being discon­tinued in the Mediterranean theatre, with the reluctance of Alliedforces here to accept Reichsmarks. Springer has a balance-of-paymentsproblem too, and he's been speculating heavily in Sterling, and . . ."But," sez Slothrop, "but, uh, where's my million marks, then, Emil?"
Saure sucks yellow flame flowing over the edge of the bowl. "It is

gone where the woodbine twineth." Exactly what Jubilee Jim Fisk toldthe Congressional committee investigating his and Jay Gould's schemeto corner gold in 1869. The words are a reminder of Berkshire. With
nothing more than that to go on, it occurs to Slothrop that Saure can't
possibly be on the Bad Guys' side. Whoever They are, Their game hasbeen to extinguish, not remind.

"Well, 1 can sell by the ounce from what 1 have," Slothrop reckons."For occupation scrip. That's stable, isn't it?"
"You aren't angry . You really aren't."
"Rocketman is above all that shit, Emil."
"I have a surprise for you. 1 can get you the Schwarzgerat you askedabout."
"You?"

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A little something from Moroc-co,
With just a lit-tle bit of sock-o,

"Springer. 1 asked him for you."
"Quit fooling. Really? Jeepers, that's so swell of you! How can 1-""Ten thousand pounds sterling."
Slothrop loses a whole lungful of smoke. "Thanks Emil. . . ." Hetells Saure about the run-in with Tchitcherine, and also about how he

saw that Mickey Rooney.
"Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We onlywant to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don't eat

us. If you eat, don't digest. Let us come out the other end again, likediamonds in the shit of smugglers. . . ."
"Look"-remembering now the tip that that Geli gave him long ago

438

'.-'- -' - - -.- - -_ .. -

�"- . - . / �
__ lli_____L_�'



in Nordhausen-" did your pal Springer mention he was hanging
out in

Swinemiinde these days, anyplace like that?"

"Only the price of your instrument, Rak. Half the money
in front. He

said it would cost him at least that much to track it
down."

"So he doesn't know where it is. Shit, he could have us all on' the

hook, bidding us up, hoping somebody's fool enough to
front him some

dough."
"Usually he delivers. You didn't have any trouble,

did you, with that

pass he forged?"
"Yaaahhh-" Oh. Oh, wow, aha, yes been meaning to ask you

about

this little Max Schlepzig item here- "Now then." But
meantime Trudi

has abandoned Gustav in the piano and comes over now to sit
and rub

her cheeks against the nap of Slothrop's trousers, dear
naked legs whis­

pering together, hair spilling, shirt half unbuttoned,
and Same has at

some point rolled over and gone groaning
back into sleep. Trudi and

Slothrop retire to a mattress well away
from the Bosendorfer. Slothrop

settles back sighing, takes his helmet off and lets big
sweet and saftig

Trudi have her way with him. His joints are aching
with rain and city

wandering, he's half blitzed, Trudi is kissing
him into an amazing com­

fort, it's an open house here, no favored
senses or organs, all are equally

at play . . . for possibly the first time
in his life Slothrop does not feel

obliged to have a hardon, which is just as well,
because it does not seem

to be happening with his penis so much as
with . . . oh mercy, this is

embarrassing but ... well his nose actually
seems to be erecting, the

mucus beginning to flow yes a nasal hardon
here and Trudi has certainly

noticed all right, how could she help but . . .
as she slides her lips over

the throbbing snoot and sends a yard of
torrid tongue up one of his nos­

trils . . . he can feel each pink taste-bud as she penetrates
even farther,

pulling aside the vestibule walls and
nose-hair now to accommodate her

head, then shoulders and . . . well she's halfway in, might
as well­

pulling up her knees, crawling using
the hair for hand and footholds she

is able to stand at last inside the great red hall
which is quite pleasantly

lit, no walls or ceiling she can really discern
but rather a fading to sea­

shell and springtime grades of pink in all
directions. . . .

They fall asleep in the roomful
of snoring, with low-pitched twangs

out of the piano, and the rain's million-legged
scuttle in the courtyards

outside. When Slothrop wakes up it's at the height
of the Evil Hour,

Trudi is in some other room with Gustav rattling coffee cups,
a tortoise­

shell cat chases flies by the dirty window. Back
beside the Spree, the

White Woman is waiting for Slothrop. He isn't especially disposed
to

can 1-

on��
0'

439



� I',�
........

leave. Trudi and Gustav come in with coffee and half a reefer, and
everybody sits around gabbing.

Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a ragingdebate with Saure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Saure is for
Rossini. "I'rn not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav ar­
gues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of
more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic de­
mocracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of
the architects of musical freedom-he submitted to the demands of his­
tory, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36,
womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with trag­edy and grandeur."

"So?" is Saute's customary answer to that one. "Which would yourather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream,c c
a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening toBeethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The

man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinnyold fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to LaGazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, thewhole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, andlike it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World.
Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power,love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached,the balconies are scaled-listen!" It was a night in early May, and thefinal bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Saure had to shout his
head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, themagpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing to­gether. ...

"

This rainy morning, in the quiet, it seems that Gustav's German Dia­
lectic has come to its end. He has just had the word, all the way fromVienna along some musicians' grapevine, that Anton Webern is dead.
"Shot in May, by the Americans. Senseless, accidental if you believe inaccidents-some mess cook from North Carolina, some late drafteewith a .45 he hardly knew how to use, too late for WW II, but not forWebern. The excuse for raiding the house was that Weberri's brother
was in the black market. Who isn't? Do you know what kind of myththat's going to make in a thousand years? The young barbarians comingin to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been
going on since Bach, an expansion of music's polymorphous perversitytill all notes were truly equal at last. . . . Where was there to go after

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440

........... -.- .... -.---� .... - ..... ---.-_.-

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Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom. It all had to come

down. Another Cotterdammerung-c-'
"Young fool," Saure now comes cackling in from out in Berlin, trail­

ing a pillowcase full of flowering tops just in from that North
Africa.

He's a mess-ted-drenched eyes, fatbaby arms completely hairless, fly
open and half the buttons gone, white

hair and blue shirt both streaked

with some green horrible scum. "Fell in a shell-hole. Here, quick, roll

up some of this."
"What do you mean, 'young fool,'

"

inquires Gustav.

"I mean you and your musical mainstreams," cries
Saure. "Is it finally

over? Or do we have to start da capo with Carl Orff?"

"I never thought of that," sez Gustav, and for a moment it is clear
that Saure has heard about Webern too, and trying in his underhanded

way to cheer Gustav up.
"What's wrong with Rossini?" hollers Saure, lighting up. "Eh?"

"Ugh," screams Gustav, "ugh, ugh, Rossini," and they're
at it again,

"you wretched antique. Why doesn't anybody go to
concerts any more?

You think it's because of the war? Oh no, I'll tell you why, old man-be­

cause the halls are full of people like you! Stuffed full! Half asleep, nod­

ding and smiling, farting through their dentures, hawking
and spitting

into paper bags, dreaming up ever more ingenious plots against
their

children-not just their own, but other people's children too! just sitting
around, at the concert with all these other snow-topped old rascals, just
a nice background murmur of wheezing, belching, intestinal gurgles,

scratching, sucking, croaking, an entire opera house
crammed full of

them right up to standing room, they're doddering in
the aisles, hanging

off the tops of the highest balconies, and you know
what they're all lis­

tening to, Saure? eh? They're all listening to
Rossini! Sitting there drool­

ing away to some medley of predictable little tunes, leaning
forward el­

bows on knees muttering, 'C'rnon, c'mon then Rossini,
let's get all this

pretentious fanfare stuff out of the way,
let's get on to the real good

tunes!' Behavior as shameless as eating a whole jar of peanut butter at

one sitting. On comes the sprightly Tancredi tarantella,
and they stamp

their feet in delight, they pop their teeth and pound their canes-'Ah,
ah! that's more like it!'

"

"It's a great tune," yells Saure back. "Smoke
another one of these and

I'll just play it for you here on the
Bosendorfer."

To the accompaniment of this tarantella,
which really is a good tune,

Magda has come in out of the morning rain,
and is now rolling reefers

for everybody. She hands Saure one to light. He stops playing
and peers

at it for a long time. Nodding now and then, smiling
or frowning.

441



-. - .!. I /,
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Gustav tends to sneer, but Saure really turns out to be an adept at the
difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contem­
plating the way people roll reefers-the shape, the licking pattern, the
wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper. "You will soon be in
love," sez Saure, "see, this line here."

"It's long, isn't it? Does that mean-"
"Length is usually intensity. Not time."
"Short but sweet," Magda sighs. "Fabelhaft, was?" Trudi comes over

to hug her. They are a Mutt and Jeff routine, Trudi in heels is a foot or
so taller. They know how it looks, and travel around in the city togetherwhenever they can, by way of intervening, if only for a minute, in peo­
pie's minds.

"How do you like this shit?" sez Saure,
"Hubsch,' allows Gustav. "A trifle stahlig, and perhaps the infinitesi­

mal hint of a Bodengeschmack behind its Korper, which is admittedly
siiffig·

"

"I would rather have said spritzig," Saure disagrees, if that indeed is
what it is. "Generally more bukettreich than last year's harvests,
wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, for an Haut Atlas herbage it does have its Art. Certainly it canbe described as kemig, even-as can often be said of that sauber quality
prevailing in the Oued Nfis region-authentically pikant."

"Actually I would tend to suspect an origin somewhere along thesouthern slope of Jebel Sarho," Same sez-"note the Spiel, rather glattand blumig, even the suggestion of a Fulle in its wiirzig audacity-""No no no, Fulle is overstating it, the El Abid Emerald we had last
month had Fulle. But this is obviously more zart than that."

The truth is they are both so blitzed that neither one knows what he's
talking about, which is just as well, for at this point comes a godawfulhammering at the door and a lot of achtungs from the other side. Slo­
throp screams and heads for the window, out onto the roof and over,
scrambling down a galvanized pipe to the next streetward courtyard.Back in Saure's room the heat come busting in. Berlin police supportedby American MPs in an adviser status,

"You will show me your papers!" hollers the leader of the raid.
Saure smiles and holds up a pack of Zig-Zags, just in from Paris.
Twenty minutes later, somewhere in the American sector, Slothrop is

ambling past a cabaret where blank-faced snowdrops are lounging infront and inside, and a radio or phonograph somewhere is playing an
Irving Berlin medley. Slothrop goes hunching paranoiacally along the

442

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pt at�
street, here's "God Bless America," a-and "This Is the Army, Mister

Jones," and they are his country's versions of the Horst Wessel Song,
al­

though it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna

pull an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American
lieutenant-colo­

nel, "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the

simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant,
back again

to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!"

"Teutonic?" sez the colonel. "Dominant? The war's over, fella. What

kind of talk is that?"

In from the soggy fields of the Mark comes a
cold drizzle blowing.

Russian cavalry are crossing the Kurfiirstendamm, driving a herd
of

cows to slaughter lowing and muddy, eyelashes beaded with
the fine

rain. In the Soviet sector, girls with rifles slung across bouncing wool­

covered breasts are waving the traffic around with bright orange pen­
nants. Bulldozers growling, trucks straining push over teetering walls,
and little kids cheer at each wet crash. Silver

tea-services ring on

fronded terraces where water drips, waiters in lean black coats wheel

and tilt their heads. An open victoria splashes by, two Russian officers

covered with medals sitting with their ladies in silk frocks
and great

floppy-brimmed hats trailing ribbons in the breeze. On
the river, ducks

with green heads glittering drift among
shock-waves of one another's

passage. Woodsmoke
scatters out the dented pipe of Margherita's

house. Inside the door, the first thing Slothrop sees is a high-heeled shoe

come flying straight at his head. He twitches out
of the way in time.

Margherita is kneeling on the bed, breathing rapidly, staring.
"You left

me."
"Had some chores." He rummages in covered cans on

a shelf over the

stove, finds dried clover tops for tea.

"But you left me alone." Her
hair blows in a gray-black cloud around

her face. She is prey to interior winds
he never felt.

"Only for a little while. Do you want
tea?" Starting outside with an

empty can.
"What's a little while? For God's sake, haven't you been

alone?"

"Sure." Dipping up water from a rain barrel
outside the door. She

lies, shaking, her face working, helpless.
Slothrop puts the can on to boil. "You

were sleeping pretty soundly.

Isn't it safe here? Is that what you mean?"

"Safe." A terrible laughter. He wishes she wouldn't. The
water has

begun to creak. "Do you know what they
were doing to me? What they

were piling on my breasts? The names they
were calling me?"

443



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"Who, Greta?"
"When you left I woke up. I called to you but you didn't come back.When they were sure you'd left, they came in. . . ."
"Why didn't you try to stay awake?"
"I was awake!" Sunlight, switched on, breaks through. At the harshlighting she turns her face away.
While he makes tea, she sits on the bed, cursing him in German andItalian, in a voice always just at the edge of falling apart. He hands her a

cup. She knocks it out of his hand.
"Look, take it easy, all right?" He sits down next to her and blows onhis tea. The cup she refused stays on its side where it is. The dark stain

steams into the wood planks. Faraway clover rises, disperses: a ghost.
. . After a while she takes his hand.
''I'm sorry I left you alone."
She starts to cry.
And cries all day. Slothrop falls asleep, keeps drifting up to her sobs,and to feel her, always in touch, some part of her, some part of him. . . .In a dream from this time, his father has come to find him. Slothrop hasbeen wandering at sundown by the Mungahannock, near a rotting oldpaper mill, abandoned back in the nineties. A heron rises in silhouette

against luminous and dying orange. "Son," a falling tower of words tum­
bling over and over themselves, "the president died three months ago."Slothrop stands and curses him. "Why didn't you tell me? Pop, I lovedhim. You only wanted to sell me to the IG. You sold me out." The oldman's eyes fill with tears. "Oh son ... " trying to take his hand. But thesky is dark, the heron gone, the empty skeleton of the mill and the darkincrease of the river saying it is time to go . . . then his father is gonetoo, no time to say good-by, though his face stays, Broderick who soldhim out, long after waking, and the sadness Slothrop brought into it,fool loudmouth kid. Margherita is leaning over him, brushing tears fromhis face with the tips of her nails. The nails are very sharp, and pauseoften when they approach his eyes.

"I'rn afraid," she whispers. "Everything. My face in the mirror­when I was a child, they said not to look in the mirror too often or I'd
see the Devil behind the glass . . . and . . ." glancing back at thewhite-flowered mirror behind them, "we have to cover it, please, can'twe cover it . . . that's where they . . . especially at night-""Easy." He moves to put as much of their bodies in touch as he can.He holds her. The tremor is strong, and maybe uncalmable: after awhile Slothrop has started to tremble too, in phase. "Please, take iteasy." Whatever possesses her needs touch, to drink touch insatiably.

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ner

The depth of this frightens him. He feels responsible for her safety,
and often trapped. At first they stay together days at a clip, till he has to

go out dealing, or foraging. He doesn't sleep much. He finds
himself by

reflex telling lies-"It's all right," "There's nothing to worry about."
Sometimes he manages to be alone out by the river, fishing with a piece
of string and one of her hairpins. They manage a fish a day, on lucky
days two. They are goofy fish, anything swimming in Berlin waters

these

days has to be everybody's last choice. When Greta cries in her sleep
for

longer than he can listen to, he has to wake her. They will try to talk,
or

to screw, though he's less and less often in the mood, and that makes her
worse because she feels he's rejecting her, which indeed he is.

Whippings seem to comfort her, and they let him off the hook.
Some­

times he's too tired even for that. She keeps provoking him. One night
he puts in front of her a broiled fish, an

unwholesome yellow loach with
brain damage. She can't eat it, she'll get sick.

"You have to eat."

She moves her head aside, first one side, then the other.

"Oh boy, what a sad story, listen cunt, you ain't the only
one's ever

suffered-you been out there lately?"
"Of course. I keep forgetting how you must have suffered."
"Shit you Germans are crazy, you all

think the world's against you."
"I'm not German," just remembering, "I'rn a Lombard."
"Close enough, sweetheart."
With a hiss, nostrils wide, she grabs the little table and wrenches it

away, plates, silverware, fish flying splot against the
wall where it com­

mences to drip down toward the woodwork, still, even
in death, getting

all the lousy breaks. They sit in their two straight chairs,
a meter and a

half of perilously empty space between. It is the warm,
romantic sum­

mer of '45, and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails:
what

Grandmother called "a crime of passion" has become, in the absence of

much passion over anything today, the technique
of preference in re­

solving interpersonal disputes.
"Clean it up."
She flicks a pale bitten thumbnail from one of her top

teeth and

laughs, that delightful Erdmann laugh. Slothrop, shaking,
is about to

say, "You don't know
how close you are-" Then, by chance, he hap­

pens to get a look at her face.
Of course she knows how close she is.

"O.K., O.K." He throws her underwear around
the room till he finds the

black girdle he's looking for. The metal clips
of the suspenders raise

dark little curved welts over fading earlier bruises on her buttocks
and

thighs. He has to draw blood before she
cleans up the fish. When

she's

445



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finished she kneels and kisses his boots. Not exactly the scenario she
wanted but close enough, sweetheart.

Getting closer every day, and he's afraid. He's never seen anythinglike it. When he goes out to the city she begs to be tied with her stock­
ings, star-fashion, to the bedposts. Sometimes she'll leave the house, and
stay away for days, coming home with stories about Negro MPs beatingher with nightsticks, screwing her in the asshole, how much she loved it,
hoping to trigger some race/sex reaction, something a little bizarre, alittle different. . . .

Whatever it is with her, he's catching it. Out in the ruins he sees
darkness now at the edges of all the broken shapes, showing from be­hind them. Light nests in Margherita's hair like black doves. He will
look at his chalk hands, and along the borders of each finger, darknesswill gutter and leap. In the sky over the Alexanderplatz he has seenOberst Enzian's KEZVH mandala, and the face of Tchitcherine on
more than one random snowdrop. Across the facade of the Titania­
palast, in red neon through a mist one night he saw DIE, SLOTHROP. One
Sunday out at Wannsee, an armada of sails all bent the same way, pa­tiently, dreamlike into the wind, passing forever against the other shore,
a crowd of little kids in soldier hats folded from old army maps plottedto drown and sacrifice him. He escaped only by murmuring Hauptstufethree times.

The house by the river is an enclosure that acts as a spring-suspensionfor the day and the weather, allowing only mild cycling of light andheat, down into evening, up again into morning to the midday peak butall damped to a gentle sway from the earthquake of the day outside.When Greta hears shots out in the increasingly distant streets, shewill think of the sound stages of her early career, and will take the ex­
plosions as cue calls for the titanic sets of her dreams to be smoothlyclogged with a thousand extras: meek, herded by rifle shots, ascendingand descending, arranged into patterns that will suit the Director's
ideas of the picturesque-a river of faces, made up yellow and white­lipped for the limitations of the film stock of the time, sweating yellowmigrations taken over and over again, fleeing nothing, escaping no­where....

It's early morning now. Slothrop's breath is white on the air. He is
just up from a dream. Part I of a poem, with woodcuts accompanyingthe text-a woman is attending a dog show which is also, in some way, astud service. She has brought her Pekingese, a female with a Sickeninglycute name, Mimsy or Goo-Goo or something, here to be serviced. She is
passing the time in a garden setting, with some other middle-class ladies

446

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like herself, when from some enclosure nearby she hears the sound of
her bitch, coming. The sound goes on and on for much longer than
seems appropriate, and she suddenly realizes that the sound is her own

voice, this interminable cry of dog-pleasure. The others, politely, are

pretending not to notice. She feels shame, but is helpless, driven now by
a need to go out and find other animal species to fuck. She sucks the

penis of a multicolored mongrel who has tried to mount her
in the

street. Out in a barren field near a barbed-wire fence, winter fires across

the clouds, a tall horse compels her to kneel, passively, and kiss his
hooves. Cats and minks, hyenas and rabbits, fuck her inside automo­

biles, lost at night in the forests, out beside a waterhole in the desert.
As Part II begins, she has discovered she's pregnant. Her husband, a

dumb, easygoing screen door salesman, makes an agreement with her:

her own promise is never stated, but in return, nine months from now,
he will take her where she wants to go. So it is that close to the end of

her term he is out on the river, an American river, in a rowboat, hauling
on the oars, carrying her on a journey. The key color in this section is vi­
olet.

Part III finds her at the bottom of the river. She has drowned. But all

forms of life fill her womb. "Using her as mermaid" (line 7), they trans­

port her down through these green river-depths. "It was down,
and out

again.! Old Squalidozzi, ploughman of the deep,! At
the end of his

day's sowing! Sees her verdigris belly among the weeds" (lines 10-13),
and brings her back up. He is a classically-bearded Neptune figure

with

an old serene face. From out of her body streams a Hood now of dif­
ferent creatures, octopuses, reindeer, kangaroos, "Who can say all the

life! That left her womb that day?" Squalidozzi can only catch a

glimpse of the amazing spill as he bears her back toward
the surface.

Above, it is a mild and sunlit green lake or pond, grassy at the banks,
shaded by willows. Insects whine and hover. The key

color now is

green. "And there as it broke
to sun! Her corpse found sleep in the

water! And in the summer depths! The creatures took their way! Each

to its proper love! In the height of afternoon! As the peaceful
river

went....
"

This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the

bank, drops his line into the Spree. Presently he lights up
an army ciga­

rette, and stays still then for a long while, as the fog
moves white

through the riverbank houses, and up above the warplanes go droning
somewhere invisible, and the dogs run barking in the back-streets.

447



��'
--

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D D D D D D D

When emptied of people, the interior is steel gray. When crowded, it's
green, a comfortable acid green. Sunlight comes in through portholes inthe higher of the bulkheads (the Riicksichtslos here lists at a permanentangle of 23°27'), and steel washbowls line the lower bulkheads. At the
end of each sub-latrine are coffee messes and hand-cranked peep shows.You'll find all the older, less glamorous, un-Teutonic-looking women inthe enlisted men's machines. The real stacked and more racially goldentomatoes go to the officers, natiirlich. This is some of that Nazi fanati­
cism.

The Riicksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that
of the specialist. This vessel here is a Toiletship, a triumph of the Ger­
man mania for subdividing. "If the house is organic," argued the craftyearly Toiletship advocates, "family lives in the house, family's organic,house is outward-and-visible sign, you see," behind their smoked glassesand under their gray crewcuts not believing a word of it, Machiavellian
and youthful, not quite ripe yet for paranoia, "and if the bathroom's
part of the house-house-is-organic! ha-hah," singing, chiding, pointingout the broad blond-faced engineer, hair parted in the middle and
slicked back, actually blushing and looking at his knees among the good­natured smiling teeth of his fellow technologists because he'd been
about to forget that point (Albert Speer, himself, in a gray suit with a
smudge of chalk on the sleeve, all the way in the back leaning akimbothe wall and looking remarkably like American cowboy actor HenryFonda, has already forgotten about the house being organic, and no­body points at him, RHIP). "Then the Toiletship is to the Kriegsmarineas the bathroom is to the house. Because the Navy is organic, we allknow that, ha-hah!" [General, or maybe Admiral, laughter.] TheRucksichtslos was intended to be the flagship of a whole Geschwader of
Toiletships. But the steel quotas were diverted clear out of the Navyover to the A4 rocket program. Yes, that does seem unusual, but Degen­kolb was heading up the Rocket Committee by then, remember, andhad both power and will to cut across all branches of the service. So the
Riicksichtslos is one-of-a-kind, old warship collectors, and if you're inthe market you better hurry 'cause GE's already been by to have a look.
Lucky the Bolshies didn't get it, huh, Charles? Charles, meantime, is
making on his clipboard what look like studious notes, but are really ob­servations of the passing scene such as They are all looking at me, or

448



Lieutenant Rinso is plotting to murder me, and of course the ever-relia­
ble He's one of them too and I'm going to get him some night, well by
now Charles's colleague here, Steve, has forgotten about the Russians,
and discontinued his inspection of a Hushing valve to take a really close
look at that Charles, you can't pick your search team, not if you're just
out of school and here I am, in the asshole of nowhere, not much more
than a gofer to this-what is he, a fag? What am I? What does GE want
me to be? Is this some obscure form of company punishment, even,
good God, permanent exile? I'm a career man, they can keep me out
here 20 years if they want, 'n' nobody'll ever know, they'll just keep
writing it off to overhead. Sheila! How'm I gonna tell Sheila? We're en­

gaged. This is her picture (hair waved like choppy seas falling down
Rita Hayworth style, eyes that if it were a color snap would have yellow
lids with pink rims, and a mouth like a hot dog bun on a billboard).
Took her out to Buf-falo Bayou,

Lookin' for a little fun-

Big old bayou mosquito, oh my you
Shoulda seen what he done!

Poked his head up, under her dress,
Give a little grin and, well I guess,
Things got rough on Buf-falo Bayou,
Skeeter turn yer meter, down,
All-right-now!

Ya ta, ta-ta, ya-ta-ta, ta-ta
Lookin' for a little fun,
Ev-rybody!
Oh ya know, when you're young and wholesome ["Ev'rybody,"

in this

case a Toiletshipload of bright hornrimmed shoe-pac'd young fellas from

Schenectady, are singin' along behind this recitative here] and a good church­

goin' kid, it's sure a mournful thing to get suddenly ganged by a pack of
those

Texas mosquitoes, it can set you back 20 years. Why, there's boys just
like you

wanderin' around, you may've seen one in the street today and never known it,
with the mind of a infant, just because those mosquitoes got to him and did their

unspeakable thing. And we've laid down insecticides, a-and bombed
the bayous

with citronella, and it's no good, folks. They breed faster'n we can kill 'em, and
are we just gonna tuck tail and let them be there out in

Buffalo Bayou where my

gal Sheila had to look at the loathsome behavior of those-things,
we gonna

allow them even to exist?

-And,
Things got rough on, Buf-falo Bayou,
Skeeter turn yer meter, down,

449



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Hubba hubba-
Skeeter turn yer meter, down!

Well, you can't help but wonder who's really the more paranoidof the two here. Steve's sure got a lot of gall badmouthing Charlesthat way. Among the hilarious graffiti of visiting mathematicians,

J __1_.- d (cabin) = log cabin + c = houseboat,(cabin)
that sort of thing, they go poking away down the narrow sausage-shapedlatrine now, two young/ old men, their feet fade and cease to ring on thesloping steel deck, their forms grow more transparent with distanceuntil it's impossible to see them any more. Only the empty compart­ment here, the S-curved spokes on the peep-show machines, the rows of
mirrors directly facing, reflecting each other, frame after frame, back in
a curve of very great radius. Out to the end of this segment of curve isconsidered part of the space of the Riicksichtslos. Making it a rather fatship. Carrying its right-of-way along with it. "Crew morale," whisperedthe foxes at the Ministry meetings, "sailors' superstitions. Mirrors athigh midnight. We know, don't we?"

The officers' latrines, by contrast, are done in red velvet. The decor is
1930S Safety Manual. That is, all over the walls, photograffiti, are pic­tures of Horrible Disasters in German Naval History. Collisions, maga­zine explosions, U-boat sinkings, just the thing if you're an officer tryingto take a shit. The Foxes have been busy. Commanding officers getwhole suites, private shower or sunken bathtub, manicurist (BDM vol­unteers, mostly), steam room, massage table. To compensate though, allthe bulkheads, and the overhead, are occupied by enormous photo­graphs of Hitler at various forms of play. The toilet paper! The toilet

paper is covered square after square with caricatures of Churchill, Ei­senhower, Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, there was even a Staff Caricatur­ist always on duty to custom-illustrate blank paper for those connois­
seurs who are ever in search of the unusual. Wagner and Hugo Wolfwere patched into speakers from up in the radio shack. Cigarettes werefree. It was a good life on board the Toiletship Riicksichtslos, as it pliedits way from Swinemiinde to Helgoland, anyplace it was needed, cam­ouflaged in shades of gray, turn-of-the-century style with sharp-shad­owed prows coming at you from midships so you couldn't tell which
way she was headed. Ship's company actually lived each man inside his
stall, each with his own key and locker, pin-ups and library shelves dec­orating the partitions ... and there were even one-way mirrors so youcould sit at your ease, penis dangling toward the ice-cold seawater in

450

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your bowl, listen to your VE-301 People's Receiver, and watch the
aft­

ernoon rush, the busy ringing of feet and talk, card games inside the

group toilets, dealers enthroned on real porcelain receiving visitors,
some of them lined up back outside the compartment (quiet queues, all

business, something like the queues in banks), toilet-lawyers dispensing
advice, all kinds of visitor coming and going, the U-boat crews hunching
in, twitching eyes nervously every second or two at the overhead,

de­

stroyer sailors larking at the troughs (gigantic troughs! running
the

whole beam of the ship, even, legend has it, off into mirror-space, big
enough to seat 40 or 50 aching assholes side by side, while a

constant

river of salt flushing water roared by underneath), lighting wads of toilet

paper, is what they especially liked to do, setting them flaming yellow
in

the water upstream and cackling with glee as one by one down the line
the sitters leaped off the holes screaming and clutching their

blistered

asses and inhaling the smell of singed pubic hair. Not that the crew
of

the Toiletship itself were above a practical joke now and then.
Who can

ever forget the time shipfitters Hopmann and Kreuss, at
the height of

the Ptomaine Epidemic of 1943, routed those waste lines into the
venti­

lation system of the executive officer's
stateroom? The exec, being an

old Toiletship hand, laughed good-naturedly at the
clever prank and

transferred Hopmann and Kreuss to icebreaker duty, where the
two

Scatotechnic Snipes went on to erect vaguely turd-shaped
monoliths of

ice and snow all across the Arctic. Now and then one shows up
on an

ice floe drifting south in ghostly grandeur, exciting the
admiration of all.

A good ship, a good crew, Merry Xmas and turn to.
Horst Achtfaden,

late of the Elektromechanische Werke, Karlshagen (another cover name

for the testing station at Peenemiinde), has really no time
for naval nos­

talgia. With the technical spies of three or four
nations after him, he has

had the disastrous luck to've been picked up by the Schwarzkommando,
who for all he knows now constitute a nation of their own. They have

interned him in the Chiefs' Head. He has watched voluptuous Gerda

and her Fur Boa go through the same number 178 times (he
has jimmied

the coin box and figured a way to override it) since they put
him in here,

and the thrill is gone. What do they want? Why are they occupying
a

derelict in the middle of the Kiel Canal? Why don't the British do some­

thing about this?
Look at it this way, Achtfaden. This Toiletship here's

a wind tunnel's

all it is. If tensor analysis is good enough for turbulence, it ought
to be

good enough for history. There ought to be nodes,
critical points ...

there ought to be super-derivatives of the
crowded and insatiate flow

that can be set equal to zero and these critical points
found.... 1904

451



was one of them-1g04 was when Admiral Rozhdestvenski sailed hisfleet halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur, which put yourpresent captor Enzian on the planet, it was the year the Germans all but
wiped out the Hereros, which gave Enzian some peculiar ideas aboutsurvival, it was the year the American Food and Drug people took thecocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic and death­oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WW II, and it
was the year Ludwig Prandtl proposed the boundary layer, which reallygot aerodynamics into business and put you right here, right now. 1904,Achtfaden. Ha, hal That's a better joke on you than any singed asshole,all right. Lotta good it does you. You can't swim upstream, not underthe present dispensation anyhow, all you can do is attach the number toit and suffer, Horst, fella. Or, if you can tear yourself away from Gerdaand her Fur Boa, here's a thought-find a non-dimensional coefficientfor yourself. This is a wind-tunnel you're in, remember? You're an aero­
dynamics man. So-

Coefficients, ja, [a, . . . Achtfaden flings himself disconsolately on thescarlet VD toilet way down at the very end of the row. He knows aboutcoefficients. In Aachen once, for a while, he and his colleagues couldstand in the forward watchtower: look out into the country of the bar­barians through Hermann and Wieselsberger's tiny window. Terrific
compressions, diamond shadows writhing like snakes. Often the stingwas bigger than the model itself-the very need to measure interferedwith the observations. That should have been a clue right there. No onewrote then about supersonic flow. It was surrounded by myth, and by apure, primitive terror. Professor Wagner of Darmstadt predicted that atspeeds above Mach 5, air would liquefy. Should pitch and roll frequen­cies happen to be equal, the resonance would throw the projectile intoviolent oscillations. It would corkscrew to destruction. "Lunar motion,"we called it. "Bingen pencils" we would call the helical contrails in thesky. Terrified. The Schlieren shadows danced. At Peenemiinde the testsection measured 40 X 40 em, about the size of a tabloid page. "Theypray not only for their daily bread," Stresemann had said, "but also fortheir daily illusion." We, staring through the thick glass, had our DailyShock-the only paper many of us read.

You come in-just hit town, here in the heart of downtown Peene­miinde, hey, whatcha do for fun around here? hauling your provincialvalise with a few shirts, a copy of the Handbuch, perhaps Cranz'sLehrbuch der Ballistik. You have memorized Ackeret, Busemann, vonKarman and Moore, some Volta Congress papers. But the terror will not
go away. This is faster than sound, than the words she spoke across the

452

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room so full of sunlight, the jazz band on the radio when you could not

sleep, the hoarse Heils among the pale generators and from the execu­
tive-crammed galleries overhead . . . the Comerians whistling from the

high ravines (terrific falls, steepness, whistling straight down the preci­
pice to a toy village lying centuries, miles below . . .) as you sat out

on

the counter of the KdF ship alone, apart from the maypole dancing on

, anQ! the
white deck, the tanned bodies full of beer and song, paunches in

'hr� sunsuits, and you
listened to Ur-Spanish, whistled not voiced, from the

mountains around Chipuda . . . Comera was the last piece of land Co­
lumbus touched before America. Did he hear them too, that last night?
Did they have a message for him? A warning? Could he understand the

prescient goatherds in the dark, up in the Canarian holly and the faya,
gone dead green in the last sunset of Europe?

In aerodynamics, because you've only got the thing on paper at first,

you use dimensionless
coefficients: ratios of this to that-centimeters,

grams, seconds neatly all canceling out above and below.
This allows

you to use models, arrange an airflow to
measure what you're interested

in, and scale the wind-tunnel results all the way up to reality, without

running into too many unknowns, because these
coefficients are good

for all dimensions. Traditionally they are named after people-Reyn­
olds, Prandtl, Peclet, Nusselt, Mach-and the question here is,

how

about an Achtfaden number? How's chances for that?

Not good. The parameters breed like mosquitoes in the bayou,
faster

than he can knock them off. Hunger, compromise, money, paranoia,

memory, comfort, guilt. Cuilt gets a minus sign
around Achtfaden

though, even if it is becoming quite a commodity
in the Zone. Remit­

tance men from all over the world will come to Heidelberg before long,
to major in guilt. There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially
to guilt enthusiasts. Extermination camps will be turned

into tourist at­

tractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves,
tickled and shivering with guilt. Sorry-not for Achtfaden here, shrug­

ging at all his mirror-to-mirror replications chaining
out to port and star­

board-he only worked with it up to the point where the air
was too

thin to make a difference. What it did after that was none of his respon­

sibility. Ask Weichensteller, ask Flaum, and Fibel-they
were the re­

entry people. Ask the guidance section, they pointed
it where it was

going....
"Do you find it a little schizoid,"

aloud now to all the Achtfaden

fronts and backs, "breaking a flight profile up into segments of responsi­

bility? It was half bullet, half arrow. It
demanded this, we didn't. So.

Perhaps you used a rifle, a radio, a typewriter.
Some typewriters in

453



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Whitehall, in the Pentagon, killed more civilians than our little A4 could
have ever hoped to. You are either alone absolutely, alone with your
own death, or you take part in the larger enterprise, and you share inthe deaths of others. Are we not all one? Which is your choice," Fahrin­
ger now, buzzing and flat through the filters of memory, "the little cart,
or the great one?" mad Fahringer, the only one of the Peenemiinde club
who refused to wear the exclusive pheasant-feather badge in his hat­band because he couldn't bring himself to kill, who could be seen eve­
nings on the beach sitting in full lotos position staring into the settingsun, and who was first at Peenemiinde to fall to the SS, taken away one
noon into the fog, his lab coat a flag of surrender, presently obscured bythe black uniforms, leather and metal of his escort. Leaving behind afew joss sticks, a copy of the Chinesische Blatter fur Wissenschaft undKunst, pictures of a wife and children no one had known about . . . was
Peenemiinde his mountain, his cell and fasting? Had he found his wayfree of guilt, fashionable guilt?

"Atmen . . . atman . . . not only to breathe, but also the soul, thebreath of God . . " one of the few times Achtfaden can remember
talking with him alone, directly, "atmen is a genuinely Aryan verb. Nowtell me about the speed of the exhaust jet."

"What do you want to know? 6500 feet per second."
"Tell me how it changes."
"It remains nearly constant, through the burning.""And yet the relative airpseed changes drastically, doesn't it? Zero upto Mach 6. Can't you see what's happening?"
"No, Fahringer."
"The Rocket creating its own great wind . . . no wind without both,Rocket and atmosphere . . . but inside the venturi, breath-furious and

blazing breath-always flows at the same unchanging speed . . . can't
you really see?"

Gibberish. Or else a koan that Achtfaden isn't equipped to master, atranscendent puzzle that could lead him to some moment of lightalmost as good as:
-What is it that flies?
-Los!

Rising from the Wasserkuppe, rivers Ullster and Haune tilting aroundinto map-shapes, green valleys and mountains, the four he has leftbelow gathering up the white shock cords, only one looking up, shadinghis eyes-Bert Fibel? but what does the name matter, from this van­
tage? Achtfaden goes looking for the thunderstorm-under, through the

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thunder playing to a martial tune inside his head-crowding soon in

gray cliffs to the right, the strokes of lightning banging all the mountains
blue, the cockpit briefly filled with the light . . . right at the edge. Right
here, at the interface, the air will be rising. You follow the edge of the
storm, with another sense-the flight-sense, located nowhere, filling all

your nerves . . . as long as you stay always right at the edge between
fair lowlands and the madness of Donar it does not fail you, whatever it

is that flies, this carrying drive toward-is it freedom? Does no one rec­

ognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface
of the

thunder?
No time to work out puzzles. Here come the Schwarzkommando.

Achtfaden has wasted too much time with luscious Gerda, with memo­

ries. Here they come clattering down the ladders, fast oogabooga talk he
can't even guess at, it's a linguistic wilderness here, and he's afraid.
What do they want? Why won't they leave him in peace-they have
their victory, what do they want with poor Achtfaden?

They want the Schwarzgerat. When Enzian actually pronounces
the

word aloud, it's already redundant. It was there in his bearing, the line
of his mouth. The others back him, rifles slung, half a dozen African

faces, mobbing the mirrors with their darkness, their vein-heavy
red­

white-and-blue eyes.
"I only was assigned to part of it. It was trivial. Really."
"Aerodynamics isn't trivial," Enzian calm, unsmiling.
"There were others from Gessner's section. Mechanical design. I al­

ways worked out of Prof.-Dr. Kurzweg's shop."
"Who were the others?"

"I don't remember."

ro�

"So."
"Don't hit me. Why should I hide anything? It's the truth. They kept

us cut off. I didn't know anybody at Nordhausen. Just a few in my own
work section. I swear it. The S-Gerat people were all strangers to me.
Until that first day we all met with Major Weissmann, I'd never

seen

any of them. No one used
real names. We were given code-names.

Characters from a movie, somebody said. The other aerodynamics peo­

ple were 'Sporri' and 'Hawasch.' I was called
'Wenk.'

"

"What was your job?"
"Weight control. All they wanted from me was the

shift in CG for a

device of a given weight. The weight was classified top
secret. Forty­

something kilos. 45? 46?"
"Station numbers," raps Andreas from over Enzian's

shoulder.

eu

455



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.........

"I can't remember. It was in the tail section. I do remember the load
was assymmetrical about the longitudinal axis. Toward Vane III. That
was the vane used for yaw control-"

"We know that."
"You'd have to talk to 'Sporri' or 'Hawasch.' They'd be the ones who

worked that problem out. Talk to Guidance." Why did I say-
"Why did you say that?"
"No, no, it wasn't my job, that's all, guidance, warhead, propulsion
.. ask them. Ask the others."
"You meant something else. Who worked on guidance?""I told you, I didn't know any of their names." The dust-covered caf­

eteria in the last days. The machinery in the adjoining halls, that oncebattered eardrums pitiless as a cold-chisel day and night, is silenced.The Roman numerals on the time clocks stare from the walls of the
bays, among the glass Windowpanes. Telephone jacks on black rubber
cords dangle from brackets overhead, each connection hanging over its
own desk, all the desks perfectly empty, covered with salt-dust sifted
from the ceiling, no phones to plug in, no more words to be said. . . .
The face of his friend across the table, the drawn and sleepless face nowtoo pointed, too lipless, that once vomited beer on Achtfaden's hikingboots, whispering now, "I couldn't go with von Braun ... not to the
Americans, it would only just keep on the same way . . . I want it reallyto be over, that's all ... good-by, 'Wenk.' "

"Stuff him down the waste lines," Andreas suggests. They are all soblack, so sure. . . .
I must be the last one . . . somebody's sure to have him by now . . .what can these Africans do with a name . . . they could have got itfrom anybody. . . .
"He was a friend. We knew each other before the war, at Darm­stadt."
"We're not going to hurt him. We're not going to hurt you. We wantthe S-Gerat."
"Narrisch. Klaus Narrisch." A new parameter for his self-coefficient

now: betrayal.
As he leaves the Riicksichtslos, Achtfaden can hear behind him,metallic, broadcasting from another world, ripped by static, a radiovoice. "Oberst Enzian. M' okamanga. M' okamanga. M' okamanga."There is urgency and gravity in the word. He stands by the canalside,

among steel wreckage and old men in the dusk, waiting for a directionto go. But where is the electric voice now that will ever call forhim?

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They have set out by barge along the Spree-Oder Canal, headed at last
for Swinemiinde, Slothrop to see what Geli Tripping's clew will lead
him to in the way of a Schwarzgerat, Margherita to rendezvous with a

yachtful of refugees from the Lublin regime, among whom ought to be
her daughter Bianca. Stretches of the canal are still blocked-in the

night Russian demolition crews can be heard blasting away the
wrecks

with TNT-but Slothrop and Greta can summon, like dreamers, draft
shallow enough to clear whatever the War has left in their way. Off and
on it rains. The sky will begin to cloud up about noon, turning the color
of wet cement-then wind, sharpening, colder, then rain that must be
often at the edge of sleet, blowing at them head-on up the canal. They
shelter under tarps, among bales and barrels, tar, wood and

straw

smells. When the nights are clear, peepers-and-frogs nights, star-streaks
and shadows at canalside will set travelers' eyes to jittering. Willows

line the banks. At midnight coils of fog rise to dim out even the glow of
the bargee's pipe, far away up, or down, the dreaming convoy.

These

nights, fragrant and grained as pipesmoke, are tranquil and good
for

sleep. The Berlin madness is behind, Greta seems less afraid, perhaps
all

they needed was to be on the move. . . .
But one afternoon, sliding down the long mild slope of the Oder to­

ward the Baltic Sea, they catch sight of a little red and white resort

town, wiped through in broad smudges by the War, and she
clutches to

Slothrop's arm.
''I've been here ...

"

"Yeah?"

"Just before the Polish invasion . . . 1 was here with Sigmund
. . . at

the spa....
"

On shore, behind cranes and steel railings, rise fronts of what were

restaurants, small factories, hotels, burned now, windowless, powdered
with their own substance. The name of the town is Bad Karma.

Rain

from earlier in the day has streaked the walls, the pinnacles of waste
and the coarse-cobbled lanes. Children and old men stand on

shore

waiting to take lines and warp the barges in. Black dumplings
of smoke

are floating up out of the stack of a white river steamer. Shipfitters
are

slamming inside its hull. Greta stares at it. A pulse
is visible in her

throat. She shakes her head. "I thought it was Bianca's ship, but it

isn't."

i11

457



In close to the quay, they swing ashore, grabbing on to an iron ladder
held in the old stone by rusted bolts, each one staining the wall down­
ward in a wet sienna fan. On Margherita's jacket a pink gardenia has
begun to shake. It isn't the wind. She keeps saying, "I have to see.... "

Old men are leaning on railings, smoking pipes, watching Greta or
looking out at the river. They wear gray clothes, wide-bottom trousers,
wide-brim hats with rounded crowns. The market square is busy and
neat: tram tracks gleam, there's a smell of fresh hosing down. In the
ruins lilacs bleed their color, their surplus life out over the broken stone
and brick.

Except for a few figures in black, sitting out in the sun, the Spa itself
is deserted. Margherita by now is spooked as badly as she ever was in
Berlin. Slothrop tags along, in his Rocketman turnout, feeling burdened.The Sprudelhof is bounded on one side by a sand-colored arcade: sand
columns and brown shadows. A strip just in front is planted to cy­
presses. Fountains in massive stone bowls are leaping: jets 20 feet high,whose shadows across the smooth paving of the courtyard are thick and
nervous.

But who's that, standing so rigid by the central spring? And why has
Margherita turned to stone? The sun is out, there are others watching,but even Slothrop now is bristling along his back and flanks, chills flung
one on the fading cluster of another, up under each side of his jaw ...the woman is wearing a black coat, a crepe scarf covering her hair, theflesh of thick calves showing through her black stockings as nearly pur­ple, she is only leaning over the waters in a very fixed way and watchingthem as they try to approach . . . but the smile . . . across ten meters
of swept courtyard, the smile growing confident in the very white face,all the malaise of a Europe dead and gone gathered here in the eyesblack as her clothing, black and lightless. She knows them. Greta has
turned, and tries to hide her face in Slothrop's shoulder. "By the well,"is she whispering this? "at sundown, that woman in black. ... "

"Come on. It's all right." Back to Berlin talk. "She's just a patienthere." Idiot, idiot-before he can stop her she's pulled away, some
quiet, awful cry in the back of her throat, and turned and begun to run,a desperate tattoo of high heels across the stone, into the shadowed
arches of the Kurhaus.

"Hey," Slothrop, feeling queasy, accosts the woman in black.
"What's the big idea, lady?"

But her face has changed by now, it is only the face of another
woman of the ruins, one he would have ignored, passed over. Shesmiles, all right, but in the forced and business way he knows. "Zigaret-

458

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ten, bitte?" He gives her a long stub he's been saving, and goes looking
for Margherita.

He finds the arcade empty. All the doors of the Kurhaus are locked.

Overhead passes a skylight of yellow panes, many of them fallen out.
Down the corridor, fuzzy patches of afternoon sun stagger along, full of
mortar dust. He climbs a broken flight of steps that end in the sky. Odd
chunks of stone clutter the way. From the landing at the top, the Spa
stretches to country distances: handsome trees, graveyard clouds, the
blue river. Greta is nowhere in sight. Later he will figure out where it
was she went. By then they will be well on board the Anubis, and it will

only make him feel more helpless.
He keeps looking for her till the darkness is down and he's come back

by the river again. He sits at an open-air cafe strung with yellow lights,
drinking beer, eating spaetzle and soup, waiting. When she materializes
it is a shy fade-in, as Gerhardt von Coll must have brought her on a time
or two, not moving so much as Slothrop's own vantage swooping to her
silent closeup stabilized presently across from him, finishing his beer,

bumming a cigarette. Not only does she avoid the subject of the
woman

by the spring, she may have lost the memory already.
"I went up in the observatory," is what she has to say finally, "to

look

down the river. She's coming. I saw the boat she's on. It's only a kilome­
ter away."

"The what now?"

"Bianca, my child, and my friends. I thought they'd have been
in

Swinemiinde long ago. But then nobody's on timetables any
more....

"

Sure enough, after two more bitter cups of acorn coffee and
another

cigarette, here comes a cheerful array of lights, red, green, and white,
down the river, with the faint wheeze of an accordion, the thump of a

string bass, and the sound of women laughing. Slothrop
and Greta walk

down to the quay, and through mist now beginning to seep up
off the

river they can make out an ocean-going yacht, nearly the
color of the

mist, a gilded winged jackal under the bowsprit, the
weather-decks

crowded with chattering affluent in evening dress. Several people have

spotted Margherita. She waves, and they point or wave back,
and call

her name. It is a moving village: all summer it has been sailing these
lowlands just as Viking ships did a thousand years ago, though passively,
not marauding: seeking an escape it has not yet defined clearly.

The boat comes in to the quay, the crew lower an access
ladder. Smil­

ing passengers halfway down are already stretching
out gloved and

ringed hands to Margherita.

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459



"Are you coming?"
"Uh . . . Well, should I?"
She shrugs and turns her back, steps gingerly off the landing and onboard, skirt straining and glossy a moment in the yellow light from thecafe. Slothrop dithers, goes to follow her-at the last moment some

joker pulls the ladder up and the boat moves away, Slothrop screams, I
�loses his balance and falls in the river. Head first: the Rocketman helmet

is pulling him straight down. He tugs it off and comes up, sinuses burn-
ing and vision blurred, the white vessel sliding away, though the churn-
ing screws are moving his direction, beginning to suck at the cape, so hehas to get rid of that, too. He backstrokes away and then cautiouslyaround the counter, lettered in black: ANUBIS SWinoujScie, trying tokeep away from those screws. Down the other side he spots a piece ofline hanging, and manages to get over there and grab hold. The band upon deck is playing polkas. Three drunken ladies in tiaras and pearl chok­ers are lounging at the lifelines, watching Slothrop struggle up the rope."Let's cut it," yells one of them, "and see him fall in again!" "Yes,let's!" agree her companions. Jesus Christ. One of them has produced ahuge meat cleaver, and is winding up all right, amid much vivacious

laughing, at about which point somebody grabs hold of Slothrop's ankle.He looks down, observes sticking out a porthole two slender wrists insilver and sapphires, lighted from inside like ice, and the oily riverrushing by underneath.
"In here." A girl's voice. He slides back down while she tugs on his I ufeet, till he's sitting in the porthole. From above comes a heavy thump,the rope goes falling and the ladies into hysterics. Slothrop squirms oninside, water squeegeeing off, falls into an upper bunk next to a girlmaybe 18 in a long sequined gown, with hair blonde to the point of purewhiteness, and the first cheekbones Slothrop can recall getting a hardonlooking at. Something has definitely been happening to his brain outhere, all right. . . .
"Uh-"
"Mmm." They look at each other while he continues to drip water allover. Her name, it turns out, is Stefania Procalowska. Her husband An­toni is owner of the Anubis here.
Well, husband, all right. "Look at this," sez Slothrop, "I'm soakingwet."
"I noticed. Somebody's evening clothes ought to fit you. Dry off, I'llgo see what I can promote. You can use the head if you want, every­thing's there."
He strips off the rest of the Rocketman rig, takes a shower, using

460

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lemon verbena soap in which he finds a couple of Stefania's white pubic
hairs, and is shaving when she gets back with dry clothes for him.

"So you're with Margherita."
"Not sure about that 'with.' She find that kid of hers?"

"Oh indeed-they're already deep into it with Karel. This month he's

posing as a film producer. You know Karel. And of course she wants to

get Bianca into the films worse than anything."
"Uh ...

"

Stefania shrugs a lot, and every sequin dances. "Margherita wants her
to have a legitimate career. It's guilt. She never felt her own career was

anything more than a string of dirty movies. I suppose you heard about
how she got pregnant with Bianca."

"Max Schlepzig, or something."
"Or something, right. You never saw Alpdriicken? In that one scene,

after the Grand Inquisitor gets through, the jackal men come in to rav­
ish and dismember the captive baroness. Von Coll let the cameras run

right on. The footage got cut out for the release prints of course,
but

found its way into Coebbels's private collection. I've seen it-it's fright­
ening. Every man in the scene wears a black hood, or an

animal mask

. . . back at Bydgoszcz it became an amusing party game to speculate
on who the child's father was. One has to pass the time. They'd run the
film and ask Bianca questions, and she had to answer yes or no."

"Yup." Slothrop goes on dousing his face with bay rum.
"Oh, Margherita had her corrupted long before she came to stay with

us. I wouldn't be surprised if little Bianca sleeps with Karel tonight.
Part of breaking into the business, isn't it? Of course it will have to

be

all business-that's the least a mother can do. Margherita's problem was
that she always enjoyed it too much, chained up in those torture

rooms.

She couldn't enjoy it any other way. You'll see. She and
Thanatz. And

whatever Thanatz brought in his valise."
"Thanatz.

"

"Ah, she didn't tell you." Laughing. "Miklos Thanatz, her husband.

They get together off and on. Toward the end of the war they
had a lit­

tle touring show for the boys at the front-a lesbian couple,
a dog, a

trunk of leather costumes and implements, a small band. They enter­

tained the SS troops. Concentration camps . . . the
barbed-wire circuit,

you know. And then later, in Holland, out
at the rocket sites. This is the

first time since the surrender they've been together, so I wouldn't actu­

ally expect to see too much of her. . . ."
"Oh, yeah, well, I didn't know that." Rocket sites? The

hand of Provi­

dence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.



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"While they were away, they left Bianca with us, at Bydgoszcz. Shehas her bitchy moments but she's really a charming child. I never
played the father game with her. I doubt she had a father. It was par­
thenogenesis, she's pure Margherita, if pure is the word I want."

The evening clothes fit perfectly. Stefania leads Slothrop up a com­
panionway and out on deck. The Anubis moves now through starlit
countryside, the horizon broken now and then by silhouettes of a wind­
mill, haycocks, a row of pig arks, some line of trees set on a low hill for
the wind. . . . There are ships we can dream across terrible rapids,
against currents . . . our desire is wind and motor. . . .

"Antoni." She has brought Slothrop to an enormous figure in Polish
cavalry fatigues and with a lot of maniacal teeth.

"American?" pumping Slothrop's hand. "Bravo. You nearly completethe set. We are the ship of all nations now. We've even got a Japanese
on board. An ex-liaison man from Berlin who didn't quite get out by
way of Russia. You'll find a bar on the next deck. Anything wanderingaround"-hugging Stefania to him-" except this one, is fair game."

Slothrop salutes, gathers they would like to be alone, and finds the
ladder to the bar. The bar is hung with festive garlands of flowers and
light bulbs, and crowded with dozens of elegantly-decked guests, whohave just now, with the band accompanying, broken into this up-tempo
song:

WELCOME ABOARD!

Welcome aboard, gee, it's a fabulous or-gy
That you just dropped in on, my friend­
We can't recall just how it star-ted,
But there's only one way it can end!
The behavior is bestial, hardly Marie-Celestial,
But you'll fit right in with the crowd,
If you jettison all of those prob-lems,
And keep it hysterically loud!
There are mo-thers, with their lo-vers,
Stealing rot-ters, from their daught-ers,
Big erec-tions, predilec-tions
That you wouldn't believe,
So put your brain on your sleeve,
And come a-

board the Titanic, things'll really be manic,

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Folks'll panic the second that sunken iceberg is knocked,
Naughty 'n' noisy, and very Walpurgisnacht,
That's how the party will end,
So-welcome aboard, welcome aboard, my friend!

Well here's couples moaning together in the lifeboats, a drunk's gone
to sleep in the awning over Slothrop's head, fat fellows in white gloves
with pink magnolias in their hair are dancing tummy-to-tummy and
murmuring together in Wendish. Hands grope down inside satin gowns.
Waiters with brown skins and doe eyes circulate with trays on which

you are likely to find any number of substances and paraphernalia. The
band is playing a medley of American fox-trots. The Baron de Mallakas­
tra sifts a sinister white powder into the highball of Mme. Sztup. It is
the same old shit that was going on back at Raoul de la Perlimpinpin's
place, and for all Slothrop knows it's the same party.

He gets a glimpse of Margherita and her daughter, but there is a den­

sity of orgy-goers around them that keeps him at a distance. He
knows

he's vulnerable, more than he should be, to pretty little girls, so he reck­
ons it's just as well, because that Bianca's a knockout, all right: 11 or 12,
dark and lovely, wearing a red chiffon gown, silk stockings and high­
heeled slippers, her hair swept up elaborate and flawless and interwo­
ven with a string of pearls to show pendant earrings of crystal twinkling
from her tiny lobes . . . help, help. Why do these things have to keep
coming down on him? He can see the obit now in Time magazine­
Died, Rocketman, pushing 30, in the Zone, of lust.

The woman who tried to chop Slothrop down with the cleaver is now
seated on a bitt, holding a half-liter of some liquid which has already
seeped into and begun to darken the orchid garnishing it. She is telling
everybody a story about Margherita. Her hair has been

combed or

styled in a way that makes it look like a certain cut of meat. Slothrop's
drink, nominally Irish whisky and water, arrives and he moves in to

lis­

ten.
"

... her Neptune is afflicted. Whose isn't? some will ask. Ah. But
as

residents on this planet, usually. Greta lived, most of the time, on Nep­
tune-her affliction was more direct, purer, clearer than we know it

here.
"She found Oneirine on a day when her outpost in England, the usual

connection for Chlordyne, failed. Beside the Thames, as geraniums of

light floated in the sky too slow to tell-brass light,
tanned-skin and

mellow peach light, stylized blooms being drafted on and on among
the

clouds, to fade here, to regenerate there-as this happened to the day's

463

It(



light, he fell. A fall of hours, less extravagant than Lucifer's, but in the
same way part of a deliberate pattern. Greta was meant to find Oneir­
ine. Each plot carries its signature. Some are God's, some masquerade
as God's. This is a very advanced kind of forgery. But still there's the
same meanness and mortality to it as a falsely made check. It is only
more complex. The members have names, like the Archangels. More or
less common, humanly-given names whose security can be broken, and
the names learned. But those names are not magic. That's the key, that's
the difference. Spoken aloud, even with the purest magical intention,
they do not work.

"So he fell from their grace. So there was no Chlordyne. So she hap­
pened to meet V-Mann Wimpe in the street, in Berlin, under a theatre
marquee whose sentient bulbs may have looked on, a picturesque arrayof extras, witnesses to grave and historic encounters. So she had come to
Oneirine, and the face of her afflicted home planet was rearranged inthe instant."

Oneirine J amf Imipolex A4. -. . .
"That silly bitch," observes a voice at Slothrop's elbow, "tells it worse

every time."

"Beg pardon?" Slothrop looks around and finds Miklos Thanatz, full
beard, eyebrows feathering out like trailing edges of hawks' wings,
drinking absinthe out of a souvenir stein on which, in colors made
ghastly by the carnival lights on deck, bony and giggling Death is about
to surprise two lovers in bed.

There is no problem steering him onto the subject of the Rocket-"I
think of the A4," sez he, "as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of
Herods out to destroy it in infancy-Prussians, some of whom in their
innermost hearts still felt artillery to be a dangerous innovation. If you'dbeen out there ... inside the first minute, you saw, you grew docileunder its . . . it really did possess a Max Weber charisma . . . some joy­ful-and deeply irrational-force the State bureaucracy could never
routinize, against which it could not prevail . . . they did resist it, but
they also allowed it to happen. We can't imagine anyone choosing a rolelike that. But every year, somehow, their numbers grow."But the tour with General Kammler's rocketeers is what Slothrop,perversely, wants-wants?-to know about, "Well I've been to that
Nordhausen, sure, seen the bits and pieces. But never a fully-assembledA4. That must really be something, huh?"

Thanatz is holding out his stein for a refill. The waiter, deadpan, drib­bles water down a spoon to turn the absinthe milky green while Tha-
464



natz caresses his buttocks, then moves away. It is not clear if Thanatz

has been thinking about his answer. "Yes, fueled, alive, ready for firing
... fifty feet high, trembling ... and then the fantastic, virile roar.
Your ears nearly burst. Cruel, hard, thrusting into the Virgin-blue robes
of the sky, my friend. Oh, so phallic. Wouldn't you say?"

"Vh ...
"

"Hmm, ja, you would have got on with them out at the batteries, they
were sedate, like you. More studious than your infantry or Panzer types,
attentive to the point of fanaticism. Oh, with notable exceptions of

course. One lives for notable exceptions. . . . There was a boy." Drunk
reminiscence? Is he faking this? "His name was Gottfried. God's peace,
which I trust he's found. For us I hold no such hope. We are weighed in

the balance and found wanting, and the Butcher has had His thumb in

the scales ... you think I'm jaded. So did I, until that terrible week. It

was a time of dissolution, falling back across the Niedersachsisch oil
fields. Then I understood I was but a dewy child. The battery com­
mander had become a screaming maniac. He called himself 'Blicero.'

He'd begun to talk the way the captain in Wozzeck sings,
his voice

breaking suddenly up into the higher registers of hysteria. Things
were

falling apart, and he reverted to some ancestral
version of himself,

screamed at the sky, sat hours in a rigid trance, with his eyes rolled
clear

up into his head. Breaking without warning
into that ungodly colora­

tura. White blank ovals, the eyes of a statue, with the gray rain
behind

them. He had left 1945, wired his nerves back into the pre-Christian
earth we fled across, into the Vrstoff of the primitive German, God's

poorest and most panicked creature. You and I perhaps
have become

over the generations so Christianized, so enfeebled by Gesellschaft
and

our obligation to its celebrated 'Contract,' which never
did exist, that

we, even we, are appalled by reversions like that. But deep, out of its
si­

lence, the Urstoff wakes, and sings ... and on the last day ...
it is

shameful ... through that whole terrible day, I had an
erection ...

don't judge me . . . it was out of my control . . . everything
was out of

control-"

About here they are interrupted by Margherita and Bianca, playing

stage mother and reluctant child. Whispers
to the bandleader, funseek­

ers crowding eagerly around a cleared space where
Bianca now stands

pouting, her little red frock halfway up her
slender thighs, with black

lace petticoats peeping from beneath the hem, surely
it's going to be

something sophisticated, bigcity, and wicked,
but what's she doing with

her finger posed aside of one dimpled cheek like
this-at which point

465



comes the band's intro, and pre-vomit saliva begins to gush into Slo­
throp's mouth, along with a horrible doubt into his brain about how he
is going to make it through the next few minutes.

Not only is her song "On the Good Ship Lollipop," but she is also
now commencing, without a trace of shame, to grunt her way throughit, in perfect mimickry of young Shirley Temple-each straining baby­
pig inflection, each curl-toss, unmotivated smile, and stumbling toe-tap
. . . her delicate bare arms have begun to grow fatter, her frock shorter
-is somebody fooling with the lights? But the billowings of asexual
child-fat have not changed her eyes: they remain as they were, mock­
ing, dark, her own. . . .

Much applause and alcoholic bravo-ing when it's finally over. Tha­
natz abstains, fatherly head wagging, great eyebrows in a frown. "She's
never going to be a woman if this goes on. . . ."

"And now, liebling," Margherita with a rare, and somewhat phony,smile, "let's hear 'Animal Crackers in My Soup'!""
'Super Animals in My Crack,'

"

hollers a humorist from the crowd.
"No," groans the child.
"Bianca-"
"You bitch," spike heel ringing on the steel deck. It's an act.

"Haven't you humiliated me enough?"
"Not nearly enough," pouncing on her daughter, grabbing her by thehair and shaking her. The little girl has fallen to her knees, struggling,trying to get away.
"Oh, delightful," cries the meat-cleaver lady, "Greta's going to pun­ish her."
"How I'd like to," murmurs a striking mulatto girl in a strapless gown,pushing forward to watch, tapping Slothrop's cheek with her jeweledcigarette holder as satin haunches whisper across his thigh. Someone has

provided Margherita with a steel ruler and an ebony Empire chair. Shedrags Bianca across her lap, pushing up frock and petticoats, yankingdown white lace knickers. Beautiful little-girl buttocks rise like moons.The tender crevice tightens and relaxes, suspender straps shift andstretch as Bianca kicks her legs, silk stockings squeak together, eroticand audible now that the group have fallen silent and found the me­
dium of touch, hands reaching out to breasts and crotches, Adam's ap­ples bobbing, tongues licking lips . . . where's the old masochist and
monument Slothrop knew back in Berlin? It's as if Greta is now re­
leasing all the pain she's stored up over the past weeks onto her child'snaked bottom, the skin so finely grained that white centimeter markingsand numerals are being left in mirror-image against the red stripes with

466

........... - - ----_ .. -,. _.. -

,.
- . -

�:��



each blow, crisscrossing, building up a skew matrix of pain on Bianca's
flesh. Tears go streaming down her inverted and reddening face, mixing
with mascara, dripping onto the pale lizard surfaces of her mother's
shoes . . . her hair has loosened and spills to the deck, dark, salted with

the string of little seed pearls. The mulatto girl has backed up against
Slothrop, reaching behind to fondle his erection, which has nothing

be­

tween it and the outside but somebody's loosely-pleated tuxedo trou­

sers. Everyone is kind of aroused, Thanatz is sitting up on the bar
hav­

ing his own as yet unsheathed penis
mouthed by one of the

white-gloved Wends. Two of the waiters kneel on deck lapping
at the

juicy genitals of a blonde in a wine velvet frock,
who meantime is lick­

ing ardently the tall and shiny French heels of an elderly lady
in lemon

organza busy fastening felt-lined silver manacles to the
wrists of her es­

cort, a major of the Yugoslav artillery in dress uniform, who
kneels with

nose and tongue well between the bruised buttocks
of a long-legged

ballerina from Paris, holding up her silk skirt for him with docile finger­

tips while her companion, a tall Swiss
divorcee in tight-laced leather

corselette and black Russian boots, undoes the top of her friend's gown
and skillfully begins to lash at her bared breasts with the

stems of half a

dozen roses, red as the beads of blood which spring up and soon
are

shaking off the ends of her stiff nipples to splash
into the eager mouth of

another Wend who's being jerked off by a retired Dutch banker sitting
on the deck, shoes and socks just removed by two adorable schoolgirls,
twin sisters in fact, in identical dresses of flowered voile, with each

of

the banker's big toes inserted now into a downy little furrow
as they lie

forward along his legs kissing his shaggy stomach, pretty
twin bottoms

arched to receive in their anal openings the cocks of the two waiters

who have but lately been, if you recall, eating that juicy
blonde in that

velvet dress back down the Oder River a ways. . . .

As for Slothrop, he ends up coming between the
round shuddering

tits of a Viennese girl with hair the color of a lioness's pelt and
emerald

eyes with lashes thick as fur, his sperm surging
out into the hollow of

her arched throat and among all the diamonds of
her necklace, burning

agelessly through the haze of his seed-and it feels,
at least, like every­

body came together, though how could that be?
He does notice that the

only person not connected, aside from Antoni
and Stefania, seems to be

the Jap liaison man, who's been sitting alone,
one deck up, watching.

Not masturbating or anything, just watching, watching
the river, the

night ... well, they're pretty inscrutable, you know,
those Japs.

There is a general withdrawing from orifices after
a while, drinking,

doping and gabbing resume, and many begin
to drift away to catch

467



some sleep. Here and there a couple or threesome linger. A C-melodysaxophone player has the bell of his instrument snuggled between the
widespread thighs of a pretty matron in sunglasses, yes sunglasses atnight, this is some degenerate company Slothrop has fallen in with all
right-the saxman is playing "Chattanooga Choo Choo," and those vi­
brations are just driving her wild. A girl with an enormous glass dildo in­side which baby piranhas are swimming in some kind of decadent laven­
der 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 ofoctogenarians who wear only jackboots and are carrying on some sort oftechnical discussion in what seems to be ecclesiatical Latin.

The sun is still hours away, down the vast unreadable underslope ofRussia. Fog closes in, and the engines slow. Wrecks slide away underthe keel of the white ship. Springtime corpses caught in the wreckagetwist 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 Swinemiinde.

D D D D D D D

Slothrop here's been dreaming about Llandudno, where he spent arainy 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 noisyas hell. Sunlight filters down the hatches, so that must mean it's morn­
ing. 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 anaffair with Thanatz. Madness, of course we're good friends, but that's all

. if she paid any attention to me she'd know that."
468



"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 di­

ameter 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

Alencon lace. The bare backs of her legs come brushing softly
across

Slothrop's face. He starts taking giant,
ass-enthusiast bites now, mean­

time reaching around to play with cuntlips and clit,
Bianca's little feet

shifting in a nervous dance and scarlet nails digging sharp
as needles un­

derneath 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 swallow­

ing, 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 set­

tles slow, excruciating till he fills her, stuffs
her full. . . .

Now something, oh, kind of funny happens
here. Not that Slothrop is

469



��'_'---:ft___
I

/� ---
l .

really aware of it now, while it's going on-but later on, it will occur tohim 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, insidethe metropolitan organ entirely, all other colonial tissue forgotten andleft to fend for itself, his arms and legs it seems woven among vesselsand ducts, his sperm roaring louder and louder, getting ready to erupt,somewhere below his feet ... maroon and evening cuntlight reacheshim in a single ray through the opening at the top, refracted through theclear juices flowing up around him. He is enclosed. Everything is aboutto come, come incredibly, and he's helpless here in this exploding em­prise . . . red flesh echoing . . . an extraordinary sense of waiting torise....
She posts, his pretty horsewoman, face to the overhead, quivering upand down, thightop muscles strung hard as cable, baby breasts workingout 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 takinghim 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, whatcould it be but the kingly voice of the Aggregat itself?
Somewhere in their lying-still are her heart, buffeting, a chickadee inthe snow, her hair, draping and sheltering both their faces, little tongueat his temples and eyes on and on, silk legs rubbing his flanks, coolleather of her shoes against his legs and ankles, shoulderblades risinglike 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 hidingout.
"Sure. But we'll have to get off sometime, Swinemiinde, 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 make­

up 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 goodreason. Sure he'll stay for a while, but eventually he'll go, and for this heis to be counted, after all, among the Zone's lost. The Pope's staff is al­

ways going to remain barren, like Slothrop's own unflowering cock.So when he disentangles himself, it is extravagantly. He creates abureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visasstamped with love-bites . . . but coming back is something he's already
470



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 wrin­

kling 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 re­

ality than anything that might come up by surprise, by Murphy's Law,
where the salvation could be. . . . Lost, again and again, past poor dam­

busted 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 re­

members, 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 pre­

cisely 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

471



" ,... .1. I I
��---

- - /. . �.-
,/It .

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 sinis­
ter 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-wasSundial. The frames never enclosed him-or it-for long enough to tell.
Sundial, Hashing in, Hashing out again, came from "across the wind," bywhich readers understood "across some How, more or less sheet and ver­
tical: 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-obses­
sion, 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 dif­
ference between a boxtop and its image, all right, their whole econ­
omy'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 Pokler and certainly other pairs of hands
busy through trouser cloth, that Alpdrucken 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, slouchedalone in your own seat, never threatened along any rookwise row or di­
agonal 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.

472

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I
/

-
-

�:t-�=--r-�� \



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

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 En­

sign Morituri, of the Imperial Japanese Navy.
"Yeah, I ...

"

why is Slothrop drawling this way? "saw ya watching
. . . last night too, mister. . . ."

"You think I am a voyeur. Yes you do. But it isn't that. There is no

thrill, I mean. But when I watch people, I feel less alone."
"W'l hell, Ensign ... why don'tcha just ... join in? They're always

lookin' fer ... company."
"Oh, my goodness," grinning one of them big polyhedral Jap grins,

like they do, "then I would feel more alone."
Tables and chairs have been set out under orange-and-red-stripe

awnings on the fantail. Slothrop and Morituri have got the place almost
to themselves, except for some girls in two-piece swimsuits out to catch
some sun before it goes away. Cumulonimbus are building up dead
ahead. You can hear thunder in the distance. The air is coming awake.

A steward brings coffee, cream, porridge and fresh oranges. Slothrop
looks at the porridge, doubtful. ''I'll take it," Ensign Morituri grabbing
the bowl.

"Oh, sure." Slothrop notices now how this Nip also has this wide han­
dle-bar mustache. "Aha, aha. I'm hep to you. A porridge fan! Shameful.
A latent Anglophile-yeah, you're blushing." Pointing and hollering ha,
ha, ha.

"You've found me out. Yes, yes. I've been on the wrong side for six

years."
"Ever try to get away?"
"And find out what you people are really like? Oh, my golly. What if

phile changes then to phobe? Where would I be?" He giggles, spits
an

orange pit over the side. Seems he put in a few
weeks' training on that

Formosa, in Kamikaze school, but they washed him out. No one ever
told him why, exactly. Something to do with his attitude. "I just

didn't

have a good attitude," he sighs. "So they sent me back here again, by
way of Russia and Switzerland. This

time with the Propaganda Minis­

try." He would sit most of the day watching Allied footage
for what

could be pulled and worked into newsreels to make the Axis
look good

473



",._ .1; I I
�!-�---

/�
r

'4.. ••• ;. •• -

and the other side look bad. "All I know about Great Britain comes
from that raw material."

"Looks like German movies have warped other outlooks around here
too."

"You mean Margherita's. Did you know, that's how we met! A mu­
tual friend at Ufa. I was on holiday at Bad Karma-just before the Pol­
ish invasion. The little town where you joined us. It was a spa. I
watched you fall in the water. Then you climbed aboard. I also watched
Margherita watching you. Please don't be offended, Slothrop, but it
might be better to stay away from her right now."

"Not at all. I know something creepy is going on." He tells Morituri
about the incident in the Sprudelhof, and Margherita's flight from the
apparition in black.

The Ensign nods, grim, twisting half his mustache up so it points in a
saber at one eye. "She didn't tell you what happened there? Golly, Jack,
you had better know. . . "

ENSIGN MORITURI'S STORY

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the
looking back, there is such noise and gravity. But we are conditioned to
forget. So that the war may have more importance, yes, but still . . .
isn't the hidden machinery easier to see in the days leading up to the
event? There are arrangements, things to be expedited . . . and often
the edges are apt to lift, briefly, and we see things we were not meant
to....

They'd tried to talk Margherita out of going to Hollywood. She went,
and she failed. Rollo was there when she returned, to keep the worst
from happening. For a month he impounded sharp objects, kept her at
ground level and away from chemicals, which meant she didn't sleep
much. She would drop off and wake up hysterical. Afraid to go to sleep.Afraid she wouldn't know how to get back.

Rollo did not have a keen mind. He meant well, but after a month of
her he found he couldn't take any more. Actually it surprised everyonethat he'd lasted so long. Greta was handed over to Sigmund, hardly im­
proved, but perhaps no worse.

The trouble with Sigmund was the place he happened to be living in,
a drafty, crenelated deformity overlooking a cold little lake in the Ba­
varian Alps. Parts of it must have dated back to the fall of Rome. That
was where Sigmund brought her.

She had got the idea somewhere that she was part Jewish. Things in
474

_
�

, /
-

-

�7 �- -It--�



Germany by then, as everyone knows, were very bad. Margherita
was

terrified of being "found out." She heard Gestapo in every puff
of air

that slipped in, among any of a thousand windways of dilapidation. Sig­
mund spent whole nights trying to talk it away. He

was no better at it

than Rollo. It was around this time that her symptoms began.
However psychogenic these pains, tics, hives and nauseas, her

suffer­

ing was real. Acupuncturists came
down by Zeppelin from Berlin, show­

ing up in the middle of the night with
little velvet cases full of gold

needles. Viennese analysts, Indian holy men, Baptists from America

trooped in and out of Sigmund's castle, stage-hypnotists
and Colombian

curanderos slept on the rug in front of the fireplace. Nothing
worked.

Sigmund grew alarmed, and before long as ready
as Margherita to hallu­

cinate. Probably it was she who suggested Bad Karma. It
had a reputa­

tion that summer for its mud, hot and greasy mud with traces of radium,

jet black, softly bubbling. Ah. Anyone
who's been sick in that way can

imagine her hope. That mud would cure anything.
Where was anybody that summer before the War? Dreaming.

The

spas that summer,
the summer Ensign Morituri came to Bad Karma,

were crowded with sleepwalkers. Nothing for him to do at the Embassy.

They suggested a holiday till September.
He should have known some­

thing was up, but he only went on holiday
to Bad Karma-spent the

days drinking Pilsener Urquelle in the
cafe by the lake in the Pavilion

Park. He was a stranger, half the time drunk, silly beer-drunk,
and he

hardly spoke their language. But what he
saw must have been going on

all over Germany. A premeditated frenzy.
Margherita and Sigmund moved along the

same magnolia-shaded

paths, sat out in rolling-chairs to hear
concerts of patriotic music . . .

when it rained they fidgeted over card games in one
of the public rooms

of their Kurhaus. At night they watched the fireworks-fountains,

spark-foaming rockets, yellow starbursts high
over Poland. That oneiric

season. . . . There was no one in all the spas to read anything in
the pat­

terns the fires made. They were only gay lights, nervous as
the fantasies

that flickered from eye to eye, trailing the skin like the
ostrich fans of 50

years ago.
When did Sigmund first notice her absences, or

when did they be­

come for him more than routine? Always she gave him plausible
stories:

a medical appointment, a chance meeting with
an old friend, drowsi­

ness in the mud-baths, while time raced by. It may have been this
unac­

customed sleep that got him suspicious at last,
because of what her

wakefulness had put him through in the South.
The stories about the

children in the local newspapers could have made
no impression, not

475



then. Sigmund only read headlines, and rarely at that, to fill up a dead
moment.

Morituri saw them often. They would meet and bow, exchange Heil
Hitlers, and the Ensign would be permitted a few minutes to practicehis German. Except for waiters and barmen, they were the only peoplehe spoke with. Out at the tennis courts, waiting in line at the pump
room under the cool colonnade, at an aquatic corso, a battle of flowers,
a Venetian fete, Sigmund and Margherita hardly changed, he with his­
Morituri thought of it as his American Smile, around the amber stem of
his dead pipe . . . his head like a flesh Christmas ornament . . . how
long ago it was . . . she with her yellow sunglasses and Garbo hats. The
flowers were all that changed about her day to day: morning glory, al­mond blossom, foxglove. Morituri grew to look forward so to these daily
meetings. His wife and daughters clear on the other side of the world,himself exiled in a country that bewildered and oppressed him. He
needed the passing zoogoers' civility, the guidebook words. He knows
he stared back, every bit as curious. In their European slickness, they allfascinated him: the white-plumed old ladies in the lying-out chairs, the
veterans of the Great War like serene hippopotamuses soaking in thesteel baths, their effeminate secretaries chattering shrill as monkeys
across the Sprudelstrasse, while far down the arches of lindens and
chestnuts you could hear the endless roar of carbon dioxide at the bub­
bling spring, coming out of solution in great shuddering spheres . . . but
Sigmund and Margherita fascinated him most of all. «They seemed asalien here as I was. We each have antennas, don't we, tuned to recog­nize our own. . . ."

One forenoon, by accident, he met Sigmund, alone, a tweed statue on
his walking stick in front of the Inhalatorium, looking as if he'd lost his
way, no real place to go, no desire. Without premeditation, then, theybegan to talk. The time was right. They moved off presently, strollingthrough the crowds of sick foreigners, while Sigmund told of histroubles with Greta, her Jewish fantasy, her absences. The day before,he had caught her out in a lie. She'd come in very late. Her hands hadtaken a fine tremor that wouldn't stop. He'd begun to notice things. Hershoes, beaded with drying black mud. A seam in her dress widened,
nearly ripped, though she'd been losing weight. But he hadn't the
courage to have it out with her.

Morituri, who had been reading the papers, for whom the connectionhad sprung up like a monster from the tamed effervescences of the
Trinkhalle, but who did not have the words, German or otherwise, totell Sigmund, Morituri, the Beer Ensign, began to follow her then. She

476

.... .... . ... --- - -- .-

-
-

�'):�_ 17--�



never looked back, but she knew he was there. At the weekly ball in the
Kursaal he felt, for the first time, a reticence among them all. Margher­
ita, eyes he was accustomed to seeing covered with sunglasses naked

now, burning terribly, never took her gaze from him. The Kur-Orches­
tra played selections from The Merry Widow and Secrets of Suzanne,
out-of-date music, and yet, when bits of it found Morituri years later in

the street, over the radio, they never failed to bring back the unwritten
taste of that night, the three of them at the edge of a deepness none
could sound . . . some last reprise of the European thirties he had never
known . . . which are also for him a particular room, a salon in the aft­
ernoon: lean girls in gowns, mascara all around their eyes, the men with
faces shaven very smooth, film-star polished . . . not operetta but dance
music here, sophisticated, soothing, a bit "modern," dipping elegantly
in the up-to-date melodic lines . . . an upstairs room, with late sunlight
coming in, deep carpets, voices saying nothing heavy or complex,

smiles

informed and condescending. He has awakened that morning in a soft

bed, he looks forward to an evening at a cabaret dancing to popular
love songs played in just such a mannered and polished style. His

after­

noon salon with its held tears, its smoke, its careful passion has been a

way-station between the comfortable morning and the
comfortable

night: it was Europe, it was the smoky, citied fear of death,
and most

perilous it was Margherita's scrutable eyes, that lost
encounter in the

Kursaal, black eyes among those huddled jewels and nodding old gener­
als, in the roar from the Brodelbrunnen outside, filling the quiet spaces
in the music as machinery was soon to fill the sky.

Next evening, Morituri followed her out for the last
time. Down the

worn paths, under the accustomed trees, past the German goldfish pool
that reminded him of home, across the golf links, the day's last white­
mustached men struggling up out of traps and hazards, their

caddies

standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset,
the bundled

clubs in Fascist silhouette.... Twilight came down on Bad Karma that

night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical
disaster. Greta had

dressed all in black, a hat with a veil covering most of her hair, purse

slung by a long strap over one shoulder. As choices of a
destination nar­

rowed to one, as Morituri ran into snares the night began to layout for

him, prophecy filled him like the river wind: where she had
been on her

absences, how the children in those headlines had-

They had arrived at the edge of the black mud pool:
that under­

ground presence, old as Earth, partly enclosed back at
the Spa and a

name given to.... The offering was to be a boy, lingering
after all the

others had gone. His hair was cold snow.
Morituri could only hear frag-

477



�b� I
----

-

��
- ;/'4 ..

ments of what they said. The boy wasn't afraid of her at first. He might
not have recognized her from his dreams. It would have been his only
hope. But they had made that impossible, his German overseers. Mor­
ituri stood by in his uniform, waiting, unbuttoning the jacket so that he
could move, though he didn't want to. Certainly they were all repeatingthis broken act from an earlier time. . . .

Her voice began its rise, and the boy his trembling. "you have been
in exile too long." It was a loud clap in the dusk. "Come home, with
me," she cried, "back to your people." Now he was trying to break
away, but her hand, her gloved hand, her claw had flown out and seized
his arm. "Little piece of Jewish shit. Don't try to run away from me."

"No ...
"

but at the very end rising, in a provocative question.
"You know who I am, too. My home is the form of Light," burlesqu­

ing it now, in heavy Yiddish dialect, actressy and false, "I wander all the
Diaspora looking for strayed children. I am Israel. I am the Shekhinah,
queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God. And I will take you back,
you fragment of smashed vessel, even if I must pull you by your nastylittle circumcised penis-"

"No ...
"

So Ensign Morituri committed then the only known act of heroism in
his career. It's not even in his folder. She had gathered the boy strug­
gling, one glove busy between his legs. Morituri rushed forward. For a
moment the three of them swayed, locked together. Gray Nazi statuary:its name may have been "The Family." None of the Greek stillness: no,
they moved. Immortality was not the issue. That's what made them
different. No survival, beyond the senses' taking of it-no handing­down. Doomed as d'Annunzio' s adventure at Fiume, as the Reich itself,
as the poor creatures from whom the boy now tore loose and ran off into
the evening.

Margherita collapsed by the edge of the great lightless pool. Morituriknelt beside her while she cried. It was terrible. "What had brought himthere, what had understood and moved in so automatically, fell back
now to sleep. His conditioning, his verbal, ranked and uniformed self
took over again. He knelt shivering, more afraid than he'd ever been in
his life. It was she who led their way back to the Spa.She and Sigmund left Bad Karma that night. The boy may have beentoo frightened, the light too faint, Morituri himself may have had strong
protectors, for God knows he was visible enough there-but no policecame. "It never occurred to me to go to them. In my heart, I knew shehad murdered. You may condemn me for it. But I saw what I'd be
handing her over to, and it came to the same thing, in official custody or

478

..................... - - -
"

- . -

��1--�,



not, you see." The next day was 1 September. There was no longer any
way for children to vanish mysteriously.

The forenoon has gone dark. Rain spits in under the awning. The

bowl of porridge has stayed after all untouched in front of Morituri. Slo­

throp is sweating, staring at the bright remains of an orange. "Listen,"
it

has occurred to his agile brain, "what about Bianca, then? Is she going
to be safe with that Greta, do you think?"

Frisking his great mustache, "What do you mean? Are you asking,
'Can she be saved?'

"

"Oh, pip, pip, old Jap, come off it-"
"Look, what can you save her from?" His eyes are prying Slothrop

away from his comfort. Rain is drumming now on
the awnings, spilling

in clear lacework from the edges.
"But wait a minute. Oh, shit, that woman yesterday, in that Sprudel­

hof-"

"Yes. Remember Greta also saw you coming up out of the river. Now

think of all the folklore among these people about radioactivity-these
travelers from spa to spa, season after season.

It's grace. It's the holy wa­
ters of Lourdes. This mysterious radiation that can cure so much­

might it be the ultimate cure?"
"Uh ...

"

"I watched her face as you came aboard. I was with
her at the edge

of one radioactive night. I know what she saw this time. One of
those

children-preserved, nourished by the mud, the radium, growing
taller

and stronger while slowly, viscous and slow, the
currents bore him along

underground, year by year, until at last, grown to manhood,
he came to

the river, came up out of the black radiance
of herself to find her again,

Shekhinah, bride, queen, daughter. And mother. Motherly as sheltering
mud and glOWing pitchblende-"

Almost directly overhead, thunder suddenly breaks
in a blinding egg

of sound. Somewhere inside the blast, Slothrop has murmured, "Quit

fooling."
"Are you going to risk finding out?"
Who is this, oh sure it's a Jap ensign, looking at me like this.

But

e�� where are Bianca's arms, her defenseless mouth.... "Well
in a day or

ru�� two we'll be in Swinemiinde, right?" talking to keep from-get up
from

��� the table then, you asshole-
d "We'll all just keep moving, that's all. In the end it

doesn't matter."

m "Look, you've got kids, how can you say that? Is
that all you want,

(0)'& just to 'keep moving'?"
479



"�_.J��___ I
,_

� -,/
�, .. , ...,.

-

"I want to see the war over in the Pacific so that I can go home. Since
you ask. It's the season of the plum rains now, the Bai-u, when all the
plums are ripening. I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and
once I'm there, never to leave Hiroshima again. I think you'd like it
there. It's a city on Honshu, on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect
size, big enough for city excitement, small enough for the serenity a
man needs. But these people are not returning, they are leaving theirhomes you see-"

But one of the knots securing the rain-heavy awning to its frame has
given way, white small-stuff unlacing rapidly, whipping around in the
rain. The awning sags, funneling rainwater at Slothrop and Morituri,and they flee below decks.

They get separated in a crowd of newly-risen roisterers. There is
hardly a thing now in Slothrop's head but getting to Bianca. At the end
of the passageway, across -a score of empty faces, he spots Stefania inwhite cardigan and slacks, beckoning. It takes him five minutes to
thread his way to her, by which time he's picked up a brandy Alexan­der, a party hat, a sign taped to his back urging whoever reads it, in
Low Pomeranian, to kick Slothrop, lipstick smudges in three shades of
magenta, and a black Italian maduro someone has thoughtfully alreadylit.

"You may look like the soul of conviviality," Stefania greets him, "butit doesn't fool me. Under that cheerful mask is the face of a Jonah.""You mean, uh, the, uh-"
"I mean Margherita. She's locked herself in the head. Hysterical. No-body can bring her out."
"So you're looking at me. How about Thanatz?"
"Thanatz has disappeared, and so has Bianca."
"Oh, shit."
"Margherita thinks you've done away with her."
"Not me." He gives her a quick rundown of Ensign Morituri's tale.Some of her elan, her resilience, go away. She bites a fingernail."Yes, there were rumors. Sigmund, before he vanished, leaked justenough to titillate people, but never got specific. That was his style. Lis­ten, Slothrop. Do you think Bianca's in any danger?""I'll try to find out." He is interrupted here by a swift kick in the ass.
"Unlucky you," crows a voice behind them. "I'm the only one onboard who reads Low Pomeranian."
"Unlucky you," Stefania nods.
"All I wanted was a free ride to Swinemiinde."

....... - ............. - - ------'" - -

I
- . -

��---'<�



But like Stefania sez, "There's only one free ride. Meantime, start
working off the fare for this one. Go see Margherita."

"You want me to-come on."

"We don't want anything to happen."
One of the General Orders aboard this vessel. Nothing shall happen.

Well, Slothrop politely sticks the rest of his cigar between Mme. Pro­
calowska's teeth and leaves her puffing on it, fists jammed in her sweater

pockets.
Bianca isn't in the engine room. He moves around in pulsing bulb­

light, among asbestos-packed masses, burning himself once or twice
where insulation's missing, looking into pale recesses, shadows, wonder­

ing about his own insulation here. Nothing but machinery, noise. He
heads for the ladder. A scrap of red is waiting for him . . . no, only her
frock, with a damp trace of his own semen still at the hem . . . this loud

humidity has kept it there. He crouches, holding the garment, smelling
her smell. I'm a child, I know how to hide, and I can hide you.
"Bianca," he calls, "Bianca, come out."

Gathered about the door to the head, he finds an assortment of

upper-class layabouts and drunks blocking the passageway along with a
litter of bottles and glassware, and a seated circle of cocaine habitues,

crystal birds Hying up into forests of nose hair off the point of a gold and

ruby dagger. Slothrop pushes through, leans on the door and calls Mar­

gherita's name.
"Go away."
"You don't have to come out. Just let me in."
"I know who you are."
"Please."

"They were very clever, sending you as poor Max. But it won't
work

now."
"I'm through with Them. I swear it. I need you, Greta." Bullshit. For

what?

"They'll kill you, then. Go away."
"I know where Bianca is."

"What have you done with her?"

"Just-will you let me in?" After a full minute's silence, she
does. A

funseeker or two tries to push in, but he slams the door and locks it

again. Greta is wearing nothing but a black chemise. Strokes
of black

hair curl high on her thighs. Her face is white, old, strained.
"Where is she?"

"Hiding."



"",� .ti I I
��---

/--
�,� �

"From me?"
"From Them."
A quick look at him. Too many mirrors, razors, scissors, lights. Too

white. "But you're one of Them."
"Quit it, you know I'm not."
"You are. You came up out of the river."
"Well, that's cause I fell in, Greta."
"Then They made you."
He watches her playing, nervous, with strands of her hair. The Anu­

bis has begun to rock some, but the sickness rising in him is for his head,
not his stomach. As she begins to talk, nausea begins to fill him: a glow­
ing black mudslide of nausea. . . .

D D D D D D D

It was always easy for men to come and tell her who to be. Other girlsof her generation grew up asking, "Who am I?" For them it was a ques­tion full of pain and struggle. For Gretel it was hardly even a question.She had more identities than she knew what to do with. Some of these
Gretels have been only the sketchiest of surfaces-others are deeper.
Many have incredible gifts, antigravity, dreams of prophecy ... co­
matic images surround their faces, glowing in the air: the light itself is
actually crying tears, weeping in this stylized way, as she is borne along
through the mechanical cities, the meteorite walls draped in midair,
every hollow and socket empty as a bone, and the failing shadow thatshines black all around it . . . or is held in staring postures, long gowns,fringe and alchemical symbol, veils flowing from leather skullcaps pad­ded concentric as a bike-racer's helmet, with crackling-tower and obsid­ian helix, with drive belts and rollers, with strange airship passages thatthread underneath arches, solemnly, past louvers and giant fins in the
city mist....

In Weisse Sandwiiste von Neumexiko she played a cowgirl. Firstthing, they'd asked, "Can you ride?" "Of course," she'd answered.
Never been closer than roadside ditches in time of war to any horse inher life, but she needed the work. When the moment came to saddle
up, it never occurred to her to be afraid of the beast pressing up be­tween her thighs. It was an American horse named Snake. Trained or
not, it could have run away with her, even killed her. But they pranced

482



the screen full of the Sagittarian fire, Gretel and that colt, and her smile

never drew back.

Here is one of the veils she has shed, a thin white scum, a caustic resi­

due from one recent night in Berlin. "While you were asleep, I left the

house. I went out in the street, without my shoes. I found a corpse.
A

man. A week's gray beard and old gray suit. . .
." It was lying still and

very white behind a
wall. She lay down beside it and put her arms

around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles

stayed frozen in the cloth. She felt its bristled face
rub her own cheek.

The smell was no worse than cold meat from the icebox. She lay, hold­

ing it, till morning.
"Tell me how it is in your land." What woke

her? Boots in the street,

an early steamshovel. She can hardly hear her tired whispering.
Corpse answers: "We live very far beneath

the black mud. Days of

traveling." Though she couldn't move its limbs easily
as a doll's, she

could make it say and think exactly what she wished.
For an instant too she did wonder-not quite in words-if that's how

her own soft mind might feel, under the fingers of Those who . .
.

"Mm, it's snug down here. Now and then you
can pick up something

from Them-a distant rumbling, the implied silhouette of some explo­
sion, conducted here through the earth overhead ... but nothing, ever,
too close. It's so dark that things glow. We have flight. There's no sex.

But there are fantasies, even many of those we used to attach
to sex­

that we once modulated its energy with. . . ."

As the dizzy debutante Lotte Lustig, she found
herself during a flood,

disguised as a scrubwoman, proceeding
downriver in a bathtub with

rich playboy Max Schlepzig. Every girl's dream.
Name of the movie was

lugend Herauf! (a lighthearted pun, of course,
on the then popular

phrase "Juden heraus!"). Actually, all the
bathtub scenes were process

shots-she never did get to go out on the river in the
bathtub with Max,

all that was done with doubles, and in the final print it survives only as
a

very murky long shot. The figures are
darkened and deformed, resem­

bling apes, and the quality of the light is peculiar,
as if the whole scene

were engraved on a dark metal such as lead.
Greta's double was actually

an Italian stunt man named Blazzo in a long blonde wig. They
carried

on a romance for a while. But Greta wouldn't go to bed
with him, unless

he wore that wig!
Out on the river the rain lashes: the rapids can now be

heard ap-

483

or

c�



"��
J

- ----- ,/�
.....�..

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken,
strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces
of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtlander Collin­
ears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895. For
Greta it is her daughter's soul each time, an inexhaustible soul. . . . This
scarf of an only child, tucked in waist-high, always out vulnerable to the
wind. To call her an extension of her mother's ego is of course to invite
the bitterest sarcasm. But it's possible, now and then, for Greta to see
Bianca in other children, ghostly as a double exposure . . . clearly yes
very clearly in Gottfried, the young pet and protege of Captain Blicero.

proaching, still impossible to see, but real, and inevitable. And the dou­
bles both experience an odd, ticklish fear now that perhaps they are re­
ally lost, and that there is really no camera on shore behind the fine gray
scribbling of willows . . . all the crew, sound-men, grips, gaffers have
left . . . or never even arrived . . . and what was that the currents just
brought to knock against our snow-white cockle shell? and what was
that thud, so stiffened and so mute?

"Pull down my straps for a moment. Is it dark enough? Look. Tha­
natz said they were luminous. That he knew each one by heart. They're
very white today; aren't they? Hmm. Long and white, like cobwebs.
They're on my ass too. Around the insides of my thighs....

"

Many
times, afterward, after the blood had stopped and he had put on the al­
cohol, Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the
scars down her back, as a gypsy reads a palm. Life-scar, heart-scar.
Croix mystique. What fortunes and fantasies! He was so exalted, after
the whippings. So taken away by the idea that they would win out, es­
cape. He'd fall asleep before the wildness and hope had quite left him.
She loved him most at those moments, just before sleep, her own dorsal
side aflame, his little head heavy on her breast, while scar-tissue formed
silently on her, cell by cell, in the night. She felt almost safe....

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 inrust-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 Spanishdancer's costume, stroking the barrel of a gun.

484

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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 fol­
lowed 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 an­

cient 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 ter­

rified. They turned, feeling it at their backs, and moved away quickly.
Back at the SchuBstelle 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.



/
I

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/

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�
_

"We moved into the Heath. There were oilfields, and blackened
earth. [abos 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 tak­
ing 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 Odys­
sey. 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 grayweather to a petrochemical plant that for days had stalked us in a wheel
at our horizon, black and broken towers in the distance, clustered to­
gether, 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, toughcells 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 silverstork flew Wings-down into our wind, brow low and legs back, Prussian
occipital knot behind: on its shiny surfaces now appeared black swirls oflimousines 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 grav­
ity 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.

_. ..... ......

.-

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'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 Bli­
cero. A meeting of nobles in the Castle. They went into the board room.
1 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
1 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?' 1
asked, vamping Drohne. He took me out of earshot of the others. 'I

think it's for the F-Gerat,' he whispered."
"F?" sez Slothrop, "F-Gerat, 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-some­
thing they had forced, by their joint will, to materialize on the

table. No

one's lips were moving. It was a seance. 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. 1 knelt

and began unbuttoning Drone's trousers. But two others took
me by the

arms and dragged me off into a warehouse area. Others followed,
or en­

tered 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
au­

dience, waiting for something to begin. Drohne and the men
stretched

me out on an inflatable plastic mattress. All around, 1 watched a
clear

crumbling of the air, or of the light. Someone said 'butadiene,'
and 1

heard beauty dying. . . . Plastic rustled and snapped
around us, closing

487



",�__.....}.t�___
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,-

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o 0 0 0 0 0 0

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.' 1 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. 1 wanted to
feel it against my cunt. Nothing 1 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 gigan­
tic Imipolex penis over his own. 1 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. 1 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-let­
ting all these go?

"I don't know how long they kept me there. 1 slept, 1 woke. Men ap­
peared and vanished. Time had lost meaning. One morning 1 was out­
side the factory, naked, in the rain. Nothing grew there. Something hadbeen deposited in a great fan that went on for miles. Some tarry kind of
waste. 1 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 Swinemiinde,
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 1 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 1 couldn't. It was the same as the day with
Thanatz, in the pine forest. 1 felt a silence waiting for me up there. Notfor 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 whapf the livingshape 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 muscu­
larity. 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

488



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 pelo­
rus ... spills out portholes onto the white river. Inexplicably, the after­
noon has been going on for longer than it should. Daylight has been de­

clining 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 oil­

drums, whisky cases stenciled for Fort-Lamy), observers from other gal­
axies, 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
Swinem­

iinde 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,

dith­

ering between executioner's silence and the Big Time.
There are inter­

national 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. Light­

ning flickers all around the horizon, and thunder that
reminds the mili­

tary men on board of drumfire announcing battles they're
not sure now



'��_"__ �
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490

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.

Partygoers stagger fore and aft, evening clothes decorated with sun­
bursts of vomit. Ladies lie out in the rain, nipples erect and heavingunder drenched silk. Stewards skid along the decks with salvers of
Dramamine and bicarbonate. Barfing aristocracy sag all down the life­
lines. Here comes Slothrop now, down a ladder to the main deck,
bounced by the rolling off of alternate manropes, feeling none too keen.
He's lost Bianca. Gone fussing through the ship doubling back again and
again, can't find her any more than his reason for leaving her this morn­
ing.

It matters, but how much? Now that Margherita has wept to him,
across the stringless lyre and bitter chasm of a ship's toilet, of her last
days with Blicero, he knows as well as he has to that it's the S-Gerat
after all that's following him, it and the pale plastic ubiquity of Laszlo
J amf. That if he's been seeker and sought, well, he's also baited, and
bait. The Imipolex question was planted for him by somebody, back at
the Casino Hermann Goering, with hopes it would flower into a full
Imipolectique with its own potency in the Zone-but They knew Slo­
throp would jump for it. Looks like there are sub-Slothrop needs Theyknow about, and he doesn't: this is humilating on the face of it, but now
there's also the even more annoying question, What do I need that
badly?

Even a month ago, given a day or two of peace, he might have foundhis way back to the September afternoon, to the stiff cock in his pants
sprung fine as a dowser's wand trying to point up at what was hangingthere in the sky for everybody. Dowsing Rockets is a gift, and he had it,suffered from it, trying to fill his body to the pores and follicles with
ringing prurience ... to enter, to be filled ... to go hunting after ...to be shown. . . to begin to scream . . . to open arms legs mouth ass­hole eyes nostrils without a hope of mercy to its intention waiting in thesky paler than dim commercial Jesus. . . .

But nowadays, some kind of space he cannot go against has openedbehind Slothrop, bridges that might have led back are down now for
good. He is growing less anxious about betraying those who trust him.
He feels obligations less immediately. There is, in fact, a general loss of

� .' ..... . . .
,

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/:____,____-�;�
/

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emotion, a numbness he ought to be alarmed at, but can't quite . . .
Can't ...
Russian transmissions come crackling out of ship's radio, and the

static blows like sheets of rain. Lights have begun to appear on shore.
Procalowski throws a master switch and cuts off all the lights of the
Anubis. St. Elmo's fire will be seen spurting at moments from cross­

ends, from sharp points, fluttering white as telltales about the antennas
and stays.

The white ship, camouflaged in the storm, will slip by Stettin's great
ruin in silence. Rain will slacken for a moment to port and reveal a few

last broken derricks and charred warehouses so wet and gleaming you
can almost smell them, and a beginning of marshland you can smell,
where no one lives. And then the shore again will be invisible as the

open sea's. The Oder Haff will grow wider
around the Anubis. No pa­

trol boats will be out tonight. Whitecaps will come slamming in out of
the darkness, and break high over the bow, and brine stream from the

golden jackal mouth . . . Count Wafna lurch aft in nothing but his
white bow tie, hands full of red, white, and blue chips that spill and
clatter on deck, and he'll never cash them in . . . the Countess Bibes­

cue dreaming by the fo'c'sle of Bucharest four years ago, the January
terror, the Iron Guard on the radio screaming Long Live Death, and the
bodies of Jews and Leftists hung on the hooks of the city slaughter­
houses, dripping on the boards smelling of meat and hide, having her
breasts sucked by a boy of 6 or 7 in a velvet Fauntleroy suit, their wet
hair flowing together indistinguishable as their moans now, will vanish
inside sudden whiteness exploding over the bow . . . and stockings lad­

der, and silk frocks over rayon slips make swarming moires ... hardons

go limp without warning, bone buttons shake in terror . . . lights
be

thrown on again and the deck become a blinding mirror . . . and
not

too long after this, Slothrop will think he sees her, think he has found
Bianca again-dark eyelashes plastered shut and face running with rain,
he will see her lose her footing on the slimy deck, just as the Anubis
starts a hard roll to port, and even at this stage of things--even

in his

distance-he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as
she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get
back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the
side and it's adios to the Anubis and all its screaming Fascist cargo, al­

ready no more ship, not even black sky as the rain drives down
his fall­

ing eyes now in quick needlestrokes, and he hits, without a
call for help,

just a meek tearful oh fuck, tears that will add nothing to the whipped
white desolation that passes for the Oder Haff tonight....

491



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D D D D D D D

The voices are German. Looks like a fishing smack here, stripped for
some reason of nets and booms. Cargo piled on deck. A pink-faced
youth is peering down at Slothrop from midships, rocking in, rearing
back. "He's wearing evening clothes," calling in to the pilot house. "Is
that good or bad? You're not with the military government, are you?"

"Jesus, kid, I'm drowning. I'll sign a form if you want." Well, that's
Howdy Podner in German. The youth reaches out a pink hand whose
palm is crusted with barnacles, and hauls him on up, ears freezing, salty
snot pouring out his nose, Hopping onto a wood deck that reeks with
generations of fish and is scarred bright from more solid cargo. The boat
gets under way again with this tremendous surge of acceleration. Slo­
throp is sent rolling wetly aft. Behind them a great roostertail foams
erect against the rain. Maniacal laughter blows aft from the pilot house.
"Hey who, or what, is in command of this vessel, here?"

"My mother," the pink boy crouching beside him with an apologetic
and helpless look. "The terror of the high seas."

This apple-cheeked lady is Frau Gnahb, and her kid's name is Otto.
When she's feeling affectionate she calls him "the Silent OUo," which
she thinks is very funny, but it dates her. While Slothrop gets out of the
tuxedo and hangs it up inside to dry, wrapping himself in an old army
blanket, mother and son tell him how they run black market items all
along the Baltic coast. Who else would be out tonight, during a storm?
He has a trustworthy face, Slothrop does, people will tell him anything.
Right now seems they're headed for Swinemiinde to take on cargo for a
run tomorrow up the coast of Usedom.

"Do you know a man in a white suit," quoting Geli Tripping from afew eras back, "who's supposed to be on the Strand-Promenade in that
Swinemiinde every day around noon?"

Frau Gnahb takes a pinch of snuff, and beams. "Everybody does.He's the white knight of the black market, as I am queen of the coastal
trade."

"Der Springer, right?"
"Nobody else."
Nobody else. Up in his pants pocket Slothrop is still packing aroundthat chesspiece old Saure Bummer gave him. By it shall Springer knowhim. Slothrop falls asleep in the pilot house, gets in two or three hours,

during which Bianca comes to snuggle in under his blanket with him.
492

t . -; .... -
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r- �-
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( --� ,



"You're really in that Europe now," she grins, hugging him. "Oh my
goo'ness," Slothrop keeps saying, his voice exactly like Shirley Temple's,
out of his control. It sure is embarrassing. He wakes to sunlight, gulls
squealing, smell of number 2 fuel oil, the booming of wine barrels down
racketing planks to shore. They are docked in Swinemiinde, by the sag­
ging long ash remains of warehouses. Frau Gnahb is supervising some

ofHoading. Otto has a tin can of honest-to-God Bohnenkaffee sim­

mering. "First I've had in a while," Slothrop scorching his mouth.
"Black market," purrs the Silent Otto. "Good business to be in."

"I was in it for a while. . . ." Oh, yes, and he's left the last of that
Bodine hashish, hasn't he, several fucking ounces in fact, back on the
Anubis, wasn't that clever. See the sugar bowl do the Tootsie Roll with

the big, bad, Devil's food cake-
"Nice morning," Otto remarks.
Slothrop puts his tux back on, wrinkled and shrunken and almost dry,

and debarks with Otto to find Der Springer. it seems to be Springer
who's chartered today's trip up the coast. Slothrop keeps looking
around for the Anubis, but she's nowhere in Sight. In the distances,
gantries huddle together, skeletal, presiding over the waste that

came

upon this port so sudden. The Russian assault in the spring
has compli­

cated the layout here. The white ship could be hiding behind any of
these heaps of dockyard wreckage. Come out, come out. . . .

The storm has blown away, the breeze is mild today and the sky lies
overhead in a perfect interference-pattern, mackerel gray and blue.

Someplace military machines are rooting and clanking. Men and women
are hollering near and far in Russian. Otto and Slothrop dodge

them

down alleys flanked by the remains of half-timbered houses, stepped out

story by story, about to meet overhead after centuries of imperceptible
toppling. Men in black-billed caps sit on stoops, watching hands

for cig­
arettes. In a little square, market stalls are set up,

wood frames and old,

stained canvas shimmering when the breeze passes through. Russian sol­

diers lean against posts or benches talking to girls in dirndls and
white

knee-socks, all nearly still as statues. Market wagons stand unhitched
with tongues tilted to the ground and floors covered with burlap

and

straw and traces of produce. Dogs sniff among the mud negatives of
tank treads. Two men in dark old blue uniforms work their way along
with hose and broom, cleaning away garbage and stone-dust with salt

water pumped up from the harbor. Two little girls chase
round and

round a gaudy red kiosk plastered with chromos of Stalin.
Workers in

leather caps, blinking, morning-faced, pedal down to the
docks with

lunchboxes slung on handle bars. Pigeons and seagulls feint
for scraps in

493



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r� .....,.

494

the gutters. Women with empty string bags hurry by light as ghosts. Alone sapling in the street sings with a blockful of birds you can't see.
Just as Geli said, out on the steel-littered promenade, kicking stones,

watching the water, eyes idly combing the beach for the odd watch or
gold eyeglass frame, waiting for whoever will show up, is The Man.
About 50, bleak and neutral-colored eyes, hair thick at the sides of his
head and brushed back.

Slothrop flashes the plastic knight. Der Springer smiles and bows.
"Gerhardt von Coll, at your service." They shake hands, though Slo­

throp's is prickling in an unpleasant way.
Gulls cry, waves flatten on the strand. "Uh," Slothrop sez, "I havethis kind of trick ear, you'll have to-you say Gerhardt von what now?"

This mackerel sky has begun to look less like a moire, and more like a
chessboard. "I guess we have a friend in common. Well, that Margher­ita Erdmann. Saw her last night. Yup....

"

"She's supposed to be dead." He takes Slothrop's arm, and they allbegin to stroll along the promenade.
"W-well you're supposed to be a movie director."
"Same thing," lighting American cigarettes for everybody. "Same

problems of control. But more intense. As to some musical ears, disso­
nance is really a higher form of consonance. You've heard about Anton
Webern? Very sad."

"It was a mistake. He was innocent."
"Ha, Of course he was. But mistakes are part of it too--everythingfits. One sees how it fits, ja? learns patterns, adjusts to rhythms, one day

you are no longer an actor, but free now, over on the other side of the
camera. No dramatic call to the front office-just waking up one day,and knowing that Queen, Bishop, and King are only splendid cripples,and pawns, even those that reach the final row, are condemned to creepin two dimensions, and no Tower will ever rise or descend-no: flighthas been given only to the Springer!"

"Right, Springer," sez Otto.
Four Russian privates come wandering out of a bank of ruined hotel­

fronts, laughing across the promenade, over the wall down to the water
where they stand throwing smooth stones, kicking waves, singing toeach other. Not much of a liberty town, Swinemiinde. Slothrop fills vonColl in on Margherita, trying not to get personal. But some of his anxi­
ety over Bianca must be coming through. Von Goll shakes his arm, akindly uncle. "There now. I wouldn't worry. Bianca's a clever child, andher mother is hardly a destroying goddess.»

"You're a comfort, Springer."



The Baltic, restless Wehrmacht gray, whispers along the beach. Von
Coll tips an invisible Tyrolean to old ladies in black who've come out in
pairs to get some sun. Otto goes chasing seagulls, hands out in front of
him silent-movie style looking to strangle, but always missing his bird.
Presently they are joined by a party with a lumpy nose, stoop, week's
growth of orange and gray whiskers, and oversize leather trenchcoat
with no trousers on underneath. His name is Narrisch-r-the same Klaus

Narrisch that aerodynamics man Horst Achtfaden fingered for the
Schwarzkommando, the very same. He is carrying by the neck an un­
plucked dead turkey. As they thread their way among chunks big and
little of Swinemiinde and the battle for it last spring, townspeople begin
to appear out of the ruins, and to straggle close on von Cell's landward
flank, all eying this dead bird. Springer reaches inside his white suit

jacket, comes out with a U.S. Army .45, and makes a casual show of
checking its action. His following promptly dwindles by a half.

"They're hungrier today," observes Narrisch,
"True," replies the Springer, "but today there are fewer of them."
"Wow," it occurs to Slothrop, "that's a shitty thing to say."
Springer shrugs. "Be compassionate. But don't make up fantasies

about them. Despise me, exalt them, but remember, we define each
other. Elite and preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness
and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can compre­
hend it in toto. Consider honestly therefore, young man, which side you
would rather be on. While they suffer in perpetual shadows, it's . . . al­
ways-"

BRIGHT DAYS (FOX-TROT)

-bright days for the black mar-ket,
That silver 'n' gold makes-it shine!
From the Cor-al Sea to, the sky, blue, Baltic,
Money's the mainspring, that makes it all tick-like a
Blinkin' beacon, there's a pricetag peekin'
From each decolletage dee-vine-
Be she green or scar-let, even Mom's a har-lot, it's the
Good Lord's grand design . . .
A-and it's sunny days-for, the black, black ma(a)rket,
Cause silver and gold makes it shii-iine!

Narrisch and Otto joining in here on three-part harmony, while the
idle and hungry of Swinemiinde look on, whitefaced as patient live-

495



'��
/

I

;;;:., - --�- ,/
r7t .. ......

stock. But their bodies are only implied: wire racks for prewar suits and
frocks, too ancient, too glossy with dirt, with passage.

Leaving the promenade, they pause at a street corner while a detach­
ment of Russian infantry and horsemen marches by. "Gee, they're pour­
ing in," notes Otto. 'Whore's the circus?"

"Up the coast, kid," sez Narrisch.
"What's up the coast," inquires Slothrop.
"Look out," warns Narrisch, "he's a spy."
"Don't call me 'kid,'

"

Otto snarls.
"Spy's ass," sez Slothrop.
"He's all right," Springer pats them all on the shoulders, Herr Cemut­

lich here, "the word's been out on him for a while. He isn't even
armed." To Slothrop: "You're welcome to come along with us, up the
coast. It might be interesting for you." But Slothrop is no dummy. He
notices how he is getting funny looks from everybody now, including
that Springer.

Among the cargo headed up the coast are six chorus girls, wearing
feathers and spangles under old cloth coats to save trunk space, a small
pit band at different levels of alcoholic slumber, manymany cases of
vodka, and a troupe of performing chimpanzees. Otto's nautical-pirati­
cal mother has one of these chimps cornered inside the pilot house,
where they are going at it, the Frau with her insults, the chimp reaching
now and then trying to slap her with this floppy banana peel. Ulcerous
impresario G. M. B. Haftung is trying to get Otto's attention. He has a
record of always making his appeals to the wrong personnel. "That's
Wolfgang in there! He'll murder her!" Wolfgang's his prize chimp,
somewhat unstable, does a fair Hitler imitation but has this short atten­
tion span.

"Well," vaguely, "he'd better watch out for my Mom."
Framed here in her lozenge of hatchway, it's much clearer just how

extensively this old woman has been around: she is leaning, lilting, big
s�ee�,smi!e just as toothy,�s can be, right into that Wolfgang, cooing athim: Deme Mutter ...

"Say, she's never seen one of those critters before," Slothrop turning
to Otto, surprising the youth with a faceful of, call it amiable homicide,
"has she-"

"Ach, she's fantastic. She knows by instinct-exactly how to insult
anybody. Doesn't matter, animal, vegetable-I even saw her insult a
rock once."

"Aw, now-"

fit,.· ......
-

-

/':'�---- �
/ --� �



"Really! Ja. A gigantic clummmp of felsitic debris, last year, off the
coast of Denmark, she criticized its," just about to fall into one of those
mirthless laughs we edge away from, "its crystalline structure, for
twenty minutes. Incredible."

Chorus girls have already pried open a case of vodka. Raftung, brush­

ing hair that grows only in memory across the top of his head, rushes
over to scream at them. Boys and girls, all ages, tattered and thin, trail
across the brow, stevedoring. Against the fair sky, chimps swing from

spars and antenna, above them seagulls glide by and stare. Wind rises,
soon a whitecap here and there will start to flicker out in the harbor.
Each child carries a bale or box of a different shape, color, and size.

Springer stands by, pince-nez clipped in front of agate eyes, checking
off his inventory in a green morocco book, snails in garlic sauce, one

gross . . . three cases cognac . .
. tennis balls, two dozen . . . one

Victrola film, Lucky Pierre Runs Amok, three reels ... binoc-
ulars, sixty wrist-watches ... u.S.W., a check-mark for each

child.

Presently all has been stowed below decks, chimps fall asleep, musi­
cians wake up, girls surround Raftung and call him names, and pinch
his cheeks. Otto makes his way along the side, hauling in lines as the
children cast them off. As the last one is flung away, its eye-splice still in
midair framing a teardrop vista of gutted Swinemiinde, Frau Gnahb,

sensing the release from land through her feet, gets under way
in the

usual manner, nearly losing a chimp over the fantail and sending
Haftung's half-dozen lovelies sprawling in a winsome tangle of legs,

bot­

toms and breasts.
Crosscurrents tug at the boat as it moves out the widening funnel of

the Swine, toward the sea. Just inside the breakwaters, where it foams

through breaches bombed underwater in the spring look out,
Frau

Gnahb, with no change of expression, swings her wheel full over, goes
barreling straight at the Sassnitz ferry whoosh veers away just

in time,

cackling at passengers staggering back from the rail, gaping
after her.

"Please, Mother," silent Otto plaintive in the window of the pilot house.
In reply the good woman commences bellowing a bloodthirsty

SEA CHANTY

I'm the Pirate Queen of the Baltic Run, and nobody fucks
with me-

And those who've tried are bones and skulls, and lie beneath

the sea.

497



'" ,__ .� , I
��---

",_,/
l-� .

And the little fish like messengers swim in and out their eyes,
Singing, "Fuck ye not with Gory Gnahb and her desperate

enterprise!
"

I'll tangle with a battleship, I'll massacre a sloop,
I've sent a hundred souls to hell in one relentless swoop-
I've seen the Flying Dutchman, and each time we pass, he cries,
"Oh, steer me clear of Gory Gnahb, and her desperate

enterprise!'
,

Whereupon she grips her wheel and accelerates. They find them­
selves now leaping toward the side of a half-sunken merchantman:
black concave iron splashed with red-lead, each crusted rivet and pitted
plate closing in, looming over- The woman is clearly unbalanced. Slo­
throp shuts his eyes and hangs on to a chorus girl. With a whoop from
the pilot house, the little boat is put over hard to port, missing collision
by maybe a few coats of paint. Otto, caught daydreaming of death, stag­
gers wildly by heading over the side. "It's her sense of humor," he
points out, on the way past. Slothrop reaches out grabs him by the
sweater, and the girl grabs Slothrop by the tail of his tuxedo.

"She gets into something a little illegal," Otto a moment later catch­
ing his breath, "you see what happens. I don't know what to do with
her."

"Poor kid," the girl smiles.
"Aw," sez Otto.
Slothrop leaves them, always happy to see young people get together,

and joins von Coll and Narrisch on the fantail. Frau Gnahb has angled,
wallowing, around to the northwest. Presently they are heading up the
coast, through white-streaked, salt-smelling Baltic.

"Well. Where we going, fellas?" jovial Slothrop wants to know.
Narrisch stares. "That is the isle of Usedom," von Coll explains,

gently. "It is bounded on one side by the Baltic Sea. It is also bounded
by two rivers. Their names are the Swine, and the Peene. We were just
on the Swine River . We were in Swinemiinde. Swinemiinde means
'mouth of the Swine River.'

"

"All right, all right."
"We are headed around the island of U sedom, to a place that is at the

mouth of the Peene River."
"Let's see, so that would be called . . . wait . . . Peenemiinde,

right?"
"Very good."

498

,. . ....
/

-
-

/ =_ t -��



"So?" There is a pause. "Oh, Oh, that Peenemiinde."
Narrisch, as it turns out, used to work up there. He's apt to brood

some at the idea of Russians occupying the place.
"There was a liquid-oxygen plant I had my eye on, too," Springer a

little down with it himself, "I wanted to start a chain-we're still an­

gling for the one in Volkenrode, at the old Goering Institute."
"There's a bunch of those LOX generators under Nordhausen," Slo­

throp trying to be helpful.
"Thanks. The Russians have that too, you'll recall. That's a problem:

if it weren't so against Nature I'd say they don't know what they want.
The roads heading east are jammed day and night with Russian lorries,
full of materiel. All kinds of loot. But no clear pattern to it yet, beyond
strip-it-and-pack-it-home."

"Jeepers," clever Slothrop here, "do you reckon they've found that
S-Geriit yet, huh, Mr. von Coll?"

"Ah, cute," beams the Springer.
"He's an OSS man," groans Narrisch, "tell you, we ought to rub him

out."
"S-Gerat's going for £10,000 these days, half of that in front. You in-

terested?"

"Nope. But I did hear at Nordhausen that you already have it."
"Wrong."
"Gerhardt-"
"He's all right, Klaus." The look is one Slothrop's had before, from

auto salesmen signaling their partners got a real idiot here, Leonard,
now don't spook him please? "We planted the story deliberately in Stet­
tin. Wanted to see how a Colonel Tchitcherine will respond."

"Fuck. Him again? He'll respond, all right."
"Well, that's what we're going up to Peenemiinde today to find out."
"Oh, boy." Slothrop goes on to tell about the run-in at Potsdam, and

how Geli thought Tchitcherine didn't care about Rocket hardware
nearly so much as working out some plot against that Oberst Enzian. If
the two marketeers are interested, they don't show it.

The talk has drifted on into that kind of slack, nameful recapitulating
that Slothrop's mother Nalline loved to float away on in the afternoons
-Helen Trent, Stella Dallas, Mary Noble Backstage Wife....

"Tchitcherine is a complex man. It's almost as if ... he thinks of En­
zian as . . . another part of him-a black version of something inside

himself. A something he needs to . . . liquidate."
NARRISCH: Do you think there might be some ... some political rea­

son?

499



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I

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500

VON GaLL (shaking his head): I just don't know, Klaus. Ever since
what happened in Central Asia-

NARRISCH: You mean-
VON GaLL: Yes ... the Kirghiz Light. You know, it's funny-he's

never wanted to be thought of as an imperialist­
NARRISCH: None of them do. But there's the girl. ...
VON GaLL: Little Geli Tripping. The one who thinks she's a witch.
NARRISCH: But do you really think she means to go through with this

-this plan of hers, to find Tchitcherine?
VON GaLL: I think . . . They . . . do. . . .
NARRISCH: But Gerhardt, she is in love with him­
VON GaLL: He hasn't been dating her, has he?
NARRISCH: You can't be implying-
"Say," splutters Slothrop, "what th' heck're you guys talkin' about,

anyway?"
"Paranoia," Springer snaps reproachfully (as folks will snap when in­

terrupted at a game they enjoy). "You wouldn't understand that."
"Well excuse me, got to go vomit now," a klassic komeback among

charm-school washouts like our Tactful Tyrone here, and pretty ad­
vanced stuff on dry land, but not out here, where the Baltic is making it
impossible not to be seasick. Chimps are all doing their vomiting hud­
dled under a tarp. Slothrop joins at the rail a miserable lot of musicians
and girls. They instruct him in fine points such as not vomiting into the
wind, and timing it for when the ship rolls toward the sea, Frau Gnahb
having expressed the hope that no one would get any vomit on her ship
with the kind of glacial smile Dr. Mabuse used to get, especially on a
good day ... She can be heard in the pilot house now, bellowing her sea
chanty. "000000," goes Slothrop over the side.

And this is how their desperate enterprise goes a-rollicking up the
coast of U sedom, under a hazy summer sky. On shore, the green downs
roll up in two gentle steps: above them is a chain of hills thick with
pines and oaks. Little resort towns with white beaches and forlorn
jetties wheel abeam rheumatically slow. Military-looking craft, probably
Russian PT boats, will be seen now and then lying dead in the water.
N one challenge the Frau's passage. The sun is in and out, turning the
decks a stark moment's yellow around everyone's shadow. There's a late
time of day when all shadows are thrown along the same east-northeast
bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to sea from Peene­
miinde. The exact clock time, which varies through the year, is known
as Rocket Noon . . . and the sound that must at that moment fill the air



for its devout can only be compared with a noontime siren the whole
town believes in . . . and guts resonate, hard as stone. . . .

Before you sight it, you can feel the place. Even draped over a gun­
wale, cheek against a fender smelling of tar, eyes tearing and insides
sloshing as the sea. Even barren and scorched as Rossokovsky and the
White Russian Army left it in the spring. It's a face. On the maps, it's a
skull or a corroded face in profile, facing southwest: a small marshy lake
for the eye-socket, nose-and-mouth cavity cutting in at the entrance to
the Peene, just below the power station . . . the draftsmanship is a little
like a Wilhelm Busch cartoon face, some old fool for mischievous boys
to play tricks on. Tapping his tanks for grain alcohol, scratching great
naughty words across fields of his fresh cement, or even sneaking in to
set off a rocket in the middle of the night....

Low, burned-out buildings now, ash images of camouflage nets
burned onto the concrete (they had only a minute to glow, like a bUrg­
er's silk mantle-to light this coastal indoors, this engineers' parlor full
of stodgy shapes and neutral tones . . . didn't it only flare? no need to

put right, nothing monitory, no new levels to be reached ... but who
would that be, watching so civil and mild over the modeltop? face all in
these chromo sunset colors, eyes inside blackrim lenses which, like the

Haring nets, now are seen to have served as camouflage for who but the

Bicycle Rider in the Sky, the black and fatal Edwardian silhouette on
the luminous breast of sky, of today's Rocket Noon, two circular explo­
sions inside the rush hour, in the death-scene of the sky's light. How the
rider twirls up there, terminal and serene. In the Tarot he is known

as

The Fool, but around the Zone here they call him Slick. It's 1945. Still

early, still innocent. Some of it is).
Charred helpless latticework: what was wooden now only settles,

without strength. Green human shapes flash in the ruins. The scale is

very confusing, along here. The troops look larger than they should. A
zoo? a shooting gallery? Why, some of both. Frau Gnahb wallows in
closer to land, proceeds up the marshy shoreline at half speed. Signs of

occupation increase: lorry-parks, tents, a corral teeming with horses

pied, sorrel, snow-white, red as blood. Wild summer ducks up explod­
ing, wet and showery, out of green reeds-they swing aft over the boat
and descend in its wake, where they bob quacking in two-foot excur­
sions. High in the sunlight, a white-tailed eagle is soaring. Smooth­

lipped bomb and shell craters hold blue sea water. Barracks have had
their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of
these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of fall-

501



ing Europe. But trees, beech and pine, have begun to grow in again
where spaces were cleared and leveled for housing or offices-up
through cracks in the pavement, everywhere life may gain purchase, up
rushes green summer '45, and the forests are still growing dense on the
upland.

Passing now the great blackened remains of the Development Works,
most of it strewn at ground level. In series, some ripped and broken,
others largely hidden by the dunes, Narrisch reverently telling them one
by one, come the concrete masses of the test stands, stations of the
cross, VI, V, III, IV, II, IX, VIII, I, finally the Rocket's own, from which
it stood and flew at last, VII and X. Trees that once screened these from
the sea now are only stalks of charcoal.

Pulling around the northern curve of the peninsula, test-stand wall
and earthworks receding-moving now past Peenemiinde-West, the
Luftwaffe's old territory. Far away to starboard, the cliffs of the
Greifswalder Oie shimmer through the blue haze. Concrete launching­
ramps used to test the V-lor buzzbomb point at the sea. Runways
pocked with craters, heaped with rubble and wrecked Messerschmitts
swing by, down the peninsula: over the skull's arc, south again toward
the Peene, there-above the rolling hills, miles off the port bow, the red
brick tower of the cathedral in Wolgast, and closer in the half-dozen
stacks of the power station, smokeless over Peenemiinde, have survived
the lethal compression-loads of March.... White swans drift in the
reeds, and pheasants fly over the tall pines inland. A truck motor snarls
somewhere into life.

Frau Gnahb brings her boat around in a tight turn, through an inlet,
to the dock. The summer calm lies over everything: rolling-stock inert
on its tracks, one soldier sitting against an orange-topped oil drum
trying to play an accordion. Maybe only fooling around. Otto lets go of
his chorus girl's hand. His mother cuts the engines, and he steps broadly
to the dock and jogs along, making fast. Then there's a brief pause: Die­
sel fumes, marsh birds, quiet idleness. . . .

Somebody's staff car, racketing around the corner of a cargo shed,
slides to a stop, bouncing forth out of its rear door a major even fatter
than Duane Marvy, but with a kindlier and dimly Oriental face. Gray
hair like sheep's wool comes twisting down all around his head. "Ah!
von Coll!" arms outstretched, wrinkled eyes shiny with-is it real tears?
"von Coll, my dear friend!"

"Major Zhdaev," Springer nods ambling over the brow, as behind the
major now this truckload of troops in fatigues seems to be pulling up

502



here, kind of odd they should be toting those submachine guns and car­
bines just for some stevedoring. . . .

Right. Before anyone can move, they've leaped out and made a cor­
don around Zhdaev and the Springer, pieces at the ready. "Do not be
alarmed," Zhdaev waving and beaming, strolling backward to the car
with his arm around the Springer, "we are detaining your friend for a
bit. You may proceed with your work and go. We'll see that he gets
safely back to Swinemiinde."

"What the devil," Frau Gnahb comes growling out of the pilot house.
Haftung shows up, twitching, putting hands in various pockets and tak­
ing them out again: "Who are they arresting? What about my contract?
Will anything happen to us?" The staff car pulls away. Enlisted men
begin filing on board.

"Shit," ponders Narrisch.
"You think it's a bust?"
"I think Tchitcherine is responding with interest. Just as you said."
"Aw, now-"
"No, no," hand on sleeve, "he's right. You're harmless."
"Thanks."
"I warned him, but he laughed. 'Another leap, Narrisch. I have to

keep leaping, don't I?'
"

"Well what do you want to do now, cut him loose?"

There is some excitement amidships. The Russians have thrown back
a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also
broken into the vodka. Haftung blinks and shudders. Wolfgang is on his
back, sucking at a gurgling bottle he is clutching with his feet. Some of
the chimps are docile, others are looking for a fight.

"Somehow ...
"

Slothrop does wish the man would quit talking this
way, "I owe him-that much."

"Well I don't," Slothrop dodging a sudden plume of yellow chimpan­
zee vomit. "He ought to be able to take care of himself."

"His talk's grandiose enough. But he's not paranoid in his heart-in
this line of work, that's a disaster."

One of the chimps now bites a Soviet corporal in the leg. The corpo-
ral screams, unslinging his Tokarev and firing from the hip, by which
time the chimp has leaped for a halyard. A dozen more of the critters,
many carrying vodka bottles, head en masse for the gangplank. "Don't
let them get away," Haftung hollers. The trombone player sticks his
head sleepily out a hatch to ask what's happening and has his face

� walked over by three sets of pink-soled feet before grasping
the situa-

503



�l�
//--

", -��, .... r

tion. Girls, spangles aflame in the afternoon sun, feathers all quivering,are being chased forward and aft by drooling Red Army personnel. FrauGnahb pulls on her steam whistle, thereby spooking the rest of the
chimps, who join the stampede to shore. "Catch them," Haftung pleads,"somebody." Slothrop finds himself between Otto and Narrisch, beingpushed ashore over the brow by soldiers chasing after chimps or girls, ortrying to wrangle the cargo ashore. Among splashes, cursing, and girlishshrieks from the other side of the boat, chorus girls and musicians keepappearing and wandering back and forth. It is difficult to perceive justwhat the fuck is happening here.

"Listen." Frau Gnahb leaning over the side.
Slothrop notices a canny squint. "You have a plan.""You want to pull a diversionary feint."
"What? What?"
"Chimps, musicians, dancing girls. Decoys all over. While the threeof you sneak in and grab Der Springer."
"We can hide," Narrisch looking around gangster-eyed. "Nobody'llnotice. J a, ja! The boat can take off, as if we were on board!"
"Not me," sez Slothrop.
"Hal Hal" sez Frau Gnahb.
"Hal Hal" sez Narrisch,
'Tlllie to at the northeast corner," this madmother continues, "in thechannel between the little island and that triangular part that's built upon the foreshore."
"Test Stand X."
"Catchy name. I think there'll be enough of a tide by then. Light afire. Otto I Cast me off now."
"Zu Befehl, Mutti!"
Slothrop and N arrisch go dash behind a cargo shed, find a boxcar, andhide inside. Nobody notices. Chimps are running by in several direc­tions. The soldiers chasing them seem by now to be really pissed off.Someplace the clarinet player is blowing scales on his instrument. The

boat's motor sputters up into a growl, and screws go churning away. Awhile later, Otto and his girl come climb in the boxcar, out of breath.
"Well, Narrisch," Slothrop might as well ask, "where'd they takehim, do you think? eh?"
"From what I could see, Block Four and that whole complex to thesouth were deserted. My guess is the assembly building near Test StandVII. Under that big ellipse. There are underground tunnels and rooms­ideal for a headquarters. Looks like most of it survived pretty well, eventhough Rossokovsky had orders to level the place."

w

po

The



"You got a piece?" Narrisch shakes his head no. "Me neither.
What

kind of a black-market operator are you, anyway? no piece."
"I used to be in inertial guidance. You expect me to revert?"
"W-well what are we supposed to use, then? Our wits?"
Out the slats of the car, the sky is darkening, the clouds turning or­

ange, tangerine, tropical. Otto and his girl are murmuring in one
corner.

"Scrub that one," Narrisch with sour mouth. "Five minutes away from

his mother, he's a Casanova."
Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It's

not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a

year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange
information.

Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. "What did yours
use to say when she wanted to make you

feel guilty?"
"

'I've worked my fingers to the bone!'
"

sez the girl.
"Right! And she used to cook those horrible casseroles, w-with the

potatoes, and onions-"
"And ham! Little pieces of ham-"
"You see, you see? That can't be accidental! They have a contest, for

Mother of the Year, breast-feeding, diaper-changing, they time them,
casserole competitions, ja-then, toward the end, they actually begin to
use the children. The State Prosecutor comes out on stage. 'In a mo­

ment, Albrecht, we are going to bring your mother on. Here is a Luger,
fully loaded. The State will guarantee you absolute immunity

from pros­

ecution. Do whatever you wish to do-anything at all. Good luck, my

boy.' The pistols are loaded with blanks, natiirlich, but the
unfortunate

child does not know this. Only the mothers who get shot at qualify for
the finals. Here they bring in psychiatrists, and judges sit with stop­
watches to see how quickly the children will crack. 'Now then, Olga,
wasn't it nice of Mutti to break up your affair with that long-haired
poet?' 'We understand your mother and you are, ah, quite close,

Her­

mann. Remember the time she caught you masturbating into her glove?
Eh?' Hospital attendants stand by to drag the children off, drooling,
screaming, having clonic convulsions. Finally there is only

one Mother

left on stage. They put the traditional flowered hat on her head,
and

hand her the orb and scepter, which in this case are a gilded pot roast
and a whip, and the orchestra plays Tristan und Isolde."

D D D D D D D

They come out into the last of the twilight. Just a sleepy
summer eve-

505



ning in Peenerniinde. A Hight of ducks passes overhead, going west. NoRussians around. A single bulb burns over the entrance to the cargoshed. Otto and his girl wander hand in hand along the dock. An apecomes scampering up to take Otto's free hand. To north and south theBaltic keeps unrolling low white waves. "What's happening," asks theclarinet player. "Have a banana," tuba player with his mouth full has agood-sized bunch stowed in the bell of his ax.
Night is down by the time they get started. They head inland, Spring­er's crashout party, along the railroad tracks. Pine trees tower to eitherside of the cinder embankment. Ahead fat pinto rabbits scurry, onlytheir white patches visible, no reason to suppose rabbits is what theyare. Otto's friend Hilde comes gracefully down out of the woods withhis cap that she's filled to the brim with round berries, dusty blue,sweet. The musicians are packing vodka bottles in every availablepocket. That's tonight's meal, and Hilde kneeling alone at the berrybushes has whispered grace for them all. In the marshes now you canhear the first peepers start up, and the high-frequency squeals of a batout hunting, and some wind in the upper trees. Also, from farther away,a shot or two.

"Are they firing at my apes?" Haftung chatters. "That's 2000 marksapiece. How am I ever going to get that back?"
A family of mice go dashing across the tracks, and right over Slo­throp's feet. "I was expecting just a big cemetery. I guess not.""When we came we only cleared out what we needed to," Narrischrecalls. "Most of it stayed-the forest, the life . . . there are probablystill deer up in there, someplace. Big fellows with dark antlers. And thebirds-snipes, coots, wild geese-the noise from the testing drove themout to sea, but they'd always come back in when it was quiet again."Before they reach even the airfield they have to scatter twice into thewoods, first for a security patrol, then for a steam-engine come puffingup from Peenemiinde- East, its headlight cutting through a fine night­haze, some troops with automatics hanging on to steps and ladders.Steel grinding and creaking by in the night, the men shooting the breezeas they pass, no feeling of tension to it. "They might be after us any­way," Narrisch whispers. "Come on."

Through a patch of woods, and then cautiously out onto the open air­field. A sharp sickle of moon has risen. Apes scuttle along in the bone­light, arms dangling. It's a nervous passage. Everybody's a perfect tar­get, there's no cover except for airplanes strafed where they stood intorelics-rusted stringers, burned paint, gullwings driven back into the
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earth. Lights from the old Luftwaffe complex glow
to the south. Trucks

purr now and then along the road at
the far edge of the airfield. There's

singing from the barracks, and someplace
a radio. The evening news

from somewhere. Too far to hear the words or
even the language, only

the studious monotone: the news, Slothrop, going on
without you. . . .

They make it across the tarmac to the road,
and crouch in a drainage

ditch, listening for traffic. Suddenly, to their left, yellow runway
lights

come on, a double row of them chaining to the sea, brightness bouncing

up and down a couple-three
times before it settles in. "Somebody com­

ing in," Slothrop guesses.
"More likely going out," snaps Narrisch.

"We'd better hurry."
Back in the pine woods now, heading up a road

of packed dirt toward

Test Stand VII, they start to pick up stray girls and chimpanzees.
Pine

smells wrap them: old
needles lie at the margins of the road. Downhill,

lights appear as the trees begin thinning out,
then the test-stand area

comes in view. The assembly building is something like a
hundred feet

high-it blocks out the stars. There's
a tall bright band where sliding

doors are open, and light scatters outside.
Narrisch grabs Slothrop's

arm. "It looks like the major's car. And the motor's running."
Lotta

searchlights, too, set up on fences topped
with barbed wire-also what

look like a division of security roaming around.

"Guess this is it," Slothrop a little nervous.

"Ssh." Sound of a plane, a Single-engine fighter, circling
to make its

approach low over the pines. "Not
much time." Narrisch gathers the

others around and issues his orders. Girls are
to go in from the front,

singing, dancing, vamping the woman-hungry
barbarians. Otto will try

to knock out the car, Haftung will get everybody
rounded up and ready

to rendezvous with the boat.

"Tits 'n' ass," mutter the girls, "tits 'n' ass. That's all we
are around

here."

"Ah, shaddap," snarls G. M. B. Haftung,
which is his usual way of

dealing with the help.
"Meanwhile," continues Narrisch, "Slothrop and I

will go in after

Springer. When we have him,
we'll try to get them to shoot.

That will

be your Signal to run like hell."
"Oh, definitely some shooting," sez Slothrop,

"a-and how about

this?" He has just had a brilliant idea:
fake Molotov cocktails, a switch

on Saute Bummer's old routine. He
holds up a vodka bottle, pointing

and grinning.
"But that stuff won't even hardly burn."



"But they'll think it's gasoline," beginning to pluck ostrich feathersfrom the costume of the nearest girl. "And just imagine how secure itwill make us feel."
"Felix," the clarinet player asks the tuba player, "what have wefallen among?" Felix is eating a banana, and living for the moment.Presently he has wandered off in the woods with the rest of the band,where they can be heard moving around in circles, tootling and blattingat each other. Hilde and Slothrop are making Phony Phirebombs, theother girls have taken off, Zitz und Arsch, downslope."So we'll present a plausible threat," Narrisch whispers, "we'll needmatches. Who's got matches?"

"Not me."
"Me either."
"Gee, my lighter's out of flints."
"Kot," Narrisch throwing up his hands, "Kot," walking off into thetrees, where he collides with Felix and his tuba. "You don't have anymatches either."
"I have a Zippo," replies Felix, "and two Corona Coronas, from theAmerican officers' club in-"
A minute later, Narrisch and Slothrop, hands each cupped around thecoal of one of Havana's finest, are sneaky- Peteing like two cats in a car­toon off toward Test Stand VII, with vodka-bottle bombs stuck in theirbelts and ostrich-feather wicks trailing behind in the sea breeze. Theplan is to climb the pine-topped sand-and-scrub embankment aroundthe test stand, and come in on the Assembly Building from behind.Now Narrisch here's a guidance man, a guidance man is he. And ev'ryday at Rocket Noon, there's death, and revelry.... But Narrisch hasmanaged, in his time, to avoid nearly all of it.In fact, no two people have been so ill-equipped to approach a holyCenter since the days of Tchitcherine and Dzaqyp Qulan, hauling assover the steppe, into the North, to find their Kirghiz Light. That's aboutten years' gap. Giving this pastime about the same vulnerability to rec­ord-breakers as baseball, a sport also well-spidered with white sugges­tions of the sinister.

Holy-Center-Approaching is soon to be the number one Zonal pas­time. Its balmy heyday is nearly on it. Soon more champions, adepts,magicians of all ranks and orders will be in the field than ever before inthe history of the game. The sun will rule all enterprise, if it be honestand sporting. The Gauss curve will herniate toward the excellent. Andtankers the likes of Narrisch and Slothrop here will have already beenweeded out.
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Slothrop, as noted, at least as early as the
Anubis era, has begun to

thin, to scatter. "Personal density," Kurt Mondaugen
in his Peene­

miinde office not too many steps away from here, enunciating
the Law

which will one day bear his name, "is directly proportional
to temporal

bandwidth.
"

"Temporal bandwidth" is the width of your present, your
now. It is

the familiar "ut" considered as a dependent variable. The
more you

dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your
bandwidth, the

more solid your persona. But the
narrower your sense of Now, the more

tenuous you are. It may get to where you're having
trouble remem­

bering what you were doing five minutes ago,
or even-as Slothrop

now-what you're doing here, at the base of this
colossal curved em­

bankment....

"Uh," he turns slackmouth to Narrisch, "what
are we

"What are we what?"

"What?"

"You said, 'What are we ... " then you stopped."
"Oh. Gee, that was a funny thing to say."
As for Narrisch, he's too locked in to business. He has

never seen this

great Ellipse any other way but the way
he was meant to. Greta Erd­

mann, on the contrary, saw the
rust-colored eminences here bow, ex­

actly as they did once, in expectancy,
faces hooded, smooth cowlings of

Nothing . . . each time Thanatz brought
the whip down on her skin,

she was taken, off on another penetration toward the
Center: each lash,

a little farther in . . . till someday, she knows, she will
have that first

glimpse of it, and from then on it will be an
absolute need, a ruling tar­

get . . . wh-wh-wh-whack
the boneblack trestling of water towers

above, bent to the great rim, visible above
the trees in light that's bleak

and bruise-purple as Peenemiinde sunsets
in the chill slow firing­

weather . . . a long look from the top of some known
Low Country dike

into a sky flowing so even and yellowed a
brown that the sun could be

anywhere behind it, and the crosses
of the turning windmills could be

spoke-blurs of the terrible Rider himself, Slothrop's
Rider, his two ex­

plosions up there, his celestial cyclist-
No, but even That only flickers now briefly

across a bit of Slothropian

lobe-terrain, and melts into its surface, vanishing. So
here passes for him

one more negligence . . . and likewise groweth
his Preterition sure.

. . .
There is no good reason to hope for any turn, any surprise

I-see-it,

not from Slothrop. Here he is, scaling the walls of
an honest ceremonial

plexus, set down on a good enough
vision of what's shadowless noon

and what isn't. But oh, Egg the flying Rocket hatched from,
navel of the

509



50-meter radio sky, all proper ghosts of place-forgive him his numb­ness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn't tighten in hischest, the heart that can't stiffen in any greeting.... Forgive him asyou forgave Tchitcherine at the Kirghiz Light. . . . Better days arecoming.
Slothrop is listening to faraway peripatetic tuba and clarinet beingjoined in on now by trombone and tenor sax, trying to pick up a tune. . . and to the bursts of laughter from soldiers and girls . . . soundslike a party down there ... maybe even some stag dames ... "Say,why don't we, uh . . . what was your-" Narrisch, leather scarecrow,trying to ignore Slothrop's behavior, has decided to dismantle his fire­bomb: he uncorks the vodka and waves it under his nose before taking abelt. He beams, cynical, salesmanwise, up at Slothrop. "Here." A si­lence under the white wall.

"Oh, yes I was thinking it was gasoline, but then it's fake, so it's reallyvodka, right?"
But just over the embankment, down in the arena, what might thathave been just now, waiting in this broken moonlight, camouflage paintfrom fins to point crazed into jigsaw . . . is it, then, really never to findyou again? Not even in your worst times of night, with pencil words onyour page only M from the things they stand for? And inside the victimis twitching, fingering beads, touching wood, avoiding any OperationalWord. Will it really never come to take you, now?Near the water towers, they have started to climb, up toward the rim.Sand leaks into their shoes and hisses away down the slope. At the top,back through the trees, they get a quick look at the lighted runway, thefighter now landed, surrounded by groundcrew shadows fueling, serv­icing, turning her around. Down the peninsula lights glow in patches,curves, zigzags, but over on this side, from the old Development Workssouth, it's pitch black.

They push through pine branches and down again, into the Egg,sacked of its German hardware, long converted to a Russian motor pool.The corner of the huge Assembly Building, as they come down, rises toface them across a hundred yards of jeeps and lorries. Down to the rightis a three- or four-level test frame with a round, kind of quonset top,and underneath the frame is a long pit shaped like a shallow V."Cooling duct," according to Narrisch. "They're probably under there.We have to go in through here."
They have come halfway down the slope to a pump house, built intothe earthworks, for the cold water that used to carry off the tremendousheat from the test firings. It is stripped now, hollow and dark inside. Slo-

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throp isn't two steps over the doorsill when
he walks into somebody.

"Beg your pardon," though it comes out less
than calmly.

"Oh, that's all right." Russian accent. "I don't mind at all."
He backs

Slothrop outside again, oh, a mean looking junior sergeant
here about 8

or 9 feet high.
"Well, now-" at which point Narrisch comes walking into

them.

"Oh." Narrisch blinks at the sentry. "Sergeant, don't you hear that

music? Why aren't you back at the Assembly Building,
with your com­

rades? There are, I understand, a number of eager Frauleins entertaining

them," nudge nudge, "in a most enchanting state of deshabille,
too."

"I suppose that's all perfectly divine," replies the sentry,
"for some

people."
"Kat . . ." So much for tactics.

"And besides, this is out of bounds, you big sillies."

Sighing, Narrisch raises his bottle aloft, brings it down,
or up, thunk

on the sentry's nape, dislodging the man's helmet liner,
is what happens.

"Naughty," the Russian, somewhat nettled, stoops
to retrieve his head­

gear. "Really I ought to put you both under apprehension."
"Enough chit-chat," snarls Slothrop, brandishing

his glowing cigar
and "Molotov cocktail." "Hand over that gun there, Ivan, or I

turn you

into a human flare!"
"You're mean," sulks the sentry, unslinging his Degtyarov a little

too

quickly-Slothrop dodges aside, aims his usual swift
kick to the groin,

which misses, but does knock loose the weapon,
which Narrisch is

thoughtful enough to dive for. "Beasts," whimpers
the Russian, "oh,

nasty, awful . . ." scampering off
into the night.

"Two minutes," Narrisch already inside the pump house. Slothrop

grabs the automatic from him and follows
at a run, accelerating down a

sloping corridor. Their feet ring faster, sharper,
on the concrete, down

to a metal door: behind it they can hear Springer singing and babbling
like a drunk. Slothrop pushes off his safety and Narrisch goes busting

in.

A pretty blonde auxiliary in black boots
and steel-rimmed glasses is sit­

ting here taking down shorthand
notes of everything she hears from

Springer, who leans happily grandiose against
a cold-water pipe four

feet high that runs the length of the room.

"Drop that pencil," orders Slothrop.
"All right, where's that Major

Zhdaev?"

"He's in conference. If you'd care to leave your name-"

"Dope," Narrisch screams, "they have given
him some kind of dope!

Gerhardt, Gerhardt, speak to me!"

511



Slothrop recognizes the symptoms. "It's that Sodium Amytal. It'sO.K. Let's go."
"I expect the Major to be back any moment. They're upstairs in theguardroom, smoking. Is there a number where he can reach you?"Slothrop has slid under one of Springer's arms, N arrisch under theother, when there's this loud hammering on the door.
"Smoking? Smoking what?"
"This way, Slothrop."
"Oh." They hustle Springer out another door, which Slothrop boltsand wrassles a heavy filing cabinet up against, then they drag Springerup a flight of steps into a long, straight corridor, lit by six or seven bulbs,the spaces between which are very dark. Along either side, floor to ceil­ing, run thick bundles of measurement cabling."We're done for," Narrisch wheezes. It's 150 yards to the measure­ment bunker, and no cover but the shadows between the bulbs. Allthese birds gotta do is spray a pattern.

"She baffs at nothing, the heterospeed," cries Gerhardt von Coll."Try to walk," Slothrop scared shit, "come on, man, it's our ass!"Smashing echoes after them down the tunnel. A muffled burst of auto­matic fire. And another. All at once, two faint pools of light ahead,Zhdaev materializes, on the way back to his office. He has a friend withhim, who smiles when he sees Slothrop 40 yards away, a big steel smile.Slothrop lets go of Springer and runs up into the next light, piece at theready. The Russians are blinking at him in a puzzled way. "Tchitcher­ine! Hey."
They stand facing, each at his lit circle. Slothrop recalls that he hasthe drop on them. He smiles in half-apology, tips the muzzle at them,moves closer. Zhdaev and Tchitcherine, after a discussion which seemsunnecessarily long, decide they will raise their hands.
"Bocketman] "

"Howdy."
"What are you doing in a Fascist uniform like that?""You're right. Think I'll join that Red Army, instead." Narrisch leavesSpringer sagging against a row of sleek rubber and silver-mesh cables,and comes up to help disarm the two Russians. Troops back down thetunnel are still busy busting the door down.
"You guys want to undress, here? Say Tchitcherine, how'd you likethat hashish, by the way?"
"Well," taking off his trousers, "we were all up there in the budkajust now smoking some . . . Rocketman, your timing is fantastic.Zhdaev, isn't he something?"

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Slothrop slides out of his tux. "Just see you don't get
a hardon here

now, fella."

"I'm serious. It's your Schwarzphanomen."

"Quit fooling."
"You don't even know about it. It choreographs you. Mine's always

trying to destroy me. We should be exchanging those,
instead of uni­

forms."

The disguise business grows complicated. Zhdaev's jacket
with the

gold-starred pagani on the shoulders gets draped
around the Springer,

who is now humming everyone a Kurt Weill medley. Zhdaev puts
on

Springer's white suit, and then him and
Tchitcherine get tied up with

their own belts, a-and neckties. "Now-the idea," Slothrop explains,

"being that you, Tchitcherine, will be posing
as me, and the major

there-" At which point the door back down the tunnel comes blasting

open, two figures with wicked Suomi subs, drums
on them as big as that

Gene Krupa's, come flying through. Slothrop stands
in the light in

Tchitcherine's uniform, and waves dramatically, pointing at the two

hogtied officers. "Make it good," he mutters to Tchitcherine,
"I'm trust­

ing you now, but look out I have a great passive vocabulary,
I'll know

what you're saying."
It's O.K. with Tchitcherine, but confusing. ''I'm supposed to be who,

now?"

"Oh, shit . . . look, just tell them to go check out the pump
house up

there, it's urgent." Slothrop gestures and lip-synchs
while Tchitcherine

talks. It seems to work. The two actually salute, and go back through
the door they just shot down.

"Those apes," Tchitcherine shakes his head. "Those
black apes! How

did you know, Rocketman? Of
course you didn't, but the Schwarzpha­

nomen did. A great touch. Two of them, looking at me through
the win­

dow. And I thought-well, you know: I thought just about
what you

thought I'd think. ...
"

But by this time Slothrop is way out of
earshot. Springer by now is

able to stumble at a fast walk. They get as far as the measurement
bun­

ker without running into anybody. Out a door of bulletproof glass,
be­

hind their own reflections, is the old test frame, windows
broken out,

camouflage in German Expressionist ripples streaming gray
and black

all over it. The two soldiers are sure enough up there poking
around

that pump house, finding nothing. Presently they disappear
inside again,

and Narrisch opens the door. "Hurry." They edge outside,
into the

arena.

It takes a while to get back up the slope and into the woods.
Otto and

513



Hilde show up. They've finessed Zhdaev's car and driver out of a rotorarm. So there are four of them now to try and lift warbling payload Ger­hardt von Coll up these few crummy feet of sand embankment here,gotta be the most ill-designed propulsion system this test stand has seenin a while. Otto and Hilde tug at Springer's arms, Narrisch and Slothroppush from the ass end. About halfway up Springer blows a tremendousfart that echoes for minutes across the historic ellipse, like now to do foryou folks my anal impression of the At. . . .
"Oh, fuck you," Slothrop snarls.
"An erect green steed of planetoid and bone," nods the Springer inreply.
Music and chatter back by the Assembly Building have all died awaynow, and an unpleasant calm has replaced them. Up over the top at lastand into the woods, where Springer rests his forehead against a treetrunk and commences vomiting violently.
"Narrisch, we're risking our ass for this slob?"
But Narrisch is busy helping squeeze his friend's stomach. "Gerhardt,are you all right? What can I do?"
"Beautiful," chokes Springer, vomit trickling down his chin. "Ahh.Feels great!"
Along come chimps, musicians, dancing girls. Drifting in to rendez­vous. Over the last dune and down to the packed cinder triangle of TestStand X, and the sea. The musicians for a while playa kind of marchtune. Past the foreshore, the tide has left them a strip of sand. But FrauGnahb is nowhere in sight. Haftung is holding hands with an ape. Felixshakes spit out of his tuba. A honey-haired chorus girl, whose name henever does get, puts her arms around Slothrop. "I'rn scared.""Me too." He hugs her.

All hell breaks loose-sirens whoop-whooping, searchlights starting toprobe the woods up above, truck motors and shouted commands. Thecrashout party move off the cinders, and crouch in marsh grass."We've collected one automatic and two sidearms," Narrisch whis­pers. "They'll be coming at us from the south. It'll only take one of us togo back up and hold them." He nods and begins checking his hardware."You're crazy," hisses Slothrop, "they'll kill you." Commotion nowfrom over by Test Stand VII. Headlights are appearing, one after an­other, along the road up there.
Narrisch taps Springer on the chin. It isn't clear if Springer knowswho he is. "Lebe wohl," anyway, Springer. ... Nagants stuck in over­coat pockets, automatic cradled in his arms, Narrisch takes off at acrouching run along the beach, and doesn't look back.

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"Whore's the boat?" Haftung in a white panic. Ducks, alarmed,
are

quacking at each other down here.
Wind moves in the grass. When

searchlights move by, pine trunks uphill flare, deeply shining,
terrible

... and at everyone's back, the Baltic shakes and
streams.

Shots from uphill-then, maybe from Narrisch in reply, a
burst of au­

tomatic fire. Otto is holding his Hilde close. "Anybody
read Morse

Code?" the girl next to Slothrop wants to know,
"because there's been a

light going over there, see, at the tip of
that little island? for a few min­

utes now." It's three dots, dot, dot, three more dots. Over
and over.

"Hmm, SEES," ponders Felix.

"Maybe they're not dots," sez the
tenor-sax player, "maybe they're

dashes."

"That's funny," sez Otto, "that would spell
OTTO."

"That's your name," sez Hilde.
"Mother!" screams Otto, running out in the water and waving

at the

blinking light. Felix commences booming
tuba notes across the water,

and the rest of the band joins in. Reed shadows come stabbing
across

the sand, as the spotlights swoop down. A boat engine
roars into hear­

ing. "Here she comes," Otto jumping up
and down in the marsh.

"Hey, Narrisch," Slothrop squinting, trying
to find him back there in

light that was always too weak, "come
on. Fall back." No answer. But

more shooting.
Running-lights off, the boat comes barreling

in at flank speed, Frau

Gnahb has decided to ram Peenemiinde? no, now
she puts everything

full astern-bearings shriek, screw-foam geysers,
the boat slews around

to a stop.
"Get on board," she bellows.

Slothrop's been hollering for
Narrisch. Frau Gnahb leans on her

steam-whistle. But no answer. "Shit, I've got to get him-"
Felix and

Otto grab Slothrop from behind, drag him
back to the boat kicking and

cursing. "They'll kill him, you assholes,
lemme go-" Dark shapes come

spilling over the dune between here
and Test Stand VII, orange flickers

at their midsections, the sound of rifle fire following a
second later.

"They will kill us." Otto heaves Slothrop up
over the side, and tum­

bles in after. Spotlights find and skewer them now.
The firing is louder

-nipples and spatters in the water, slugs hammering
into the boat.

"Everybody here?" the Frau's fangs bared
in a grin. "Fine, fine!" A

last ape reaches up, Haftung
catches his hand, and he dangles, feet in

the water, for several yards as they light out, all ahead full,
till he can

finally clamber up and over.
Gunfire follows out to sea, out of range, at

last out of earshot.



"Hey Felix," sez the tenor sax player, "you think there's any gigs inSwinernunde?"

John Dillinger, at the end, found a few seconds' strange mercy in themovie images that hadn't quite yet faded from his eyeballs-ClarkGable going off unregenerate to fry in the chair, voices gentle out of thedeathrow steel so long, Blackie . . . turning down a reprieve from hislongtime friend now Governor of New York William Powell, skinnychinless condescending jerk, Gable just wanting to get it over with,"Die like ya live-all of a sudden, don't drag it out-" even as bitchylittle Melvin Purvis, staked outside the Biograph Theatre, lit up the fatalcigar and felt already between his lips the penis of official commenda­tion-and federal cowards at the signal took Dillinger with theirfaggots' precision . . . there was still for the doomed man some shift ofpersonality in effect-the way you've felt for a little while afterward inthe real muscles of your face and voice, that you were Gable, the ironiceyebrows, the proud, shining, snakelike head-to help Dillinger throughthe bushwhacking, and a little easier into death.
Narrisch now, huddled inside a broken few meters of concrete drain­age pipe, after doubling back under the wall of Test Stand VII, bracingcurled now in the smell of old storm water, trying not to breathe loudenough to smack echoes into any betrayal-s-Narrisch hasn't been to amovie since Der Miide Tad. That's so long ago he's forgotten its ending,the last Rilke-elegiac shot of weary Death leading the two lovers awayhand in hand through the forget-me-nots. No help at all from that quar­ter. Tonight Narrisch is down to the last tommygun of his career, for­eign and overheated . . . and blisters on his hands he won't have toworry about tomorrow. No sources of mercy available beyond the hardweapon, the burning fingers-a cruel way to go out for a good guidanceman who always put in fair time for fair wages. . . . He had other offers. . . could've gone east with the Institute Rabe, or west to America and$6 a day-but Gerhardt von Coll promised him glamour, jackpots, aflashy dame on his arm, say, why not on both arms?-after poor linearPeenemiinde, who could blame him?

It wasn't ever necessary to see around the entire Plan ... reallythat's asking too much of anyone . . . not true? This S-Gerat strategyhe's going out of his way to die for tonight, what does he know of theSpringer's full intentions in the affair? It is reasonable to Narrisch thathe, being smaller, he should be the sacrifice, if it helps Springer survive,even survive another day . . . wartime thinking, [a, [a . . . but too lateto change.
516

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Did the S-Gerat program at Nordhausen
in its time ever hint that so

many individuals, nations, firms,
communities of interest would come

after the fact? Of course he was flattered then at being chosen to
work

on the modification to the guidance, minor as it was . . . hardly
worth

the special treatment ... still, it was his
first high historical moment

and he sourly figured it to be his last, up until meeting
with Springer's

recruiting team, back during the rainier part of June.
. . .

Conferences

in cafes and entrances to churchyards around Braunschweig (stucco

arches, vines dripping onto thin collars) without an
umbrella but with

that light, belled hope inside-a field,
crowded with lines of force, to

expand, to fill, to keep him in good health
and spirits ... Berlin! The

Chicago Cabaret! "Cocaine-or cards?" (an
old movie line the gunsels

loved to use that summer) . . . the Big Time!
But the ringing bright thing inside brought him here,

instead: here,

down in a pipe, to only a handful more of
minutes....

The idea was always to carry along a fixed quantity,
A. Sometimes

you'd use a Wien bridge, tuned to a
certain frequency �, whistling,

heavy with omen, inside the electric
corridors . . . while outside, ac­

cording to the tradition in these matters,
somewhere a quantity B would

be gathering, building, as the Rocket gathered speed. So, up
till assigned

Brennschluss velocity, "vl." electric-shocked as any
rat into following

this very narrow mazeway
of clear space-yes, radio signals from the

ground would enter the Rocket body,
and by reflex-literally by elec­

tric Signal traveling a reflex arc-the
control surfaces twitch, to steer

you back on course
the instant you'd begin to wander off (how could

you've kept from lapsing, up here, into
that radiant inattention, so

caught up in the wind, the sheer altitude
. . . the unimaginable fires at

your feet?) ... so, for that tightly
steered passage, all was carried on

in

the sharpest, most painful anticipation, with
B always growing, as pal­

pably cresting as the assault of tidal
wave that stills every small creature

and hones the air down to a cold stir. . . . Your quantity A-shining,

constant A, carried as they must have once packed far
overland at night

the Grail, in their oldtime and military bleakness of
humor . . . and one

morning a wide upper lip steelwool gray
with the one day's growth, the

fatal, the terrible sign, he shaved smooth every day,
it meant that this

was the Last Day-and, too, with only the grim sixth sense,
as much

faith as clear reception, that the B of Many Subscripts just
over the

electric horizon was really growing closer, perhaps this time as "Biw,"

the precession angle of the gyro, moving invisibly
but felt, terrifically

arousing, over the metal frame
toward angle �w (which is how they

have set you the contacts: to close, you
must see, at that exact angle).



Or as "BiL'" another integrating, not of gyro rate but of the raw currentflow itself, bled from the moving coil inside the poles, the "fettered"pendulum ... they thought this way, Design Group, in terms of captiv­ity, prohibition ... there was an attitude toward one's hardware morebrutal and soldierly than most engineers' got the chance to be. . . .They felt quite the roughshod elite, Driwelling, and Schmeil, with thefluorescent lights shining on his bared forehead night after night....Inside their brains they shared an old, old elctro-decor-variable capac­itors of glass, kerosene for a dielectric, brass plates and ebonite covers,Zeiss galvanometers with thousands of fine-threaded adjusting screws,Siemens milliammeters set on slate surfaces, terminals designated byRoman numerals, Standard Ohms of manganese wire in oil, the oldGiilcher Thermosaule that operated on heating gas, put out 4 volts,nickel and antimony, asbestos funnels on top, mica tubing. . . .Wasn't that life more decent than gangstering? A cleaner sort offriendship. . . less devious, anyway.. . . There we saw how we had tofit in . . . the machinery itself determined that . . . everything was soclear then, paranoia was all for the enemy, and never for one'sown....
-What about the SS?
-Oh, they were the enemy, I'd say.... [Laughter.]No, Klaus, don't drift away, please, not onto dreams of kindly Sovietinterrogation that will end in some ermine bed, some vodka-perfumedstupor, you know that's foolish....
B, B-sub-N-for-Narrisch, is nearly here-nearly about to burnthrough the last whispering veil to equal "A"-to equal the only frag­ment of himself left by them to go through the moment, the irreducibledoll of German styrene, shabbier, less authentic than any earlier self. . . a negligible quantity in this last light . . . this tattoo of hunters'boots, and rifle bolts in oiled keyways....

D D D D D D D
Here come Enzian, Andreas, and Christian, coming on like Smith,Klein, 'n' French, crashing into the basement room-field-gray kit,newspaper shoes, rolled trouser-cuffs, hands and bare forearms shiningwith motor oil and gear grease, toting carbines in a show of force. Butno Empty Ones here to see them. It's too late. Just the mute bed, andthe brown ellipse her blood made on the torn ticking. And washing-blue518

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in grainy splashes in the corners, under the
bed . . . their signature,

their challenge.
"Where is she-" Christian is just this side of berserk. One word

astray and he'll be off to kill the first Empty
One he finds. Maria, his sis­

ter, is, was, may be-
"We'd better," Enzian already back out the door, "where's, uh .

her husband, you know....
"

"Pavel." Christian wants to see his eyes, but Enzian won't
tum.

Pavel and Maria meant to have the child. Then Josef Ombindi and his

people started their visiting. They have
learned their vulturehood from

the Christian missionaries. They keep lists of all the women of child­

bearing age. Any pregnancy is an invitation
to hover, to tune in, to

swoop. They will use threats, casuistry, physical
seduction-there's an

arsenal of techniques. Washing-blue is the abortifacient of
choice.

"The refinery," suggests Andreas Orukambe.

"Really? I thought he'd sworn off that."

"Maybe not now." The girl's brother stares him
hard as fists. Enzian,

old bastard, you really are out of touch. . . .

They remount their motorcycles and head
off again. Blasted dry­

docks, charcoal ribs of warehouses, cylindrical chunks of
submarine that

never got assembled, go ripping by in the darkness.
British security are

about, but that's another, encapsulated world. The British G-S occupy
their own space and Zone congruent but

not identical to what these se­

rious Schwarzkommando astride bikes unmufHed go blasting on through

tonight.
Separations are proceeding. Each alternative

Zone speeds away from

all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the
Center.

Each day the mythical return Enzian dreamed of
seems less possible.

Once it was necessary to know uniforms, insignia, airplane markings,
to

observe boundaries. But by now too many choices have been made. The

Single root lost, way back there in the May
desolation. Each bird has his

branch now, and each one is the Zone.

A crowd of DPs is milling by the ruin of an ornamental fountain, a

score of them, eyes of ash, smudged into faces white as
salt. The Her­

eros go swerving by them, halfway up a
shallow flight of long steps

dovetailing into the grade of the street, teeth slamming together upper
and lower, cycle frames squeaking shrill, up and down the steps past
wordless plosions of Slavic breath. Ashes and salt. A

sound-truck ap­

pears around a wall a
hundred meters away: the voice, University-bred

inu-blue
and long tired of the message, recites, "Clear

the streets. Go to your

519



homes." Clear the-go to your what? There must be a mistake, it mustbe for some other town. . . .
Whir underneath an oil pipeline up on trestles running down left­ward to the water now, huge bolted flanges overhead softened by rustand oily dirt. Far out in the harbor rides an oil tanker, rocking serene asa web of stars.... Zoom uphill slantwise toward a rampart of wasted,knotted, fused, and scorched girderwork, stacks, pipes, ducting, wind­ings, fairings, insulators reconfigured by all the bombing, grease-stainedpebblery on the ground rushing by a mile a minute and wait, wait, saywhat, say "reconfigured," now?"

There doesn't exactly dawn, no but there breaks, as that light you'reafraid will break some night at too deep an hour to explain away-therefloods on Enzian what seems to him an extraordinary understanding.This serpentine slag-heap he is just about to ride into now, this ex-refin­ery, Jamf Olfabriken Werke AG, is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect work­ing order. Only waiting for the right connections to be set up, to beswitched on . . . modified, precisely, deliberately by bombing that wasnever hostile, but part of a plan both sides- "sidesr-had alwaysagreed on ... yes and now what if we-all right, say we are supposedto be the Kabbalists out here, say that's our real Destiny, to be thescholar-magicians of the Zone, with somewhere in it a Text, to bepicked to pieces, annotated, explicated, and masturbated till it's allsqueezed limp of its last drop . . . well we assumed-natiirlich!-thatthis holy Text had to be the Rocket, orururumo orunene the high, rising,dead, the blazing, the great one ("orunene" is already being modified bythe Zone- Herero children to "omunene," the eldest brother) . . . ourTorah. What else? Its symmetries, its latencies, the cuteness of it en­chanted and seduced us while the real Text persisted, somewhere else,in its darkness, our darkness ... even this far from Siidwest we are notto be spared the ancient tragedy of lost messages, a curse that will neverleave us....
But, if I'm riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it ...or if I passed it today somewhere in the devastation of Hamburg,breathing the ash-dust, missing it completely . . . if what the IG builton this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangementof fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AFbombers yes the "Allied" planes all would have been, ultimately, IG­built, by way of Director Krupp, through his English interlocks-thebombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release ofenergy placed exactly in space and time, each shockwave plotted in ad­vance to bring precisely tonight's wreck into being thus decoding the
520

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Text, thus coding, recoding, redecoding the holy
Text ... If it is in

working order, what is it meant to do?
The engineers who built it as a

refinery never knew there were any further steps
to be taken. Their de­

sign was "finalized," and they could forget
it.

lt means this War was never political at all, the politics was all
thea­

tre, all just to keep the people distracted ... secretly,
it was being dic­

tated instead by the needs of technology . . . by a conspiracy
between

human beings and techniques, by something that
needed the energy­

burst of war, crying, "Money be damned, the very life
of [insert name of

Nation] is at stake," but meaning, most likely,
dawn is nearly here, I

need my night's blood, my funding, funding,
ahh more, more. . . . The

real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among
firms-it

was only staged to look that way-but among
the different Technolo­

gies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft,
and their needs which are under­

stood only by the ruling elite . . .
Yes but Technology only responds (how often this argument

has been

iterated, dogged and humorless as a Gaussian reduction, among
the

younger
Schwarzkommando especially), "All very well to talk

about

having a monster by the tail, but do you
think we'd've had the Rocket if

someone, some specific somebody with a name and
a penis hadn't

wanted to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and
blow up a block full of

civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it'll
make

you feel less responsible-but
it puts you in with the neutered, brother,

in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth
for the numb

and joyless hardons of human sultans,
human elite with no right at all to

be where they are-"
We have to look for power sources here, and

distribution networks

we were never taught, routes of power our teachers
never imagined, or

were encouraged to avoid . . . we have to
find meters whose scales are

unknown in the world, draw our own schematics, getting feedback,

making connections, reducing the error, trying
to learn the real function

. . . zeroing in on what incalculable plot? Up here,
on the surface, coal­

tars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy
functions to

hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps
centuries in the unroll­

ing . . . this ruinous plant, waiting
for its Kabbalists and new alchemists

to discover the Key, teach the mysteries to others
...

And if it isn't exactly Jamf Olfabriken Werke? what if
it's the Krupp

works in Essen, what if it's Blohm & Voss right here in Hamburg
or an­

other make-believe "ruin," in another city? Another country?
YAAAGGGGHHHHH!

Well, this is stimulant talk here, yes
Enzian's been stuffing down Nazi

521



surplus Pervitins these days like popcorn at the movies, and by now thebulk of the refinery-named, incidentally, for the famous discoverer ofOneirine-is behind them, and Enzian is on into some other paranoidterror, talking, talking, though each man's wind and motor cuts him offfrom conversation.
Sort of a Just a daredevil Desox-yephedrine DaddyHoagy Carmichael With m'pockets full 0' happee daze,piano can be heard , ,

h 'ld d
in behind Zoomm through the Zone, where t e WI ogs roam,this, here Givin' all m'dreams away . . .

Took the tubes outa my radi-yo,Don't mean a thing to me-
Wouldn't spend a nickel on the Stars 'n' Stripes, causeI'm doin' my own fer free. . . .
Mouth keeps goin', nobody listenin',
Gabbin' at a terrible pace-
Aw, you're so sly, but I wave good-by,With a shit-eatin' grin on m'face!
Don'tcha ephedrine of me, my honey,Swoon just to hear my name-
In the curfew cells when all the lights are gone, oh,Ev'ry thing'll be the same
(Just light the candles)
Ev-rything'll be the same.

Last night in his journal, Enzian wrote: "The Mouth lately has beentoo much in service. Too little coming out of use to anybody. A defense.Oh God, oh God. Then they really are getting to me. Please I don'twant to pontificate this way . . . I know what my voice sounds like­heard it at Peenemiinde years ago on Weissmann's Dictaphone .chrome and Bakelite . . . too high, obnoxious, Berliner Schnauze . . .how they must wince inside whenever I begin to speak. . . ."I could go tomorrow. I know how to be alone. It doesn't frighten meas much as they do. They take endlessly-but they never use what theytake. What do they think they can take from me? They don't want mypatriarchy, they don't want my love, they don't want my information, ormy work, or my energy, or what I own . . . I don't own anything.There's no money any more=-nobody's seen any out here for months,no it can't be money ... cigarettes? I never have enough ciga­rettes....

so

dl
h,

ba
w

si



ollgh cj�(

"If I left them, where could I go?"
Back among the reservoir tanks now,

into the evening wind, skidding

on this synthetic wastefield, all of it ungraded
blackness . . . Christian's

motor seems to be missing now and then, dithering
toward a stall. Spot

decision: if he breaks down let him walk. That way
less trouble if Pa­

vel's there, if he's not there pick up Christian on the way
back and see

about getting a truck out to repair it . . . keep it simple,
that's the mark

of a great leader, Enzian.
Christian doesn't break down, though, and Pavel turns out to be

there, sort of. Well, not "there" the way Enzian
in his current state of

mind would consider for very long. But present, all right, along
with an

amazing collection of friends who always
seem to show up whenever he

comes to sniff Leunagasolin, such as, oh, the Moss
Creature here,

brightest green you can imagine, more burning
than fluorescent, lurking

over in a corner of the field tonight, shy, stirring like an infant
now and

then ... or how about the Water Giant, a mile-high visitor
made all of

flowing water who likes to dance, twisting
from the waist, arms blowing

loosely along the sky. When the Ombindi people
took Maria off to find

their doctor in Hamburg, voices began calling-voices of
the Fungus

Pygmies who breed in the tanks at
the interface between fuel and

water-bottom began to call to him. "Pavel! Omunene! Why
don't you

come back, to see us? We miss you. Why have you stayed away?"
Not

much fun for them down here at the Interface, competing
with the bac­

teria who cruise by in their country of light, these
cellular aristocracy,

approaching the wall of hydrocarbons
each for his share of God's abun­

dance-leaving their wastes, a green murmur,
a divergently unstable

gabbling, a slime that grows with the days thicker,
more poisonous. It is

a depressing thing indeed to be a pygmy
clustered together with thou­

sands of others, hundreds of thousands, and have to
live on the other

side of all this. You say other side? What do you
mean? What other

side? You mean in the gasoline? (Clustered Pygmies, playfully
and to

some well-known swing riff:) No-no, no, no! -You mean
in the water,

then? (C.P.:) No-no, no, no! -Well you gotta
tell me please, 'fore I

drop my BVDs! We mean, explain
the Pygmies, gathering their little

heads into a symmetrical cauliflower pattern, and settling
into a soft,

wistful a cappella like kids around the campfire
with Bing Crosby in a

baseball cap (yes these Leunahalluziationen
have been known to get

weird all right, weirder than cultural shock, even,
this here is meta­

shock's what it is, 3-sigma white faces in a ritual
whose mystery is

deeper than north light over the
Kalahari . . .) we mean on the other

side of the whole thing, the whole bacteria-hydrocarbon-waste cycle.

523



We can see the Interface from here. It's a long rainbow, mostly indigo,if that's any help-indigo and Kelly green (Bing, directing, raises up allthese brainwashed little Irish faces in a moving firelit crescendo) green... gasoline ... between ... submarine ... fading, because by thenPavel was on his way out to the refinery, forget this 2� weeks of self-im­posed torture, Ombindi's men after him down by the glasswool boilerpipes, men and women both trying to caress him, pressure from bothsides of the Tribal Suicide Question, Enzian complaining, too entangledwith the Rocket, too encrimsoned in his feud with the Russian, to caremuch about anyone outside himself . . . and here Pavel was trying tostay away from this, from the breath of Mukuru, only trying to be agood man-
The Moss Creature stirs. It has crept an alarming distance closersince Pavel last looked. A sudden overflow of smooth cherry-red downthe mountainside to his right (were there mountains? Where did themountains come from?) and at once he knows, beyond deception orhope, that he has slipped into the North, that inhaling the breath of thefirst ancestor has taken him over into the terrible land, as he must haveknown it would, step by step over these last years, impossible to turn(what is turn? don't know which way to begin to move ... don't knowhow to move . . .) too late, miles and changes too late.And now his head in Christian's steel notch at 300 yards. Suddenly,this awful branching: the two possibilities already beginning to fly apartat the speed of thought-a new Zone in any case, now, whether Chris­tian fires or refrains-jump, choose-

Enzian tries his best-knocks the barrel aside, has a few unpleasantwords for the young revenger. But both men saw the new branches. TheZone, again, has just changed, and they are already on, into the newone....
They ride on up to where Pavel's sniffing synthetic gasoline on theside of the lampless beige hill, under the tanks snailing whitely toheaven, here he is, one of the IG's happiest customers....Does Pavel know something the rest of us don't? If the IG wantedthis to be a cover-up for something else, why not the breath of Mukuru?Enzian can project himself back in the Erdschweinhohle starting anew file on the IG-see it getting fatter and fatter as the interlocks de­velop, the books are audited, the witnesses come-not forward but side­ways at least, always in shadows. . . . And if it should prove not to bethe Rocket, not the IG? Why then he'll have to go on won't he, on tosomething else-the Volkswagen factory, the pharmaceutical compa­nies ... and if it isn't even in Germany then he'll have to start in

Cl

of



America, or in Russia, and if he dies before they find
the True Text to

study, then there'll have to be machinery
for others to carry it on. . . .

Say, that's a swell idea-call the
whole Erdschweinhohle together, get

up there say, My people, I have had
a vision ... no no but there will

need to be more staff, if it's to be that big a search, quiet shifting
of re­

sources away from the Rocket, diversifying
while making it look like an

organic growth . . . and who to bring
in on it? Christian-can he use

the boy now, Christian's anger, will It use
Christian regardless to help

suppress Ornbindi . . .
because if the Schwarzkommando mission in the

Zone has been truly revealed just now, then there'll
have to be some­

thing done about Ombindi, Empty Ones,
doctrine of the Final Zero.

More staff will mean more Zone-Hereros, not
fewer-more information

coming in about the enemy, more
connections made will mean a greater

threat to the people, will mean the tribal numbers
will have to increase.

Is there an alternative? no . . . he would rather ignore
Ombindi but the

needs of this new Search will not allow him that
comfort now . . . the

search will rule....

Somewhere, among the wastes of the
WorId, is the key that will bring

us back, restore us to our Earth and to our
freedom.

Andreas has been talking with Pavel, who is still out
with his

strangely lighted companions, playing at
this and that. Presently, with

love and subterfuge, he gets the address of
Ombindi's medical connec­

tion.

Enzian knows who he is. "Saint Pauli. Let's go.
Your machine run­

ning a little rough, Christian?"
"Don't sweet-talk me," Christian explodes, "you don't care about me,

you don't care about my sister,
she's dying out there and you just keep

plugging her into your equations-you-play
this holy-father routine

and inside that ego you don't even
hate us, you don't care, you're not

even connected any more-" He swings his fist
at Enzian's face. He's

crying.
Enzian stands there and lets him. It hurts. He lets

it. His meekness

isn't all politics, either. He can feel enough of
the bone truth in what

Christian said-maybe not all of it, not all at once,
but enough.

"You just connected. Can we go
after her, now?"

o DOD DOD

Here is the good Frau, leaning over Slothrop from way
down at the foot

start in
of the bed: her eye bright and cocky as a parrot's, a big

white boss of

525



eye cantilevered on old prickly arms and legs, a black kerchief abovethe roll of her pompadour in mourning for all her Hanseatic dead, un­derneath heaving iron fleets, under waves of the Baltic keel-edged andgray, dead under the fleets of waves, the prairies of the sea. . . .N ext thing is Gerhardt von Coll's foot nudging Slothrop in a less thantender way. The sun is up, and all the girls have gone. Otto grouchesaround deck with a broom and swab, removing yesterday's chimpanzeeshit. Swinemiinde,
The Springer is his old chipper self: "Fresh eggs and coffee in thepilot house-fall to. We're due out of here in 15 minutes.""Well just belay that 'we,' Ace."
"But I need your help." Springer's wearing a suit of fine tweed thismorning, very Savile Row, fits perfectly-"Narrisch needed your help."
"You don't know what you're talking about." His eyes are steeliesthat never lose. His laugh, subtitled Humoring the Fools, is Mitteleuro­paisch and mirthless. "All right, all right. How much do you want?""Everything's got a price, right?" But he's not being noble here, no,what it is is that his own price has just occurred to him, and he needs toshim the talk here, give it a second to breathe and develop."Everything.

"

"What's the deal?"
"A minor piracy. Pick up one package for me while I cover you." Helooks at his watch, hamming it up.
"O.K., get me a discharge, I'll come with you.""A what? A discharge? For you? Hal Hal Hal""You ought to laugh more, Springer. It makes you look really cute.""What kind of a discharge, Slothrop? Honorable, perhaps? Ah, ah-halHal Hal" Like Adolf Hitler, Springer is easily tickled by what the Ger­mans call Schadenfreude, the feeling of joy at another's misfortune."Quit fooling, I'm serious."

"Of course you are, Slothrop!" More giggling.Slothrop waits, watches, sucking on an egg though he feels anythingbut sly this morning.
"Narrisch, you see, was supposed to go with me today. Now I'm stuckwith you. Hal Hal Where do you want it delivered, this-ha-this dis­charge?"
"Cuxhaven." Slothrop has been having lately this dim fantasy abouttrying to contact the Operation Backfire people in Cuxhaven, to see ifthey'll help get him out. They seem to be the only English connection to

526

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the Rocket any more. He knows already it won't
work. He and Springer

arrange a date anyhow.
"Be at a place called Putzi's. It's down the Dorum

road. Local dealers

will be able to tell you where."

So it's out once again-out past the moles' wet embrace,
into the Bal­

tic, crest to crest, and into nimbus piling sheet on sheet
bounces the

jolly pirate bark, into a day already squally
and bitter, and getting

worse. Springer stands outside the pilot house hollering
in above the

sound of heavy seas that splash back over the bow and
down the decks.

"Where do you make her?"

"If it's Copenhagen she's bound for," Frau Cnahb's
windburned face,

permanent smile-creases all
around her eyes and mouth, beaming like

the sun, "can't have more than an hour on us
....

"

Visibility this morning is too low to see the
coast of Usedom. Springer

joins Slothrop at the rail looking at nothing, breathing
the closing smell

of gray weather.

"He's all right, Slothrop. He's seen worse. Two
months ago in Berlin

we got ambushed, right outside the Chicago.
He walked through

crossfire from three Schmeissers to offer our competitors a deal.
Not a

scratch."

"Springer, he was going round and round
with half the Russian Army

up there."

"They won't kill him. They know who he
is. He worked in guidance,

he was Schilling's best man, he knows more about integrating
circuits

than anybody they'll find outside of Garmisch
now. The Russians are

offering fantastic salaries-better than the
Americans-and they'll let

him stay in Germany, work at
Peenemiinde or the Mittelwerke, just like

he used to. He can even escape, if that's what he wants,
we have very

good connections for that-"
"But what if they did shoot him?"
"No. They weren't supposed to."

"Springer, this ain't the fuckin' movies now,
come on."

"Not yet. Maybe not quite yet. You'd better enjoy
it while you can.

Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size
and

burdenless and selling at people's prices, the lights and booms
no longer

necessary, then ... then
...

"

We now come in sight of mythical

Rugen off our starboard bow. Its chalk
cliffs are brighter than the sky.

There is mist in the firths, and among the green oaks. Along the
beaches

drift pearl patches of fog.
Our captain, Frau Gnahb, heads into the Greifswalder

Bodden, to



comb the long firths for her quarry. After an. hour (comical bassoon solosover close-ups of the old recreant guzzling some horrible fermented po­tato-mash lobotomy out of a jerrican, wiping her mouth on her sleeve,belching) of fruitless search, our modem-day pirates head out to seaagain, and up the eastern coast of the island.
Light rain has been falling. Otto breaks out slickers, and a Thermos ofhot soup. Clouds, a dozen shades of gray, go scudding along the sky.Great misty heaps of rock, steep cliffs, streams in deep gorges, gray andgreen and spires of white chalk in the rain, go paSSing-the Stubben­kammer, the King's Seat, and presently, off to port, Cape Arkona wherewaves crash at the base of the cliffs and on top the groves of white­trunked trees are blowing. . . . The ancient Slavs put up a temple here,to Svetovid, their god of fertility and war. Old Svetovid did businessunder quite a number of aliases! Three-headed Triglav, five-headed Po­revit, SEVEN-faced Rugevit! Tell that to your boss next time he talksabout "wearing two hatsl" Now, as Arkona slides away off our portquarter-

"There she is," Otto calls from the top of the pilot house. Far faraway, hauling out to sea from behind the Wissow Klinken (the palelimestone latchkey with which Providence today is probing the wards ofSlothrop's heart), barely visible in the rain, dips a tiny white ghost of aship....
"Get a bearing," Frau Gnahb grabbing the wheel and bracing herfeet. "We want a collision course!" Otto crouches by the pelorus, shiv­ering.
"Here, Slothrop."
Luger? Box of rounds? "What
"Came this morning with the egg delivery.""You didn't mention-"
"He may be a little exercised. But he's a realist. Your friend Gretaand I knew him in Warsaw, in the old days.""Springer-tell me Springer, now, what ship is that?" Springer handshim some binoculars. In fine gold lettering, behind the golden jackal onthe wraith-white bow, is the name he already knows. "0. . .. K.,"trying to see through the rain into Springer's eyes, "you knew I wasaboard. You're setting me up, now, right?""When were you on board?"

"Come on-"
"Look=-Narrisch was going after the package today. Not you. Wedidn't even know you. Do you have to see conspiracies in everything? Idon't control the Russians, and I didn't deliver him-"

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"You're really pushing that innocence today,
ain't you?"

"Quit bickering, idiots," hollers Frau Gnahb,
"and clear-for action!"

Lazy and spectral pitches the Anubis, growing
no clearer as they

close with her. Springer reaches a megaphone out
of the pilot house,

and bawls, "Good day, Procalowski-permission to
come aboard."

The answer is a gunshot. Springer hits the deck, slicker
in rattling yel­

low flow, lies on his back with the megaphone pointing up funneling

rain in his mouth: "We'll have to without permission,
then-" Mo­

tioning Slothrop over, "Get ready to
board." To Frau Gnahb, "We'll

want to lash on."

"Fine but," one look at the evil leer now lighting up
Otto's mother's

face and it's clear that she didn't come out today for money,
"when do I

get to, to ram her?"
Alone on the sea with the Anubis. Slothrop has begun to sweat,

un­

pleasantly. The green rocky coast of Rugen backdrops
them, rising and

falling through the squall. Zonggg
another shot rattlesnaking off of a

bulkhead. "Ram," orders the Springer. The storm comes
down in ear­

nest. Gleeful Frau Gnahb, humming through her teeth, spins
the wheel,

spokes blurring, prow swinging over aiming
for midships. The blank

side of the Anubis rushes in-is the Frau gonna
bust on through it like a

paper hoop? Faces behind portholes,
cook peeling potatoes outside the

galley, drunk in a frock coat sleeping
on the rainy deck and sliding as

the ship rolls . . . ah-ja, ja, a huge
blue-flowered bowl of shredded po­

tatoes at her elbow, a window, cast-iron flowers
on spiral vine all

painted white, a mild smell of cabbage
and dishrags from under the

sink, an apron bow snug and tight above her kidneys
and lambs about

her legs and [a little, oh, ja, here
comes little-ah-here comes here­

comes LITTLE-AHH-

OTTO! slams her boat into the Anubis, a most godawful earsplitting

Otto....

"Stand by." Springer's on his feet.
Procalowski is turning away and

increasing engine speed. Frau Gnahb
moves up again on the yacht's

starboard quarter, wallowing in her wake.
Otto passes out grappling

hooks, long in Hanseatic service, iron, pitted, functional-looking,
as

Mutti puts it all ahead full. Couples
have wandered out under awnings

on the Anubis to watch the fun, pointing, laughing, gaily waving. Girls,

their nude breasts beaded with rain, blow kisses
while the band plays a

Guy Lombardo arrangement
of "Running Between the Raindrops."

Up the slippery ladder goes salty
and buccaneering Slothrop, hefting

his grappling hook, letting out line, keeping
an eye on that

Otto-wind

up, spin like a lasso,
wheeee-clank. Springer and Otto at bow and



stern are grappling on at the same time, hauling in as the vessels hit,bounce, hit . . . but the Anubis, softwhite, has slowed, sprawled, al­lowed . . . Otto gets line around chocks forward and up around thescrimshawed railing of the yacht-then dashes aft, sneakers splashing,ribbed footprints left behind then rained out, to repeat the lashingthere. A newly-arranged river roars, white and violent, backward be­tween the two ships. Springer is already up on the yacht's main deck.Slothrop tucks Luger in belt and follows.
Springer with the classic gangster head-move gestures him up to thebridge. Slothrop moves through groping hands, greetings in broken Rus­sian, puffs of alcoholic breath, around to the ladder on the port side­climbing, edging quietly onto the bridge. But Procalowski is only sittingin the captain's chair smoking one of Springer's amis with his cap tiltedback, and Springer's just at the punch line to one of his giant repertoireof German toilet jokes.

"What the devil, Gerhardt," Procalowski waving a thumb. "The RedArmy's working for you too?"
"Hello again, Antoni." The three silver stars on each of his epauletstwinkle howdy, but it's no good.
"I don't know you." To the Springer: "All right. It's in the engineroom. Starboard side, down behind the generator," which is Slothrop'scue to leave.
At the bottom of the ladder he meets Stefania coming along the pas­sageway. "Hi. Sorry we have to meet again this way.""Hello, I'm Stefania," shuttering a fast smile as she passes, "there'sliquor next deck up, enjoy yourself," already gone, out in the rain.What?
Slothrop steps down through a hatchway, starts to climb down to­ward the engineering spaces. Somewhere above him three bells strike,slowly, a little hollow, with a slight echo. It's late ... late. He remem­bers where he is.
Just as he touches the deck, all the lights go out. Air blowers whinedown to stillness. The engine room is down one more deck. Will he haveto do this in the dark?
"I can't," out loud.
"You can," replies a voice close to his ear. He can feel its breath. Heis smashed expertly at the base of the neck. Light loops through thepitch dark. His left arm has gone numb. "I'll leave you the other one,"the voice whispers, "for climbing down to the engine room.""Wait-" It feels like the pointed toe of a dancing-pump, in out of

530

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nowhere to hover a second and stroke the soft
underside of his chin­

then it flicks up, slamming his teeth shut on
his tongue.

The pain is awful. He tastes blood.
Sweat gathers next to his eyes.

"Move, now." When he hesitates he is pinched
on the back of the

neck. Oh, it hurts ... he holds to the ladder, night-blind, starting
to cry

· . .
then he thinks of the Luger, but before he can get to it

he's been

kicked viciously between hip and groin. The gun
falls to the steel deck.

Slothrop is down on one knee, groping,
when the shoe descends lightly

on his fingers. "You will need this hand for holding
on to the ladder, re­

member? Remember?" Then the shoe is lifted, but only to kick
him

under the armpit. "Up, up."
Slothrop gropes to the next ladder,

makes his stiff one-armed way

down onto it. He feels the steel hatch-opening rise
around him. "Don't

try to come back up till you've
done what you have to do."

"Thanatz?" Slothrop's tongue hurts. The name
comes out clumsily.

Silence. "Morituri?" No answer. Slothrop moves one foot up
one rung.

"No, no. I'm still here."

As he edges downward, shaking, rung by rung, feeling prickles
back

into his arm. How can he go down? How can
he go up? He tries to con­

centrate on the pain. His feet strike steel plate finally.
Blindness. He

moves to starboard, colliding at every step with shin-high edges, sharp

projections ... I don't want to
...

how can I ... reach down behind

· . .
bare hands . . . what if . . .

A sudden whine to his right-something
mechanical-he jumps,

breath sucking very cold between teeth,
nerves in back and arms off

and on, skittering. . . he reaches a cylindrical
barrier. . . might be the

generator . . . stoops and begins to-
His hand closes on stiff taffeta. He

jerks it away, tries to get up, slams
his head against something sharp

· .. he wants to crawl back toward the ladder,
but has lost all sense of

direction now . . . he squats, turning in a circle, slowly . . . let
it end

letitend. . . . But his hands, pawing the deck, return to slippery
satin.

"No." Yes: hooks and eyes. He breaks a fingernail, trying to
lose them

but they follow ... lacing that moves, snake-sure, entangling,
binding

each finger. . . .
'Woo . . ." He rises to a crouch, moves forward

into something hang­

ing from the overhead. Icy
little thighs in wet silk swing against his face.

They smell of the sea. He turns away, only
to be lashed across the cheek

by long wet hair. No matter
which way he tries to move now

...
cold

nipples . . . the deep cleft of her buttocks, perfume
and shit and the

smell of brine . . . and the smell of . . . of . . .

531



When the lights come back on, Slothrop is on his knees, breathingcarefully. He knows he will have to open his eyes. The compartmentreeks now with suppressed light-with mortal possibilities for light-asthe body, in times of great sadness, will feel its real chances for pain:real and terrible and only just under the threshold. . . . The brownpaper bundle is two inches from his knee, wedged behind the generator.But it's what's dancing dead-white and scarlet at the edges of his sight. . . and are the ladders back up and out really as empty as they look?
Back on the Frau's boat, Springer is out with a bottle of champagnecourtesy of the Anubis, untwisting the bright wires and firing the corkin a farewell salvo. Slothrop's hands are shaking and he spils most ofhis. Antoni and Stefania watch from the bridge as the two vessels pullapart, Baltic sky visible through the backs of their eyes. Her white hairin filaments of foam, her cheeks sculptured fog ... cloud-man, fog­wife, they dwindle, aloof, silent, back into the heart of the storm.The Frau heads south, along the other coast of Rugen, into the straitsby way of the Bug. The storm keeps pace, as night comes down. "We'llput in at Stralsund," her scrawled face streaming with lube-greenshadow, yellow light, as the oil-lantern sways in the pilot house.Slothrop reckons he'll get off there. Head for that Cuxhaven."Springer, you think you'll have those papers for me on time?""I can't guarantee anything," sez Gerhardt von Coll.At Stralsund, on the quai, in the lamplight and the rain, they saygood-by. Frau Gnahb kisses Slothrop, and Otto gives him a pack ofLucky Strikes. The Springer looks up from his green notebook and nodsauf Wiedersehen over his pince-nez. Slothrop walks away, over thebrow, into the wet Hafenplatz, sea-legs trying to balance rolling he's leftbehind, past booms and masts and strung tackle of derricks, past a crewon the night shift ofHoading the creaking lighters into wood wagons,bowed gray horses kissing the grassless stones ... good-bys in hispockets warming his empty hands. . . .

D D D D D D D

Where is the Pope whose staff will bloom for me?Her mountain vamps me back, with silks and scents,Her oiled, athletic slaves, her languid hintsOf tortures transubstantiate to sky,To purity of light-of bonds that sing,
532

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And whips that trail their spectra as they
fall.

At weather's mercy now, I find
her call

At every turn, at night's foregathering.

I've left no sick Lisaura's fate behind.

I made my last confession as
I knelt,

Agnostic, in the radiance of his jewel .

Here, underneath my last and splintering wind,
No song, no lust, no memory, no guilt:
No pentacles, no cups, no holy Fool. ...

Brigadier Pudding died back in the
middle of June of a massive E.

coli infection, whining, at the end, "Me little Mary hurts
...

"

over and

over. It was just before dawn, as he had
wished. Katje stayed on at "The

White Visitation" for a while, roaming the demobbed corridors, smoky
and still at the ends of all the emptied lattices of cages in the laboratory,
herself part of the ash-colored web,

the thickening dust and fly-pocked
windows.

One day she found the cans of film, stacked carelessly by Webley
Sil­

vernail in what had been a music room, occupied now only by a
disinte­

grating Wittmaier harpsichord no
one played, quills and stops broken

shamefully, strings left to sharp, flat, or
corrode in the busy knives of

weather pushing relentlessly into all the rooms.
Pointsman happened

that day to be up in London, working out
of Twelfth House, lingering at

alcoholic luncheons with his various industrialists.
Was he forgetting

her? Would she be free? Was she, already?
Out of apparently nothing more than the emptiness

of "The White

Visitation," she finds a projector, threads a reel
and focuses the image

on a water-stained wall, next to a landscape of some
northern coomb,

with daft aristocrats larking about. She sees a white-haired girl
in Pirate

Prentice's Chelsea maisonette, a face so strange that she
has recognized

the mediaeval rooms before she does herself.

When did they-ah, the day Osbie Feel was processing
the Amanita

mushrooms. . . . Fascinated, she stares at twenty minutes of
herself in

pre-Piscean fugue. What on earth did they
use it for? The answer to

that one's in the can too, and it isn't long before she finds it-Octopus

Grigori in his tank, watching the Katje footage. Clip
after clip: flickering

screen and cutaways to Octopus G., staring-each
with its typewritten

date, showing the improvement in the
creature's conditioned reflex.

Spliced on at the end of all this, inexplicably,
is what seems to be a

screen test of Osbie Feel, of all people. There is a sound
track. Osbie is

improvising a scenario for a
movie he's written, entitled:

533



DOPER'S GREED

"We open with Nelson Eddy in the background, singing:
Doper's greed,
Oh, doper's greed!
It's the most disgustin' thing I ever seed!When you're out there feelin' fine,It'll turn you into swine,
If you ever get a taste of DOPER'S GREED!

"Now into town ride two trail-weary cowboys, Basil Rathbone andS. Z. ('Cuddles') Sakall. At the entrance to town, barring t' ieir way,stands the Midget who played the lead in Freaks. The one with the Ger­man accent. He is the town sheriff. He is wearing an enormous gold starthat nearly covers his chest. Rathbone and Sakall rein up, with uneasysmiles on their faces.
"RATHBONE: That can't possibly be real, can it?"SAKALL: Hoo, hoo! Of course that's real, you wretched eddiet, youvent 'n' chewed too much 0' that veird eeetus, beck down the trail. Youshould hev smucked that nice veed I had, I tuld you-"RATHBONE (with his nervous Sickly Smile): Please-I don't need aJewish mother. I know what's real, and what isn't real."(The Midget, meanwhile, is posturing in different tough-hombre at­titudes, and waving a brace of gigantic Colts about.)"SAKALL: Vhen you been out on the trail-and you know vhieh trailtoo, don't you you sniveling punk-for as long as I have, you know ahreal midget sheriff from ah hallucinated vun."RATHBONE: I hadn't known either class existed. You must obviouslyhave seen midget sheriffs all over this Territory, else you would hardlyhave invented the category. O-or would you? You know, you're justdodgy enough to try anything."SAKALL: You forgot 'You old reseal.'

"RATHBONE : You old rascal.
"They laugh, draw their guns, and exchange a few playful shots. TheMidget is rushing back and forth, furious, emitting high-pitched Ger­man-accented Westernisms like 'This town ain't big enough for both ofus!'

"SAKALL: VeIl, ve're both seeing him. That means he's real."RATHBONE: Joint hallucination is not unknown in our world, podner."SAKALL: Who sez it's joint hallucination? Hoo, hoo! If it vas any kind
534

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of hallucination-I'm not saying it is, now-it vould be peyote.
Or jim­

son veed, mebbe. . . .
"This interesting conversation goes on for an

hour and a half. There

are no cuts. The Midget is active the whole time, reacting to
the many

subtle and now and then dazzling points presented. Occasionally
the

horses will shit in the dust. It is not clear if the Midget knows that
his

reality is being discussed. Another of this
film's artful ambiguities. Fi­

nally, Rathbone and Sakall agree that the only way
to settle the argu­

ment is to kill the Midget, who gathers their intention and
runs off

screaming down the street. Sakall laughs so hard
he falls off his horse

into the horse trough, and we get a final closeup of Rathbone smiling,
in

his uncertain way. Fade up song:

When you're out there feelin' fine,
It'll turn you into swine,
If you ever get a taste of Doper's Greed!"

There is a brief epilogue to this, with Osbie trying to point
out that of

course the element of Greed must be worked somehow
into the plot

line, in order to justify the title, but the film runs out in the
middle of an

"uh ... ".

bOli,
cned�'

fur OO�[

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"-per­

haps Silvernail himself, who's been less
than fanatically loyal to Points­

man 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 mes­

sage, 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 ar­

gues 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 peace­
time's returned madmen sitting gently in the sun. Once, outside Sche­

veningen, 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 vulner-.JXXineJ

any kinl
535



able shadow, so long ago, toward her rendezvous with Pirate by thewindmill called "The Angel." Where is he now? Is he still living inChelsea? Is he even alive?
Osbie is at home, anyway, chewing spices, smoking reefers, andshooting cocaine. The last of his wartime stash. One grand eruption.He's been up for three days. He beams at Katje, a sunburst in primarycolors spiking out from his head, waves the needle he's just taken out ofhis vein, clamps between his teeth a pipe as big as a saxophone and putson a deerstalker cap, which does not affect the sunburst a bit."Sherlock Holmes. Basil Rathbone. I was right," out of breath, lettingher bag fall with a thump.

The aura pulses, bows modestly. He is also steel, he is rawhide andsweat. "Good, good. There's the son of Frankenstein in it, too. I wish wecould have been more direct, but-"
"Where's Prentice?"
"Out scouting up some transportation." He leads her to a back roomfitted out with telephones, a cork board with notes pinned all over,desks littered with maps, schedules, An Introduction to Modem Herero,corporate histories, spools of recording wire. "Not very organizedaround here yet. But it's coming along, love, it's coming."Is this what she thinks it is? Wakened from how many times andpushed away because it won't do to hope, not this much? Dialectically,sooner or later, some counterforce would have had to arise ... shemust not have been political enough: never enough to keep faith that itwould . . . even with all the power on the other side, that it reallywould....

Osbie has pulled up -folding chairs: hands her now a mimeographedsheaf, rather fat it is, "One or two things, here, you should know. Wehate to rush you. But the horse trough is waiting."And presently, his modulations having flowed through the rooms insplendid (and for a while distracting) displays of bougainvillea red andpeach, it seems he has stabilized for the moment into the not-quite­worldly hero of a lost Victorian children's book, for he answers, afterher hundredth version of the same question, "In the Parliament of Life,the time comes, simply, for a division. We are now in the corridors wehave chosen, moving toward the Floor. . . ."

IV

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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 appear­

ing, 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 to­

ward 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
cafes to sit in and watch the sunsets-or sunrises, depending on the

hours of shifts and symposia. Fantastic pastry carts come by, big as pan­
technicons: one has to go inside, search the numberless shelves,

each re­

vealing treats gooier and sweeter than the last . . .
chefs stand by with

ice-cream scoops at the ready, awaiting only a word from the
saccharo­

maniac 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,
occa­

sionally 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

537



other novice . . . often they'll have a time getting their strands of taffydisentangled, which has also been planned as a good, spontaneous wayfor the newcomers to meet. The tour now takes Pirate out into an opencourtyard, where a small crowd has formed around one of the Erd­schweinhohle delegates in a rip-roaring argument with some advertisingexecutive over what else but the Heresy Question, already a pebble inthe shoe of this Convention, and perhaps to be the rock on which it willfounder. Street-entertainers go by: self-taught tumblers doing amazinghandsprings on pavement that seems dangerously hard and slippery,choirs of kazoos playing Gilbert & Sullivan medleys, a boy and girl whodance not along the level street but up and down, usually at the majorflights of steps, whenever there's a queue to be waited through. . ..Gathering up his ball of taffy, which by now is growing quite cumber- 1some, Pirate passes Beaverboard Row, as it is known: comprising the 'offices of all the Committees, with the name of each stenciled above thedoorway=-Aa ... IG ... OIL FIRMS ... LOBOTOMY ... SELF­DEFENSE . . . HERESY . . .
"Naturally you're seeing this all through a soldier's eyes," she's veryyoung, insouciant, wearing a silly small young-woman's hat of the pe­riod, her face clean and steady enough for the broad-shouldered, high­waisted, no-neck profile they're all affecting these days. She movesalong beside him taking long and graceful steps, swings her arms, tossesher head-reaches over to grab some of his taffy, and touching his handas 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 spiritsare so contagious,
I'll tell you it's just -out, -ray, -juss,Spirit is so -con, -tay, -juss,Nobody knows their a-ges ...
Walkin' through bees of hon -ney,Throwin' away -that -mon, -ney,Laughin' at things so -fun -ny,Spirit's comin' through -to, -you!
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,

Where did the swing
band come from?
She's bouncing up
and down, she
wants to be

jitterbugged, he sees
she wants to lose her
gravity-

c�
Pe

ex

\V

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,. The
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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
com­

ing 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 criti­

cal mass cannot be ignored. Once the technical means of
control have

reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one
to an­

other, 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 with­

out 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 un­

known?

"We have to carryon 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

539



pain, faith They are only pretending Death is Their servant-faith inDeath as the master of us all-is to ask for an order of courage that Iknow 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 ownimmortality. They may not be dying in bed any more, but maybe Theycan still die from violence. If not, at least we can learn to withhold fromThem our fear of Death. For every kind of vampire, there is a kind ofcross. And at least the physical things They have taken, from Earth andfrom us, can be dismantled, demolished-returned to where it all camefrom.
"To believe that each of Them will personally die is also to believethat 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 affirmingReturn....

"

It sounds like a disclaimer, and the priest sounds afraid.Pirate and the girl have been listening to him as they linger outside ahall 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 wouldbe. 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-and­Paper. From next door comes a sound of splashing water and all-malegiggling that echoes a bit off of the tiles. "And now," a fluent wirelessannouncer can be heard, "it's time for? Drop-The Soap!" Applauseand 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 Coll,"Doesn't this sort of thing ever stop?""Hullo, Prentice," nods a black man Pirate doesn't recognize, "weseem to be old school tie." What is this, who are all these- His name isSt.-Just Grossout. "For most of the Duration, the Firm had me trying toinfiltrate the Schwarzkommando. I never saw anyone else trying to. Itsounds 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."Do you think you could-well, give me a sort of sitrep on all this?""Oh, Geoffrey. Oh, my." Here comes Sammy Hilbert-Spaess backfrom watching the shower-room frolic, shaking his head, pouched andLevantine eyes continuing to stare straight down his nose, "Geoffrey, by540

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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 0' you," replies the knight,

churlishly. But it's hard to say really who's provoking whom,
for Merci­

ful 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 mo­

ment I'm involved with the 'Nature of Freedom' drill you know,
won­

dering 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

541



been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birthproblem to mull over-as a kind of koan, 1 suppose. It's driving me re­ally, clinically insane. 1 rather imagine that's the whole point of it. Andwho knows what comes next? Good God. 1 don't find out, of course,till 1 break through this one.... 1 don't mean to discourage you sosoon-"
"No, no, I've been wondering something else-are all you lot myGroup or something? Have 1 been assigned here?""Yes. Are you beginning to see why?""I'm afraid 1 am." With everything else, these are, after all, peoplewho kill each other: and Pirate has always been one of them. "I'd beenhoping for-oh, it's foolish, a bit of mercy . . . but 1 was at the all-nightcinema, around the corner from Gallaho Mews, the intersection withthe extra street, the one you can't always see because it comes in at sucha strange angle . . . 1 had a bad stretch of time to get through, poison,metallic time . . . it smelled as sour as a burned pot . . . all 1 wantedwas 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 togetherwith.... "

"Prentice, really it's all right," it' s St.-Just Grossout, whom the otherscall "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 . . . 1 mean if it is true, then," a laugh it hurts him,deep in his windpipe, to make, "then 1 defected for nothing, didn't I? Imean, if 1 haven't really defected at all.... "
The word reached him during a government newsreel. FROMCLOAK-AND-DAGGER TO CROAK-AND-STAGGER, the sequintitle twinkled to all the convalescent souls gathered for another longnight of cinema without schedule-shot of a little street-crowd staringin a dusty show-window, someplace so far into the East End that no oneexcept 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 columnstilted inward, brass elevator cage drooping from the overhead. Rightout in front was a half-naked, verminous and hairy creature, approxi­mately human, terribly pale, writhing behind the crumbled remains ofplate glass, tearing at sores on his face and abdomen, drawing blood,scratching and picking with dirt-black fingernails. "Every day inSmithfield Market, Lucifer Amp makes a spectacle of himself. That'snot so surprising. Many a demobilized soldier and sailor has turned to

�u
bi

542



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 Spe­

cial 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 al­

cohol 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, comput­

ing. 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 fel­

low, 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?"
"1 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 1 wouldn't . . . I'd never tell them-" The
smiles they are

remaim putting on for him now are deliberately cruel,
to help him through it a

wg ole« bit. "You don't, you really don't trust me?"

0' day [ "Of course not," Sammy sez. "Would you-really-trust any
of us?"

If. Thatl "Oh, no," Pirate whispers. This is one of his own in progress. Nobody
turnedtJ else's. But it's still a passage They can touch quite as easily as

that of

ad-At-B�
vingme:
t of it..t

It) of cow
uraoe :'�J

II you lot,

543



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 wherehe 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 ScorpiaMossmoon, living in St. John's Wood among sheet-music, new recipes, asmall kennel of Weimaraners whose racial purity she will go to extrava­gant lengths to preserve, and husband Clive who shows up now andthen, Scorpia living only a few minutes away by Underground but lostto 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 naive, for Gongylakis, for the MonkeyGirl and the pimps in Rome, for Bruce who got burned . . . for nightsup 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 girlback in the Midlands named Virginia, and for their child who nevercame 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 asdogs who have watched us so amiably from behind the wire fences atthe city pounds ... cries for the future he can see, because it makeshim feel so desperate and cold. He is to be taken from high moment tohigh moment, standing by at meetings of the Elect, witnessing a test ofthe new Cosmic Bomb-"Well," a wise old face, handing him theblack-lensed glasses, "there's your Bomb ... " turning then to see itsthick yellow exploding down the beach, across the leagues of Pacificwaves ... touching famous assassins, yes actually touching their humanhands and faces . . . finding out one day how long ago, how early in thegame the contract on his own life was let. No one knows exactly whenthe hit will come-every morning, before the markets open, out beforethe milkmen, They make Their new update, and decide on what's goingto be sufficient unto the day. Every morning Pirate's name will be on alist, and one morning it will be close enough to the top. He tries to faceit, 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 forthe 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 fornothing but his own ass, his precious, condemned, personal ass. . . ."Is there room here for the dead?" He hears the question before hecan see her asking it. He isn't sure how she came into this room. From

)01

of
IVa

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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 anar­

chist'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
dis­

tracted 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 ex­

plains. "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 learn­

ing 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
. From sound like? "That's easy enough to pledge, doesn't cost you

a thing."

545



«Then even the sins 1 did commit," he protests, «yes I'd do themover-"
«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 thethings 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 forbad faith. We'll have to build everything with it . . . deal it, as the pros­ecutors deal you your freedom."

«Philosopher." She is smiling. «You were never like that."«It must have come from always being in motion. I've never felt thisstillness. . . ." They are touching now, without urgency, still, neitherof them, quite over the surprise.... «My little brother" (Pirate under­stands the connection she has made) «left home at 18. 1 liked to watchhim sleeping at night. His long eyelashes . . . so innocent . . . 1watched for hours. . . . He got as far as Antwerp. Before long he wasloitering around parish churches with the rest of them. Do you knowwhat I mean? Young, Catholic males. Camp followers. They got to de­pend on 'alcohol, many of them, at an early age. They would choose aparticular priest, and become his faithful dog-literally wait all night athis doorstep in order to talk to him fresh from his bed, his linen, the inti­mate smells that had not yet escaped the folds of his garment . . . in­sane jealousies, daily jostling for position, for the favors of this Father orthat. Louis began to attend Rexist meetings. He went out to a soccerfield and heard Degrelle tell the crowd that they must let themselves beswept away by the flood, they must act, act, and let the rest take care ofitself. Soon my brother was out in the street with his broom, along withthe other guilty sarcastic young men with their brooms in their hands... and then he had joined Rex, the 'realm of total souls,' and the last 1heard he was in Antwerp living with an older man named Philippe. Ilost track of him. We were very close at one time. People took us fortwins. When the heavy rocket attacks began against Antwerp I knew itcould not be an accident. . . ."
Yes well Pirate's Chapel himself. «But I've wondered about the soli­darity of your Church . . . you kneel, and she takes care of you . . .when you are acting politically, to have all that common momentum,taking you upward-"
«You never had that either, did you." She's been looking really athim- «none of the marvelous excuses. We did everything ourselves."No, there's no leaving shame after all-not down here-it has to beswallowed sharp-edged and ugly, and lived with in pain, every day.

546

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Without considering, he is in her arms. It isn't for comfort. But
if he is

to keep dragging himself up the ratchet's teeth one by
one he does need

to pause in human touch for a bit.
"What did it look like out there,

Katje? I saw an organized convention. Someone else
saw it as a gar­

den....
"

But he knows what she'll say.
"There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I'd been

most of

the day looking for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you
all in here." So

they have wandered to a balcony, a graceful railing,
no one can see

them from inside or �ut: and below them in the streets,
streets they

have both lost now, are the People. There passes for Pirate and Katje a

brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous
How I Came

to Love the People. "Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird
under

the protecting grin of the car in the rain that morning,
she knelt and

performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated on
her breasts. Her name

was Lily, she was 67 last. August, she reads off the
labels of beer bottles

to herself out loud, we coupled in the standard English position, and she

patted me on the back and whispered, 'Good
friend.' His name was

Frank, his hair curled away from his face, his eyes were
rather sharp but

pleasant, he stole from American Army depots,
he bum-fucked me and

when he came inside me, so did I. Her name was Frangibella, she was

black, her face was broken out, she wanted money
for dope, her open­

ness was a viper writhing in my heart, I performed cunnilingus upon
her. His name was Allan, his buttocks were tanned, I said, where

did

you find the sun, he answered,
the sun is just around the corner, I held

him over the pillow and buggered him and he cried with
love till I, my

piston pungently greased, exploded at last.
Her name was Nancy, she

was six, we went behind a wall near a crater full
of ruins, she rubbed

and rubbed against me, her milky little thighs reaching
in and out of my

own, her eyes were closed, her fair little
nostrils moved upward, back­

ward forever, the slope of debris rushed down, steeply, just
beside us,

we teetered at the edge, on and on, exquisitely. Her name
was-" well,

all these and many more pass for our young couple here, enough
to

make them understand that horny Anonymous's intentions are nothing
less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every

individ­

ual one of the People in the World-and that when every one,
some­

what miraculously, is accounted for at last, that
will be a rough defini­

tion of "loving the People."
"Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches,"

Pirate wants to

strike a humorous note, but doesn't. He is holding Katje now as if,
in a

moment, music will start, and they would dance.
"But the People will never love you," she whispers,

"or me. However
tw,"
tODe

y.
547



bad and good are arranged for them, we will always be bad. Do youknow where that puts us?"
He does smile, crookedly as a man being theatrical about somethingfor the very first time. Knowing it for a move there's to be no going backfrom, in the same terminal class as reaching for a gun, he turns his faceupward, and looks up through all the faintly superimposed levels above,the milieux of every sort of criminal soul, every unpleasant commercialcolor from aquamarine to beige, desolate as sunlight on a day whenyou'd rather have rain, all the clanging enterprise and bustle of all thoselevels, extending further than Pirate or Katje can see for the moment,he lifts his long, his guilty, his permanently enslaved face to the illusionof sky, to the reality of pressure and weight from overhead, the hardnessand absolute cruelty of it, while she presses her own face into the easylowland between his shoulder and pectoral, a look on her face of truce,of horror come to a detente with, and as a sunset proceeds, the kind thatchanges the faces of buildings to light gray for a while, to an ashy softchaff of light bleating over their outward curves, in the strangely forge­like glow in the west, the anxiety of pedestrians staring in the tiny store­front window at the dim goldsmith behind his fire at his work andpaying them no attention, afraid because the light looks like it's going togo away forever this time, and more afraid because the failure of light isnot a private thing, everyone else in the street has seen it too . . . as itgrows darker, the orchestra inside this room does, as a matter of fact,strike up a tune, dry and astringent ... and candelabra have beenlighted after all . . . there is Veal Florentine ripening in the ovens to­night, there are drinks on the House, and drunks in the hammocks,
And all the world's busy, this twi-light!Who knows what morning-streets, our shoes have known?Who knows, how many friends, we've left, to cry alone?We have a moment together,
We'll hum this tune for a day ...
Ev'ryone's dancing, in twi-light,
Dancing the bad dream a-way. . . .

�ln

un
�el

\ ��

leauill
ilie

And they do dance: though Pirate never could before, very wellthey feel quite in touch with all the others as they move, and if they arenever to be at full ease, still it's not parade rest any longer . . . so theydissolve now, into the race and swarm of this dancing Preterition, andtheir faces, the dear, comical faces they have put on for this ball, fade,as innocence fades, grimly flirtatious, and striving to be kind.
as

lal�



d. DOl

t some�l
goin��
rns�k

le\'eha�

D D D D D D D

Fog thickens down the throats of the narrow gassen.
In the air is a smell

of salt water. The cobbled streets are wet with last night's rain. Slothrop
wakes up in a burned-out

locksmith's shop, under racks of sooty keys
whose locks have all been lost. He stumbles out, finds a pump

in a

courtyard between brick walls and casement
windows nobody stares

out of, puts his head under the spout and pumps
the pump, soaking his

head for as long as he thinks he needs to. A ginger cat, meowing
for

breakfast, comes stalking him, doorway to doorway. "Sorry,
Ace."

Doesn't look like breakfast for either of them.

He hitches up Tchitcherine's pants and
heads out of town, leaving

the blunt towers, the domes of copper corroded green swimming up
in

the mist, the high gables and red tiles, gets a ride with a
woman driving

an empty farm wagon. The horse's sandy
forelock bobs and blows, and

the fog settles in behind.
This morning it looks like what Vikings must have seen, sailing

this

great water-meadow south, clear
to Byzantium, all eastern Europe their

open sea: the
farmland rolls gray and green as

waves . . . ponds and

lakes seem to have no clear boundaries . . . the sight of other people

against this ocean sky, even the military,
comes welcome as sails after

long days of passage. . . .
The Nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless streaming

out here. Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles

and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the
Lublin regime,

others going back home, the eyes of both parties,
when they do meet,

hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what's
forced them

into moving, Estonians, Letts, and
Lithuanians trekking north again, all

their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes
in tatters, songs too hard to

sing, talk pointless, Sudetens and
East Prussians shuttling between Ber­

lin and the DP camps in Mecklenburg, Czechs and Slovaks,
Croats and

Serbs, Tosks and Ghegs, Macedonians, Magyars, Vlachs,
Circassians,

Spaniols, Bulgars stirred and streaming
over the surface of the Imperial

cauldron, colliding, shearing alongside for miles, sliding away,
numb, in­

different to all momenta but the deepest, the instability too far
below

their itchy feet to give a shape to, white
wrists and ankles incredibly

wasted poking from their striped prison-camp pajamas, footsteps light
as waterfowl's in this inland dust, caravans of Cypsies,

axles or linchpins

failing, horses dying, families leaving
the vehicles beside the roads for

549



others to come live in a night, a day, over the white hot Autobahns,trains full of their own hanging off the cars that lumber overhead,squeezing aside for army convoys when they come through, White Rus­sians sour with pain on the way west, Kazakh ex-P /Ws marching east,Wehrmacht veterans from other parts of old Germany, foreigners toPrussia as any Gypsies, carrying their old packs, wrapped in the armyblankets they kept, pale green farmworker triangles sewn chest-high oneach blouse bobbing, drifting, at a certain hour of the dusk, like can­dleflames in religious procession-supposed to be heading today forHannover, supposed to pick potatoes along the way, they've been chas­ing these nonexistent potato fields now for a month-"Plundered," aone-time bugler limps along with a long splinter of railroad tie for acane, his instrument, implausibly un dented and shiny, swinging fromone shoulder, "stripped by the SS, Bruder, ja, every fucking potato field,and what for? Alcohol. Not to drink, no, alcohol for the rockets. Pota­toes we could have been eating, alcohol we could have been drinking.It's unbelievable." "What, the rockets?" "No! The SS, picking pota­toes!" looking around for his laugh. But there are none here to followthe brass and flourish of his less solemn heart. They were infantrymen,and know how to snooze between footfalls-at some hour of the morn­ing they will fall out by the side of the road, a moment's precipitate outof the road chemurgy of these busy nights, while the invisible boilinggoes on by, the long strewn vortices-pinstripe suits with crossespainted on the back, ragged navy and army uniforms, white turbans,mismatched socks or none, Tattersall dresses, thick-knitted shawls withbabies inside, women in army trousers split at the knees, flea-bitten andbarking dogs that run in packs, prams piled high with light furnishingsin scarred veneer, hand-mortised drawers that will never fit into any­thing again, looted chickens alive and dead, horns and violins in weath­ered black cases, bedspreads, harmoniums, grandfather clocks, kits fullof tools for carpentry, watchmaking, leatherwork, surgery, paintings ofpink daughters in white frocks, of saints bleeding, of salmon and purplesunsets over the sea, packs stuffed with beady-eyed boas, dolls smilingout of violently red lips, Allgeyer soldiers an inch and a quarter to theman painted cream, gold and blue, handfuls of hundred-year-old agates necsoaked in honey that sweetened greatgrandfather tongues long gone to
\ ili�

dust, then into sulfuric acid to char the sugar in bands, brown to black, fallacross the stone, deathless piano performances punched on Vorsetzer derolls, ribboned black lingerie, flowered and grape-crested silverware, I arefaceted lead-glass decanters, tulip-shaped Jugendstil cups, strings of evej550



utob�,
over01;

�Vhite�:
rchin�1(
rei�eI!

in toe ��
he l·rna

�: hl/�
� lOOa\1

'e�n;�
unQer�'

Q be I�

amber beads ... so the populations move, across the open meadow,

limping, marching, shuffiing, carried, hauling along the
detritus of an

order, a European and bourgeois order they don't yet know is destroyed
forever.

When Slothrop has cigarettes he's an easy mark, when somebody
has

food they share it-sometimes a batch of vodka if there's an army
con­

centration nearby, the GI cans can be looted for all kinds of useful pro­
duce, potato peels, melon rinds, pieces of candy bars for sugar,

no tell­

ing what's going to go into these DP stills,
what you end up drinking is

the throwaway fraction of some occupying power. Slothrop drifts
in and

out of dozens of these quiet, hungry, scuffiing migrations, each time get­

ting hard Benzedrine jitters off of the
faces-there aren't any he can re­

ally ignore, is the problem, they're all too strong,
like faces of a race­

track crowd, each one urging No, me-look at me, be touched, reach for

your camera, your weapon, your
cock. . . . He's stripped all the insignia

off Tchitcherine's uniform, trying for less visibility, but very few people
seem to care much about insignia. . . .

Much of the time he's alone. He'll come on farmhouses, deserted
in

the night, and will sleep in the hay, or if there's a
mattress (not often) in

a bed. Wake to sun glittering off some small lake surrounded by green
salted with blossoms of thyme or mustard, a salad hillside, sweeping up
to pines in the mist. Sapling tomato-frames and purple foxgloves

in the

yards, huge birds' nests built up under the eaves of
the thatched roofs,

bird-choruses in the morning, and soon, one day, as the summer turns

ponderously in the sky, the clang of cranes, on the move.
At a farmhouse in a river valley far south of Rostock, he comes in to

shelter out of the midday rain, falls asleep in a rocking-chair on
the

porch, and dreams about Tantivy Mucker-Maffick,
his friend from long

ago. He has come back, after all and against
the odds. It's somewhere

out in the country, English country, quilted in darkened green
and

amazingly bright straw-yellow, of very old standing
rocks on high

places, of early indenture to death and taxes, of country girls
who walk

out at night to stand naked on the tor and sing.
Members of Tantivy's

family and many friends have come, all in a mood
of quiet celebrating,

because of Tantivy's return. Everybody understands it's only
a visit:

that he will be "here" only in a conditional way. At some point it
will

fall apart, from thinking about it too much.
There is a space of lawn

cleared for dancing, with a village band and many of
the women

dressed in white. After a spell of confusion about the day's schedule
of

events, the meeting takes place-it seems to be underground,
not ex-

551



actly a grave or crypt, nothing sinister, crowded with relatives andfriends around Tantivy who looks so real, so untouched by time, veryclear and full of color ... "Why, Slothrop."
"Oh-where've you been, gate?"
"'Here.' "
" c

"Here"
,

?"
"Yes, like that, you've got it-once or twice removed like that, but Iwalked in the same streets as you, read the same news, was narrowed tothe same spectrum of colors.... "
"Then didn't you-"
"I didn't do anything. There was a change."
The colors in here-stone facing, flowers worn by guests, the strangechalices on the tables-carry an underbreath of blood spilled andturned black, of gentle carbonizing in the blank parts of the cities atfour o'clock on Sunday afternoon . . . it makes crisper the outlines ofTantivy's suit, rather a gigolo suit of unspeakably foreign cut, certainlynothing he ever would have thought of wearing. . . ."I guess we don't have much time 1 know this is shitty, and re-ally selfish but I'm so alone now, and 1 heard that just after it hap-pens, sometimes, you'll sort of hang around for a while, sort of look after

a friend who's 'here.' .. ."
"Sometimes." He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are thestretch of an impotent cry past Slothrop's reach.
"Are you looking after me?"
"No, Slothrop. Not you....

"

Slothrop sits in the old weathered rocker looking out at a rolling lineof hills and the sun just come down out of the last of the rainclouds,turning the wet fields and the haycocks to gold. Who passed by and sawhim sleeping, his face white and troubled nodded on the breast of hismuddy uniform?
As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oak­work creaks in the night, honest and wooden. U nmilked cows low pain­fully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage,barging around into the fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams,uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them. Up on the rooftops theblack and white storks, long throats curved to the sky, heads upsidedown and looking backwards, clatter their beaks in greeting and love.Rabbits come scurrying at night to eat whatever's good in the yards.Trees, now-Slothrop's intensely alert to trees, finally. When he comesin among trees he will spend time touching them, studying them, sittingvery quietly near them and understanding that each tree is a creature,



ative� (
time,\. carrying on its individual life, aware of

what's happening around it, not

just some hunk of wood to be
cut down. Slothrop's family actually made

its money killing trees, amputating them from
their roots, chopping

them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching
that to paper and getting

paid for this with more paper. "That's really
insane." He shakes his

head. "There's insanity in my family." He looks up. The
trees are still.

They know he's there. They probably
also know what he's thinking.

"I'm sorry," he tells them. "I can't do anything
about those people,

they're all out of my reach. What can 1
do?" A medium-size pine nearby

nods its top and suggests, "Next time you
come across a logging opera­

tion out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded,
and

take its oil filter with you. That's what you
can do."iliel1r(.

Ipilloo(
e ciu�

ouilin�
t.ce�

Partial List of Wishes on Evening Stars for This Period:

Let me find that chicken coop the old lady told me about.

Let Tantivy really be alive.
Let this fucking zit on my back go away.
Let me go to Hollywood when this is

over so that Rita Hayworth can

see me and fall in love with me.

Let the peace of this day be here tomorrow
when 1 wake up.

Let that discharge be waiting for me in
Cuxhaven.

Let Bianca be all right, a-and-
Let me be able to take a shit soon.

Let that only be a meteor falling.
Let these boots hold out at least to Lubeck.

Let that Ludwig find his lemming and be happy
and leave me in

peace.

Well, Ludwig. Slothrop finds him one morning by
the shore of some

blue anonymous lake, a surprisingly fat
kid of eight or nine, gazing into

the water, crying, shuddering all over
in rippling fat-waves. His lem­

ming's name is Ursula, and she has
run away from home. Ludwig's been

chasing her all the way north from
Pritzwalk. He's pretty sure she's

heading for the Baltic, but he's
afraid she'll mistake one of these inland

lakes for the sea, and jump into that instead-

"One lemming, kid?"
"I've had her for two years," he sobs, "she's been fine,

she's never

tried to- 1 don't know. Something just came over
her."

"Quit fooling. Lemmings never
do anything alone. They need a

crowd. It gets contagious. You see, Ludwig, they
overbreed, it goes in

cycles, when there are too many of
them they panic and run off looking

cearn

ollin�t
�nclool
ranQIl

all ol�

553



for food. I learned that in college, so I know what I'm talking about.Harvard. Maybe that Ursula's just out after a boy friend or something.""She would have let me know."
"I'm sorry."
"Russians aren't sorry about anything.""I'm not a Russian."
"Is that why you took off all your insignia?"They look at each other. "Uh, well, you need a hand finding that lem­ming?"
This Ludwig, now, may not be completely Right in the Head. He isapt to drag Slothrop up out of sleep in the middle of the night, wakinghalf the DP encampment, spooking the dogs and babies, absolutely surethat Ursula is out there, just beyond the circle of the fire, looking in athim, seeing him but not the way she used to. He leads Slothrop into de­tachments of Soviet tankers, into heaps of ruins high-crested as the sea,that collapse around and, given a chance, on top of you the minute youstep in, also into sucking marshes where the reeds pull away in yourfingers when you try to grab them, and the smell is of protein disaster.This is either maniac faith, or something a little darker: it does dawn onSlothrop at last that if there's any impulse to suicide around here it ain'tUrsula's, it's that Ludwig's-why, the lemming may not even exist!Still . . . hasn't Slothrop, once or twice, seen something? scootingalong ahead down gray narrow streets lined with token saplings in oneor another of these Pruss ian garrison-towns, places whose whole indus­try and meaning was soldiering, their barracks and stone walls desertednow-or-or crouching by the edge of some little lake, watching clouds,white sails of gaff-riggers against the other shore so green, foggy, and faraway, getting secret instruction from waters whose movements in lem­ming-time are oceanic, irresistible, and slow enough, solid-lookingenough at least to walk out on safely...."That's what Jesus meant," whispers the ghost of Slothrop's firstAmerican ancestor William, "venturing out on the Sea of Galilee. Hesaw it from the lemming point of view. Without the millions who hadplunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The successfulloner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle,whose shape had already been created by the Preterite, like the lastblank space on the table."

"Wait a minute. You people didn't have jigsaw puzzles.""Aw, shit."
William Slothrop was a peculiar bird. He took off from Boston, head­ing west in true Imperial style, in 1634 or -5, sick and tired of the Win-

554



on,neJi
the \r�

throp machine, convinced he could preach as
well as anybody in the

hierarchy even if he hadn't been officially ordained.
The ramparts of the

Berkshires stopped everybody else at the time, but not
William. He just

started climbing. He was one of the very first Europeans
in. After they

settled in Berkshire, he and his son John got a pig operation going­
used to drive hogs right back down the great escarpment, back

over the

long pike to Boston, drive them just like sheep or
cows. By the time they

got to market those hogs were so skinny it
was hardly worth it, but Wil­

liam wasn't really in it so much for the money as just for the trip
itself.

He enjoyed the road, the mobility, the chance
encounters of the day­

Indians, trappers, wenches, hill people-and most of
all just being with

those pigs. They were good company. Despite the
folklore and the in­

junctions in his own Bible, William came
to love their nobility and per­

sonal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day­

pigs out on the road, in company together,
were everything Boston

wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey,
the weighing,

slaughter and dreary pigless return back up
into the hills must've been

like for William. Of course he took it as a parable-knew
that the

squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike
was in exact balance to

all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes
and kind eyes,

their smiles, their grace in cross-country
movement. It was a little early

for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the
air.

William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die,
that

would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene
swine who'd

rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by
trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by

inno­

cence they couldn't lose ... by faith in William
as another variety of

pig, at home with the Earth, sharing
the same gift of life. . . .

He wrote a long tract about it presently, called On
Preterition. It had

to be published in England, and is among the
first books to've been not

only banned but also ceremonially
burned in Boston. Nobody wanted to

hear about all the Preterite, the many God passes over
when he chooses

a few for salvation. William argued holiness for these "second Sheep,"
without whom there'd be no elect. You can bet the

Elect in Boston

were pissed off about that. And it got
worse. William felt that what

Jesus was for the elect, Judas Iscariot
was for the Preterite. Everything

in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart. How can Jesus
be an exception? could we feel for him anything

but horror in the face

of the unnatural, the extracreational? Well, if he is the
son of man, and

if what we feel is not horror but love, then we have to
love Judas too.

Right? How William avoided being
burned for heresy, nobody knows.

555



He must've had connections. They did finally 86 him out of Massachu­setts Bay Colony-he thought about Rhode Island for a while but de­cided he wasn't that keen on antinomians either. So finally he sailedback to Old England, not in disgrace so much as despondency, andthat's where he died, among memories of the blue hills, greenmaizefields, get-togethers over hemp and tobacco with the Indians,young women in upper rooms with their aprons lifted, pretty faces, hairspilling on the wood floors while underneath in the stables horses kickedand drunks hollered, the starts in the very early mornings when thebacks of his herd glowed like pearl, the long, stony and surprising roadto Boston, the rain on the Connecticut River, the snuffling good-nightsof a hundred pigs among the new stars and long grass still warm fromthe sun, settling down to sleep. . . .
Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the sin­gular point she jumped the wrong way from? Suppose the Slothropiteheresy had had the time to consolidate and prosper? Might there havebeen fewer crimes in the name of Jesus, and more mercy in the name ofJudas Iscariot? It seems to Tyrone Slothrop that there might be a routeback-maybe that anarchist he met in Zurich was right, maybe for a lit­tle while all the fences are down, one road as good as another, the wholespace of the Zone cleared, depolarized, and somewhere inside the wasteof it a single set of coordinates from which to proceed, without elect,without preterite, without even nationality to fuck it up. . . . Such arethe vistas of thought that open up in Slothrop's head as he tags alongafter Ludwig. Is he drifting, or being led? The only control in the pic­ture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists. The kid shows Slo­throp photos he's packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy,peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves . . . Ursula in a cagedecked with a giant ribbon and swastika'd seal, first prize in a HitlerYouth pet show . . . Ursula and the family cat, watching each othercarefully across a tiled stretch of floor . . . Ursula, front paws danglingand eyes drowsy, hanging out the pocket of Ludwig's Nazi cub-scoutuniform. Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter.Even knowing when she was a baby what they'd be in for someday, stillLudwig has always loved her. He may be thinking that love can stop itfrom happening.

Slothrop will never find out. He loses the fat young lunatic in a villagenear the sea. Girls in full skirts and flowered kerchiefs are out in thewoods gathering mushrooms, and red squirrels flash through thebeeches. Streets curve on into town, foreshortening too fast-it'swideangle, smalltown space here. Lamps are clustered up on the poles.
556

-

-

/� �-�.
__--



Street cobbles are heavy and sand-colored. Drayhorses stand in the
sun

flourishing their tails.
Down an alleyway near the Michaeliskirche, a little girl comes

totter­

ing under an enormous pile of contraband fur coats, only
her brown legs

visible. Ludwig lets out a scream, pointing at the coat on top.
Some­

thing small and gray is worked into its
collar. Artificial yellow eyes

gleam unwholesomely. Ludwig runs hollering Ursula, Ursula, grabbing
for the coat. The little girl lets out a flurry of curses.

"You killed my lemming!"
"Let go, idiot." A tug-of-war among the blurry patches

of sun and

shadow in the alley. "It isn't a lemming, it's a gray fox."

Ludwig stops yelling long enough to look. "She's right," Slothrop

points out.
''I'm sorry," Ludwig snivels. "I'm a little upset."
"Well, could you help me carry these as far as the

church?"

"Sure."

They each take an armful of furs and follow
her through the bumpy

gassen of the town, in a
side entrance, down several flights to a sub­

basement of the Michaeliskirche. There in the lamplight, the first face

Slothrop sees, inclined over a Sterno fire tending
a simmering pot, is

that of Major Duane Marvy.

D D D D D D D

YAAAGGGGHHHH- Slothrop hefts his armload of coats, ready
to

throw them and flee, but the Major's just all smiles. "Hi there,
comrade.

You're just in time for some 0' Duane Marvy's
Atomic Chili! Whyntcha

pull up a pew 'n' sit down?
Yaah-ha-ha-ha! Little What's-her-name

here," chuckling and copping a feel as the girl deposits
her delivery

with the enormous stash of furs that occupies most of this room,
"she's

kind of indiscreet sometimes. I hope you don't feel like that we're doing

anything illegal, I mean in your zone and everything."
"Not at all, Major," trying for a Russian accent, which

comes out like

Bela Lugosi. Marvy is out with his pass anyhow,
most of which is hand­

written, with here and there a seal stamped onto it. Slothrop squints
at

the Cyrillic handwriting at the bottom and
makes out Tchitcherine's

signature. "Ah. I have coordinated
with Colonel Tchitcherine on one or

two occasions."

"Hey'd ya hear what happened up in Peenymunde?
Buncha 'suckers

just come in hijacked Der Springer right
out fm under the Colonel's

557



nose. Yeah. You know Der Springer? Bad ass, comrade. That 'sucker gotso many arns in the far don't leave much for free-enterprisers like me 'n'old Bloody Chiclitz."
Old Bloody Chiclitz, whose mother, Mrs. Chiclitz, named him Clay­ton, has been lurking behind a stack of mink capes with a .45 aimed atSlothrop's stomach. "Say he's O.K., buddy," Marvy calls. "Y'all bring uss'more that champagne why don'tcha." Chiclitz is about as fat as Marvyand wears hornrimmed glasses, and the top of his head's as shiny as hisface. They stand there with their arms around each other's shoulders,two smiling fat men. "Ivan, you're lookin' at 10,000 calories a day, righthere," indicating the two paunches with his thumb, and winking."Chiclitz here goam be the Royal Baby," and they both collapse withlaughter. But it is true. Chiclitz has actually figured out a way to cash inon redeployment. He is about to wangle with Special Services the exclu­sive contract for staging the equator-crossing festivities for every troopship that changes hemispheres. And Chiclitz himself will be the RoyalBaby on as many as he can, that's been written in. He dreams of thegenerations of cannon fodder, struggling forward on their knees, one byone, to kiss his stomach while he gobbles turkey legs and ice-creamcones and wipes his fingers off in the polliwogs' hair. Officially he is oneof the American industrialists out here with the T-Force, scouting Ger­man engineering, secret weaponry in particular. Back home he owns atoy factory in Nutley, New Jersey. Who can ever forget the enormouslysuccessful Juicy Jap, the doll that you fill with ketchup then bayonetthrough any of several access slots, whereupon it flies to pieces, 82 ofthem, realistically squishy plastic, all over the room? or-or ShufHin' Sam,the game of skill where you have to shoot the Negro before he gets backover the fence with the watermelon, a challenge to the reflexes of boysand girls of all ages? Right now business is taking care of itself, but Chic­litz has his eyes on the future. That's why he's running this fur opera­tion, with the Michaeliskirche serving as a depot for the whole region."Retrenchment. Got to get capitalized, enough to see me through,"splashing champagne into gold communion chalices, "till we see whichway it's gonna go. Myself, I think there's a great future in these V-weap­ons. They're gonna be really big."The old church smells of spilled wine, American sweat, and recentlyburned cordite, but these are raw newer intrusions that haven't doneaway with the prevailing Catholic odor-incense, wax, centuries of mildbleating from the lips of the flock. Children come in and go out, bring­ing furs and taking them away, chatting with Ludwig and presently in-



ticker �Ol
ike Ine'rl

. brin�'
ntlyin·

viting him along to check out the freight cars down at
the marshaling

yards.
There are about 30 kids on Chiclitzs payroll. "My dream," he admits,

"is to bring all these kids back to America, out to Hollywood.
I think

there's a future for them in pictures. You heard of Cecil B. De Mille, the

producer? My brother-in-law's pretty close to him. I
think I can teach

them to sing or something, a children's chorus, negotiate a package
deal

with De Mille. He can use them for the real big numbers, religious
scenes, orgy scenes-"

"Ha!" cries Marvy, dribbling champagne, eyeballs bulging. "You're

dreaming all right, old buddy! You sell those kids to
Cecil B. De Mille

it's f'damn sure they ain't goam be singin'. He'll use them little
'suckers

for galley slaves! Yaah-ha-ha-yeah they'll be chained to
th' oars, just

haulin' ass, rowin' old Henry Wilcoxon away into th' sunset to fight
them Greeks or Persians or somebody."

"Galley slaves?" Chiclitz roars. "Never, by God. For De Mille, young
fur-henchmen can't be rowing!"

Out at the edge of town are the remains of an A4 battery,
left where

it stood as the troops fled south, trying to escape British
and Russian

pincers. Marvy and Chiclitz are going to have a look,
and Slothrop is

welcome to come along. But first there is the matter of Duane Marvy's
Atomic Chili, which turns out to be a test of manhood. The champagne
bottle is there within easy reach, but drinking from it will be taken as a

sign of weakness. Once Slothrop would have
been suckered in, but now

he doesn't even have to think it over. While the two Americans,

blinded, noses on fire and leaking incredible quantities of snot, undergo
what the authoritative A Cheapskate's Guide to the Zone aptly de­

scribes as "a Gotterdammerung of the mucous membranes," Slothrop
sits guzzling champagne like soda pop, nodding, smiling,

and mumbling

da, da now and then for authenticity's sake.

They ride out to the site in a green, grinning
Ford staff car. Marvy

soon as he slides behind the wheel turns into a fanged dipsomaniac­
eeeeerrrrr leaving rubber enough to condom a division,

zero to 70 before

the echo's died, trying to run down bicyclists right 'n' left, stampeding
the livestock, whilst Bloody Chiclitz, whooping happily, a champagne
bottle in each fist, urges him on-Marvy bellowing "San Antonya

Rose," his Iav'rite song, Chiclitz screaming out the
window admonitions

like "Fuck not with the Kid, lest instead of fucker thou become fuckee,"

which takes a while and draws only a few bewildered Fascist salutes

from old ladies and little children at the roadside.

559



The site is a charred patch becoming green with new weeds, inside a
copse of beech and some alder. Camouflaged metal stands silent acrossa ghostly crowd of late dandelions, gray heads nodding together waitingfor the luminous wind that will break them toward the sea, over to Den­mark, out to all points of the Zone. Everything's been stripped. Thevehicles are back to the hollow design envelopes of their earliest specs,though there's still a faint odor of petrol and grease. Forget-me-nots aregrowing violent blue violent yellow among the snarl of cables and hoses.Swallows have built a nest inside the control car, and a spider has begunfilling in the web of the Meillerwagen boom with her own. "Shit," sezMajor Marvy. "Fuckin' Rooskies done stole everthing, no offense, com­rade." They go kicking through green and purple weeds, rusted foodtins, old sawdust and chips of wood. Surveying stakes, each with a tatterof white nailed on top, still chain away toward the guide-beam transmit­ter 12 kilometers away. Eastward. So it must've been the Russians theywere trying to stop. . . .
Red, white, and blue winks from the dusty deck of the control car.Slothrop drops to one knee. The Schwarzkommando mandala: KEZVH.He looks up to see Marvy giving him a sly fat smile.
"Why shore. I shoulda known. You don't have no insignia on.Sheeeee ... you're-you're like th' Soviet CIC! Ain'tcha." Slothropstares back. "Hey. Hey, who're you tryin' to git? Huh?" The smile van­ishes. "Sa-a-a-y, I shore hope it ain't Colonel Tchitcherine, now. He's agood Rooskie, you know."
"I assure you," holding up the mandala, cross to vampire, "my onlyinterest is in dealing with the problem of these black devils."Back comes the smile, along with a fat hand on Slothrop's arm. "Youall set to go round 'n' round with thim, whin y'r comrades git here?""Round, and round? I am not sure that 1-"
"You know. Come on. Why all thim boogies't's camped outside 0'town! Hey, Ivan, god-damn 'at's goam be fun. I spint all day todaycleanin' my Colt's," caressing the sidearm in its holster. "Coam makeme a coonskin cap out a one 0' thim 'suckers, 'n' I don't have to tell youwhat part's go am be danglin' down there in back, do Vh? Hah?" Whichtickles Bloody Chiclitz so much he like to chokes laughing."Actually," Slothrop making it up as he goes along, "my mission is co­ordinating intelligence," whatever that means, "in operations such asthis. I am down here, in fact, to reconnoiter the enemy position.""Enemy's right," Chiclitz nods. "They got guns and everything. Onlything a coon ought to have in his hands is a broom!"

Marvy is frowning. "You, you ain't expecting us to go out there with
560



you, now . We can
tell you how to git there, comrade, but you're crazy

to go out there alone. Why don'tcha wait'Il tonight?
Scheduled to stort

about midnight, ain't it? You can wait till then."
"It is essential that I gather certain information in advance," poker­

face, pokerface, good, good . . . "I do not have to tell you
how impor­

tant this is ...
"

a pregnant Lugosi pause, "to all of us."

Well, that gets him directions out to the
Schwarzkommando and a lift

back into town, where the businessmen pick up a couple of those Eager
Frauleins and go roistering off into the sunset. Slothrop

stands in their

exhaust, muttering.
Next time it won't be any custard pie, you asshole ....

Takes him an hour to get out to the camp on foot
across a wide

meadow whose color is deepening now as if green dye flowed and

seeped into its nap ... he is aware of each single grassblade's
shadow

reaching into the shadows east of it ... pure
milk-colored light sweeps

up in a bell-curve
above the sun nearly down, transparent white flesh,

fading up through many blues, powdery to
dark steel at the zenith . . .

why is he out here, doing this? Is this Ursula
the lemming's idea too, get­

ting mixed up in other people's private
feuds when he was supposed to

be . . . whatever it was . . . uh. . . .

Yeah! yeah what happened to Imipolex G, all
that Jamf a-and that S­

Cerat, s'posed to be a hardboiled private eye here, gonna go
out all

alone and beat the odds, avenge my friend that They killed, get my
ID

back and find that piece of mystery hardware but
now aw it's JUST

LIKE-

LOOK-IN' FAWR A NEEDLE IN A
HAAAAY-STACK!

Sssss-searchinfrasomethin' fulla moon-beams,

(Something) got ta have yoooou!

Feet whispering through weeds and meadow grass, humming along
ex­

actly the breathless, chin-up way Fred
Astaire did, reflecting on his

chances of ever finding Ginger Rogers again this side of
their graceful

mortality....
Then, snapping back-no no, wait, you're supposed

to be planning

soberly now, weighing your options, determining your goals
at this criti­

cal turning point in your ...
Ya-ta-ta, LOOKIN' F'R A NEEDLE IN

A-

Nonono come on, Jackson, quit fooling, you got to
concentrate.

The S-Gerat now-O.K. if I can find that S-Gerat
'n' how Jamf was

hooked in, if I can find that out, yeah yeah Imipolex now
.



-searchin' for a (hmm) cellar full 0' saffron
Aw ...
At about which point, as if someone's simple longing has made it ap­pear, comes a single needle-stroke through the sky: the first star.Let me be able to warn them in time.
They jump Slothrop among the trees, lean, bearded, black-theybring him in to the fires where someone is playing a thumb-harp whosesoundbox is carved from a piece of German pine, whose reeds are cutfrom springs of a wrecked Volkswagen. Women in white cotton skirtsprinted with dark blue flowers, white blouses, braided aprons, and blackkerchiefs are busy with pots and tinware. Some are wearing ostrich-egg­shell necklaces knife-hatched in red and blue. A great cut of beef dripsfrom a wooden spit over a fire.

Enzian isn't there, but Andreas Orukambe is, nervous as wire, wear­ing a navy pullover and army fatigue trousers. He remembers Slothrop."Was ist los?"
Slothrop tells him. "Supposed to be here at midnight. Don't knowhow many there are, but maybe you'd better clear out."
"Maybe." Andreas is smiling. "Have you eaten?"The argument, go or stay, proceeds over supper. It is not the tacticaldecision-making Slothrop was taught in officer school. There seem to beother considerations, something the Zone-Hereros know about and Slo­throp doesn't.
"We have to go where we go," Andreas explains to him later. "WhereMukuru wants us to go."
"Oh. Oh, 1 thought you were out here looking for something, likeeverybody else. The 00000, what about that?"
"That is Mukuru's, He hides it where he wants us to seek.""Look, 1 have a line on that S-Gerat." He gives them Greta Erd­mann's story-the Heath, the gasoline works, the name Blicero-That rings a bell. A gong, in fact. Everybody looks at everybody else."Now," Andreas very careful, "that was the name of the German whocommanded the battery that used the S-Gerat?"
"I don't know if they used it. Blicero took the woman to a factorywhere it was either put together, or a part of it was made, from someplastic called Imipolex G."
"And she didn't say where."
"Only 'the Heath.' See if you can find her husband, Miklos Thanatz.He may have seen the actual firing, if there was one. Something out ofthe ordinary went on about then, but 1 never got to find out what."

562



"Thank you."
"It's O.K. Maybe you can tell me something

now." He brings out the

mandala he found. "What's it mean?"

Andreas sets it on the ground, turns it till the K points
northwest.

"Klar," touching each letter, "Enthiftung, these
are the female letters.

North letters. In our villages the women lived in huts on
the northern

half of the circle, the men on the south. The village
itself was a

mandala. Klar is fertilization and birth, Enthiftung is the breath,
the

soul. Ziindung and Vorstufe are the male signs,
the activities, fire and

preparation or building. And in the center, here, Hauptstufe.
It is the

pen where we kept the sacred
cattle. The souls of the ancestors. All the

same here. Birth, soul, fire, building. Male and female, together.
"The four fins of the Rocket made a cross,

another mandala. Number

one pointed the way it would fly. Two for pitch,
three for yaw and roll,

four for pitch. Each opposite pair of vanes
worked together, and moved

in opposite senses. Opposites together.
You can see how we might feel it

speak to us, even if we don't set one up
on its fins and worship it. But it

was waiting for us when we came
north to Germany so long ago . . .

even confused and uprooted as we were then, we knew
that our destiny

was tied up with its own.
That we had been passed over by von Trotha's

army so that we
would find the Aggregat."

Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes
it will work like the man­

tra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over),
mba­

kayere ... a spell against Marvy tonight, against
Tchitcherine. A

mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night. . . .

o 0 ·0 0 0 0 0

The Schwarzkommando have got to Achtfaden, but
Tchitcherine has

been to Narrisch. It cost him Der Springer and three
enlisted men in

sick bay with deep bites. One severed artery.
Narrisch trying to go out

Audie Murphy style. A knight for a bishop=-Namsch
under narcohyp­

nosis raved about the Holy Circle and the Rocketfin
Cross. But the

toafac!w blacks don't know what else
Narrisch knew:

.
fromlO� (a) there was a radio link from the ground

to the S-Gerat but not the

other way round,

(b) there was an interference problem
between a servo-actuator and a

Thamu special oxygen line running aft
to the device from the main tank,

ing o�,t� (c)
Weissmann not only coordinated the S-Gerat project

at Nordhau-

Irhat. sen, but also
commanded the battery that fired Rocket 00000.



-

- t'
__
'

�
_

/
___ --

Total espionage. Bit by bit this mosaic is growing. Tchitcherine, bu­reauless, carries it around in his brain. Every chip and scrap belongs.More precious than Ravenna, something goes erecting against thisstarch-colored sky. . . .
Radio link + oxygen = afterburner of some kind. Ordinarily itwould. But Narrisch also spoke of an asymmetry, a load inside near vane

3 that complicated roll and yaw control almost impossibly.Now wouldn't an afterburner there also give an asymmetrical burn­ing pattern, and heat fluxes greater than the structure could take?Damn, why hasn't he picked up any of the propulsion people? Do theAmericans have them all?
Major Marvy, bowie knife in his teeth and two Thompsons proppedon either hip, as dumbfounded in the clearing as the rest of the attackparty, is in no mood to talk. Instead he is sulking, and drinking vodkaout of Dzabajev's bottomless canteen. But had any propulsion engineersassigned to the S-Gerat showed up at Garmisch, Marvy would have lethim know. That's the arrangement. Western intelligence, Russiantrigger - fingers.

Oh, he smells Enzian . . . even now the black may be looking in outof the night. Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, greenbluelavender flare set­tling to yellow . . . he holds the flame longer than necessary, thinkinglet him. He won't. I wouldn't. Well ... maybe I would....But it's come a quantum-jump closer tonight. They are going to meet.It will be over the S-Gerat, real or fantasized, working or wasted-theywill meet face to face. Then ...
Meantime, who's the mysterious Soviet intelligence agent that Marvytalked to? Paranoia for you here, Tchitcherine. Maybe Moscow's beentipped to your vendetta. If they are gathering evidence for a court-mar­tial, it won't be any Central Asia this time. It'll be Last Secretary to theembassy in Atlantis. You can negotiate narcotics arrests for all thedrowned Russian sailors, expedite your own father's visas to far Lemu­ria, to the sun-resorts of Sargasso where the bones come up to lie andbleach and mock the passing ships. And just before he rides out on thenoon current, brochures tucked between ribs, traveler's checks waddedin a skull-socket, tell him of his black son-tell him about the day withEnzian in the creeping edge of autumn, cold as the mortal cold of an or­ange kept under shaved ice on the terrace of the hotel in Barcelona, sime quieres escribir you already know where I'll be staying . . . cold atthe tip of your peeling-thumb, terminally-approaching cold. . . ."Listen," Marvy by now a little drunk and peevish, "when we gonnagit those 'suckers?"

-

/;;:- --'�-,-_--:
---



Barcelona I

. ..
color

"It's coming, you can be sure."

"Butchyew don't know the kinda pressure
I'm gettin' fm Paris! F'm

headquarters! It's fantastic! There's people
in high places wanna wipe

thim 'suckers out, now. All's they got to do's mash on a
button 'n' I

never git to see no Mexican whores again's long's
I live. Now you can

see what these coons're try'n' t'do, somebody got to stop them
'fore they

do, shit-"
"This intelligence man you saw-both our governments easily

could

have the same policy-"
"You ain't got General Electric breathin'

over your shoulder, fella.

Dillon, Reed ... Standard Awl ... shit
....

"

"But that's just what you folks need," Bloody
Chiclitz interjects. "Get

some business people in there to run it right, instead of having
the gov­

ernment run everything. Your left hand doesn't know
what your right

hand's doing! You know that?"
What's this? A political debate now? Not enough

humiliation missing

the Schwarzkommando, no, you didn't think you
were going to get off

that easy....

"A-and what about Herbert Hoover?" Chiclitz is screaming.
"He

came over and fed you people, when you were starving! They
love Hoo­

ver over here-"

"Yes-" Tchitcherine breaks in: "what is General
Electric doing out

here, by the way?"
A friendly wink from Major Marvy.

"Mister Swope was ace buddies

with old FDR, you see. Electric
Charlie's in there now, but Swope, he

was one-thim Brain Trusters. Jews, most ofm. But Swope's
O.K. Now

GE has connections with Siemens over here, they worked on
the V-2

guidance, remember-"

«Swope's a Jew," sez Chiclitz.
"Naahh-Bloody, yew don' know

whatcher talkin' about-"

"I'm telling you-" They fall into a drawling juicers' argument
over

the ethnic background of the ex-chairman of GE,
full of poison and

sluggish hate. Tchitcherine listens with only
one ear. An episode of ver­

tigo is creeping on him. Didn't Narrisch,
under the drug, mention a Sie­

mens representative at the S-Gerat meetings
in Nordhausen? yes. And

an IG man, too. Didn't Carl Schmitz of
the IG sit on Siemens's board of

directors?

No use asking Marvy. He is too drunk by now
to stay on any subject .

"Ya know I was purty ignorant whin Uh come
out here. Sheeit, I used

t'think I. G. Farben was somebody's name, you know, a fella-hello,

this I. G. Farben? No, this is his wife, Mizzus Farben!
Yaaah-ha-ha-ha!"

n wegof/ll



Bloody Chiclitz is off on his Eleanor Roosevelt routine. "The othuhday, my son Idiot-uh, Elliot-and I, were baking cookies. Cookies tosend to the boys overseas. When the boys received the cookies we sentthem, they would bake cookies, and send some back to us. That way,everybody gets his cookies!"
Oh, Wimpe. Old V-Mann, were you right? Is your IG to be the verymodel of nations?
So it comes to Tchitcherine here in the clearing with these two foolson either side of him, among the debris of some numberless battery'slast stand, cables paralyzed where winch-operators levered them tostillness, beer bottles lying exactly where they were thrown by the lastmen on the last night, everything testifying so purely to the shape of de­feat, of operational death.

"Say, there." It appears to be a very large white Finger, addressinghim. Its Fingernail is beautifully manicured: as it rotates for him, itslowly reveals a Fingerprint that might well be an aerial view of theCity Dactylic, that city of the future where every soul is known, andthere is noplace to hide. Right now, joints moving with soft, hydraulicsounds, the Finger is calling Tchitcherine's attention to-� A Rocket-cartel. A structure cutting across every agency humanand paper that ever touched it. Even to Russia. . Russia bought fromKrupp, didn't she, from Siemens, the IG....
Are there arrangements Stalin won't admit ... doesn't even knowabout? Oh, a State begins to take form in the stateless German night, aState that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the Interna­tional or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul. IG Raketen.Circus-bright, poster reds and yellows, rings beyond counting, all goingat once. The stately Finger twirls among them all. Tchitcherine is cer­tain. Not so much on outward evidence he has found moving throughthe Zone as out of a personal doom he carries with him-always to beheld at the edges of revelations. It happened first with the KirghizLight, and his only illumination then was that fear would always keephim from going all the way in. He will never get further than the edgeof this meta-cartel which has made itself known tonight, this Rocket­state whose borders he cannot cross. . . .

He will miss the Light, but not the Finger. Sadly, most sadly, every­one else seems to be in on it. Every scavenger out here is in IG Rake­ten's employ. All except for himself, and Enzian. His brother, Enzian.No wonder They're after the Schwarzkommando ... and....And when They find out I'm not what They think ... and why isMarvy looking at me like this now, his eyes bulging oh, don't panic,don't feed his insanity, he's just this side of ... of
.

m

IVl

566



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

To Cuxhaven, the summer in deceleration, floating on to Cuxhaven.

to be Inl The meadows hum.
Rain clatters in crescent swoops through the reeds.

Sheep, and rarely a few dark northern deer, will come
down to browse

for seaweed at the shore which is never quite sea nor quite sand, but

held in misty ambivalence by the sun.... So Slothrop is borne,
afloat

on the water-leas. Like signals set out for lost travelers, shapes keep re­

peating for him, Zonal shapes he will allow to enter
but won't interpret,

not any more. Just as well, probably. The most persistent
of these,

which seem to show up at the least real times of day, are the stairstep
gables that front so many of these ancient

north-German buildings, ris­

ing, backlit, a strangely wet gray as if risen out
of the sea, over these

straight and very low horizons. They hold shape, they endure,
like

monuments to Analysis. Three hundred years ago mathematicians
were

learning to break the cannonball's rise and fall into stairsteps
of range

and height, �x and �y, allowing them to grow smaller
and smaller, ap­

proaching zero as armies of eternally shrinking midgets galloped up­
stairs and down again, the patter of their diminishing feet growing finer,

smoothing out into continuous sound. This analytic legacy
has been

handed down intact-it brought the technicians at Peenemiinde to peer
at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, �x by �y, flight­
less themselves . . . film and calculus, both pornographies of flight. Re­

minders of impotence and abstraction, the stone Treppengiebel shapes,
whole and shattered, appear now over the green plains, and last a while,
and go away: in their shadows

children with hair like hay are playing
Himmel and Holle, jumping village pavements from heaven to hell to

heaven by increments, sometimes letting Slothrop have a turn,
some­

times vanishing back into their dark gassen where elder houses, many-

�\\al'llr. windowed and sorrowing,
bow perpetually to the neighbor across the

n�er, way, nearly touching overhead, only
a thin lead of milk sky between.

At nightfall the children roam the streets carrying
round paper lan­

terns, singing Laterne, Laterne, Sonne, Mond und
Sterne . . . spheres in

country evenings, pale as souls, singing good-by to
another summer. In a

coastal town, near Wismar, as he's falling to sleep in a little park, they
surround Slothrop and tell him the story of Plechazunga, the Pig-Hero
who, sometime back in the loth century, routed a Viking invasion, ap­

pearing suddenly out of a thunderbolt and chasing
a score of screaming

Norsemen back into the sea. Every summer since then, a Thursday has

been set aside to celebrate the town' s deliverance-Thursday being



named after Donar or Thor, the thunder-god, who sent down the giantpig. The old gods, even by the loth century, still had some pull with thepeople. Donar hadn't quite been tamed into Saint Peter or Roland,though the ceremony did come to be held at the town's Roland-statuenear the Peterskirche.
This year, though, it's in jeopardy. Schraub the shoemaker, who hastaken the role of Plechazunga for the past 30 years, got drafted lastwinter into the Volksgrenadier and never came back. Now the whitelanterns come crowding around Tyrone Slothrop, bobbing in the dark.Tiny fingers prod his stomach.
"You're the fattest man in the world."
"He's fatter than anyone in the village.""Would you? Would you?"
"I'm not that fat-"
"Told you somebody would come."
"And taller, too."
"-waitaminute, would I what?"
"Be Plechazunga tomorrow."
"Please. "

Being a soft touch these days, Slothrop gives in. They roust him upout of his grass bed and down to the city hall. In the basement are cos­tumes and props for the Schweinheldfest-shields, spears, horned hel­mets, shaggy animal skins, wooden Thor's hammers and ten-foot light­ning bolts covered with gold leaf. The pig costume is a littlestartling-pink, blue, yellow, bright sour colors, a German Expressionistpig, plush outside, padded with straw inside. It seems to fit perfectly.Hmm.
The crowd next morning is sparse and placid: old people and chil­dren, and a few silent veterans. The Viking invaders are all kids, hel­mets sloping down over their eyes, capes dragging the ground, shields asbig as they are and weaponry twice as high. Giant Plechazunga imageswith white stock and red and blue cornflowers woven onto the wire­mesh frames, line the square. Slothrop waits hidden behind the Roland,a particularly humorless, goggle-eyed, curly-headed, pinch-waistedspecimen. With Slothrop is an arsenal of fireworks and his assistantFritz, who's about 8, and a Wilhelm Busch original. Slothrop is a littlenervous, unaccustomed as he is to pigherofestivals. But Fritz is an oldhand, and has thoughtfully brought along a glazed jug of some liquidbrain damage flavored with dill and coriander and distilled, unless Ha­ferschleim means something else, from oatmeal.

"Haferschleim, Fritz?" He takes another belt, sorry he asked.

01,.



"Haferschleim, ja."
"Well, Haferschleim is better than none, ho, ho. . . ." Whatever it

is, it seems to work swiftly on the nerve centers. By the time all the Vi­

kings, to a solemn brass chorale from the local band, have puffed
and

struggled up to the statue, formed ranks, and demanded the town's
sur­

render, Slothrop finds his brain working with less than the usual keen­
ness. At which point Fritz strikes his match, and all hell breaks loose,

rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels and-PLECCCHHAZUNNGGA!
an enormous charge of black powder blasts him out in the open, singe­
ing his ass, taking the curl right out of his tail. "Oh, yes, that's right,
uh ...

"

Wobbling, grinning hugely, Slothrop hollers his line: "I am the
wrath of Donar-and this day you shall be my anvil!" Away they all go
in a good roaring chase through the streets, in a shower of white blos­
soms, little kids squealing, down to the water, where everybody starts

splashing and ducking everybody else. Townspeople break out beer,
wine, bread, Quark, sausages. Gold-brown Kartoffelpuffer are lifted

dripping hot from oil smoking in black skillets over little peat fires.
Girls

commence stroking Slothrop's snout and velvet flanks. The town is
saved for another year.

A peaceful, drunken day, full of music, the smell of salt water, marsh,
flowers, frying onions, spilled beer and fresh fish, overhead little frost­
colored clouds blowing along the blue sky. The breeze is cool enough to

keep Slothrop from sweating inside this pig suit. All along the shoreline,

blue-gray woods breathe and shimmer. White sails move out in
the sea.

Slothrop returns from the brown back room of a pipesmoke-and-cab­
bage cafe, and an hour's game of hammer-and-forge With-every boy's
dream-TWO healthy young ladies in summer dresses and woodsoled
shoes to find the crowd begun to coagulate into clumps of three and
four. Oh, shit. Not now, come on.... Tight aching across his asshole,
head and stomach inflated with oat mash and summer beer, Slothrop
sits on a pile of nets and tries, fat chance, to will himself alert.

These little vortices appearing in a crowd out here usually mean
black market. Weeds of paranoia begin to bloom, army-green, among
the garden and midday tranquillities. Last of his line, and

how far­

fallen-no other Slothrop ever felt such fear in the presence of Com­

merce. Newspapers already lie spread out on the cobbles for buyers
to

dump out cans of coffee on, make sure it's all Bohnenkaffee,
and not just

a thin layer on top of ersatz. Gold watches and rings appear abruptly
sunlit out of dusty pockets. Cigarettes go flashing hand to hand among
the limp and filthy and soundless Reichsmarks. Kids play

underfoot

while the grownups deal, in Polish, Russian, north-Baltic,
Plattdeutsch.

569

d.



Some of the DP style here, a little impersonal, just passing through,dealing on route, in motion, almost as an afterthought . . . where'd theyall come from, these gray hustlers, what shadows in the Gemutlichkeitof the day were harboring them?
Materializing from their own weird office silence, the coppers show

up now, two black 'n' white charabancs full of bluegreen uniforms,white armbands, little bucket hats with starburst insignia, truncheonsalready unsheathed, black dildos in nervous hands, wobbling, ready foraction. The eddies in the crowd break up fast, jewelry ringing to thepavement, cigarettes scattered and squashed under the feet of stam­
peding civilians, among the instant litter of watches, war medals, silk­stuffs, rolls of bills, pinkskinned potatoes all their eyes staring in alarm,elbow-length kid gloves twisted up fingers clutching at sky, smashedlight bulbs, Parisian slippers, gold picture-frames around still-lifes ofcobbles, rings, brooches, nobody gonna claim any of it, everybodyscared now.

No wonder. The cops go at busting these proceedings the way theymust've handled anti-Nazi street actions before the War, moving in,mmm [a, with these flexible clubs, eyes tuned to the finest possibilities ofthreat, smelling of leather, of the wool-armpit rankness of their ownfear, jumping little kids three-on-one, shaking down girls, old people,making them take off and shake out even boots and underwear, jabbingand battering in with tireless truncheonwork among the crying kids andscreaming women. Beneath the efliciency and glee is nostalgia for theold days. The War must've been lean times for crowd control, murder wand mopery was the best you could do, one suspect at a time. But now, n�with the White Market to be protected, here again are whole streets fullof bodies eager for that erste Abreibung, and you can bet the heat arehappy with it.
Presently they have Russian reinforcements, three truckloads of

young Asiatics in fatigues who don't seem to know where they are ex­actly, just shipped in from someplace very cold and far to the east. Outof their slatsided rigs like soccer players coming on field, they form aline and start to clear the street by compressing the crowd toward the Wwater. Slothrop is right in the middle of all this, shoved stumbling back- ITOward, pig mask cutting off half his vision, trying to shield whom he can I all-a few kids, an old lady who was busy earlier moving cotton yardage. \ eveThe first billy-clubs catch him in the straw padding over his stomach, ruand don't feel like much. Civilians are going down right and left, but hllPlechazunga's holding his own. Has the morning been only a dress re- terhearsal? Is Slothrop expected to repel real foreign invaders now? A tiny Jus,



girl is clutching to his leg, crying the Schweinheld's
name in a confident

voice. A grizzled old cop, years of home-front high living and
bribes in

his face, comes swinging a club at Slothrop's head. The
Swine-hero

dodges and kicks with his free leg. As the cop doubles over,
half a dozen

yelling civilians jump on, relieving him of hat and
truncheon. Tears,

caught by the sun, leak out of his withered eyes.
Then gunfire has

started somewhere, panicking everybody, carrying Slothrop half off his

feet, the kid around his leg torn loose and lost in the rush forever.
Out of the street onto the quai. The police have quit hitting people

and begun picking up loot off of the street, but now the
Russians are

moving in, and enough of them are looking straight
at Slothrop. Provi­

dentially, one of the girls from the cafe shows up about now,
takes his

hand and tugs him along.
"There's a warrant out for you."

ele��. "A what? They're doing pretty good without any paperwork."
"The Russians found your uniform. They think you're a deserter."

lIar "They're right."
She takes Slothrop home with her, in his pig suit. He never

hears her

name. She is about seventeen, fair, a young face, easy to hurt. They lie

behind a sperm-yellowed bedsheet tacked to the ceiling, very close
on a

narrow bed with lacquered posts. Her mother is carving turnips
in the

kitchen. Their two hearts pound, his for his danger, hers for Slothrop.
She tells how her parents lived, her father a printer, married during

his

'3 for� journeymanship, his wanderyears now stretched out to ten,
no word

I.l1lill� where he's been since '42, when they had a note from Neukolln,
where

Butr�� he had dossed down the night with a friend. Always a friend,
God

trretl� knows how many back rooms, roundhouses, print shops
he slept single

neat�' nights in, shivering wrapped in back numbers of
Die Welt am Montag,

sure of at least shelter, like everybody in the Buchdrucherverband,

'load, often a meal, almost certainly some
kind of police trouble if the stay

lasted too long-it was a good union. They kept the German Wobbly
traditions, they didn't go along with Hitler though all

the other unions

were falling into line. It touches Slothrop's own
Puritan hopes for the

Word, the Word made printer's ink, dwelling along with antibodies
and

iron-bound breath in a good man's blood, though the World for him
be

always the World on Monday, with its cold cutting edge, slicing away

every poor illusion of
comfort the bourgeois takes for real . . . did he

run off leaflets against his country's insanity? was he busted, beaten,
killed? She has a snapshot of him on holiday, someplace Bavarian,

wa­

terfalled, white-peaked, a tanned and ageless face, Tyrolean hat, gal­
luses, feet planted perpetually set to break into a run:

the image

571



stopped, preserved here, the only way they could keep him, runningroom to room down all his cold Red suburbs, freemason's night to night. . . their aproned and kitchen way of going evening or empty after­noon in to study the Llx's and Lly's of his drifter's spirit, on the run­study how he was changing inside the knife-fall of the shutter, what hemight've been hearing in the water, flowing like himself forever, in lostsilence, behind him, already behind him.
Even now, lying beside a stranger in a pig disguise, her father is theflying element of Slothrop, of whoever else has lain here before, flight­less, and heard the same promise: ''I'd go anywhere with you." He seesthem walking a railroad trestle, pines on long slanted mountains allaround, autumn sunlight and cold, purple rainclouds, mid-afternoon,her face against some tall concrete structure, the light of the concretecoming down oblique both sides of her cheekbones, blending into herskin, blending with its own light. Her motionless figure above him in ablack greatcoat, blonde hair against the sky, himself at the top of ametal ladder in a trainyard, gazing up at her, all their shining steel roadsbelow crisscrossing and peeling off to all parts of the Zone. Both of themon the run. That's what she wants. But Slothrop only wants to lie stillwith her heartbeat awhile ... isn't that every paranoid's wish? to per­fect methods of immobility? But they're coming, house to house, lookingfor their deserter, and it's Slothrop who has to go, she who has to stay.In the streets loudspeakers, buzzing metal throats, are proclaiming anearly curfew tonight. Through some window of the town, lying in somebed, already browsing at the edges of the fields of sleep, is a kid forwhom the metal voice with its foreign accent is a sign of nightly secu­rity, to be part of the wild fields, the rain on the sea, dogs, smells ofcooking from strange windows, dirt roads ... part of this unrecover­able summer. . . .

"There's no moon," she whispers, her eyes flinching but not lookingaway.
"What's the best way out of town?"
She knows a hundred. His heart, his fingertips hurt with shame. "I'llshow you."
"You don't have to."
"I want to."
Her mother gives Slothrop a couple of hard rolls to stash inside his pigsuit. She'd find him something else to wear, but all her husband'sclothes have been traded for food at the Tauschzentrale. His last pictureof her is framed in the light of her kitchen, through the window, a fad­ing golden woman, head in a nod over a stove with a single pot sim-

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572



mering, flowered wallpaper deep-orange and red
behind her averted

face.
The daughter leads him over low stone walls, along drainage

ditches

and into culverts, southwesterly to the outskirts of the town. Far behind

them the clock in the Peterskirche strikes nine, the sightless Roland
below continuing to gaze across the square. White flowers

fall one by
one from the images of Plechazunga. Stacks of a power station rise,

ghostly, smokeless, painted on the sky. A windmill creaks
out in the

countryside.
The city gate is high and skinny, with stairsteps to nowhere on top.

The road away goes curving through the ogival opening, out into
the

night meadows.
"I want to go with you." But she makes no move to step through

the

arch with him.

"Maybe I'll be back." It's no drifter's lie, both of them are
sure that

someone will be, next year at about this time, maybe next year's
Schweinheld, someone close enough . . . and if the name, the dossier

are not exactly the same, well, who believes in those? She's a printer's
kid, she knows the medium, she even learned from him how

to handle a

Winkelhaken pretty good, how to set up a line and take it down,
"You're a May bug," she whispers, and kisses him good-by, and

stands

watching him go, a sniffling still girl in pinafore and army
boots by the

isolated gate. "Good night. . . ."
Docile girl, good night. What does he have for her but a last snapshot

of a trudging pig in motley, merging with the stars and woodpiles,
some­

thing to put beside that childhood still of her father?
He impersonates

flight though his heart isn't in it and yet he's lost all knowledge
of

staying.... Good night, it's curfew, get back inside,
back in your room

... good night....
loom He keeps to open country, sleeping when he's too tired to walk,

straw

and velvet insulating him from the cold. One morning he wakes
in a hol­

low between a stand of beech and a stream. It is sunrise and bitter cold,

e "L and there seems to be a warm tongue licking roughly at his face.
He is

looking here into the snout of another pig, very fat
and pink pig. She

grunts and smiles amiably, blinking long eyelashes.
"Wait. How about this?" He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a

hilfi; minute, then moves up
to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout. Both

Dana'i of them are dripping with dew. He follows her on
down to the stream,

ictuIt takes off the mask again and throws water
at his face while she drinks

a faa, beside him, slurping, placid. The water
is clear, running lively, cold.

t 5�' Round rocks knock together under the
stream. A resonant sound, a

573



music. It would be worth something to sit day and night, in and out, lis­tening to these sounds of water and cobbles unfold. . . .
Slothrop is hungry. "Come on. We got to find breakfast." Beside asmall pond near a farmhouse, the pig discovers a wood stake driven intothe ground. She begins snuffling around it. Slothrop kicks aside looseearth and finds a brick cairn, stuffed with potatoes ensiled last year."Fine for you," as she falls to eagerly, "but I can't eat that stuff." Sky isshining in the calm surface of the water. Nobody seems to be around.Slothrop wanders off to check the farmhouse. Tall white daisies grow allover the yard. Thatch-hooded windows upstairs are dark, no smokecomes from the chimneys. But the chicken-house in back is occupied.He eases a big fat white hen up off of her nest, reaches gingerly for theeggs-PKAWW she flies into a dither, tries to peck Slothrop's arm off,friends come shooting in from outside raising a godawful commotion, atwhich point the hen has worked her wings through the wood slats so shecan't get back in and is too fat below the wingpits to get the rest of theway out. So, there she hangs, flapping and screaming, while Slothropgrabs three eggs then tries to push her wings back inside for her. It is afrustrating job, especially trying to keep the eggs balanced. The roosteris in the doorway hollering Achtung, Achtung, discipline in his harem isshot to hell, noisy white tumbleweed hens are barrelassing all over theinside of the coop, and blood is flowing from Slothrop in half a dozenplaces.

Then he hears a dog barking-time to give up on this hen-comesoutside sees a lady in her Wehrmacht auxiliary outfit 30 meters awayleveling a shotgun and the dog charging in growling, teeth bared, eyeson Slothrop's throat. Slothrop goes scrambling around the henhouse justas the gun kicks off a good-morning blast. About then the pig shows upand chases off the dog. Away they go, eggs cradled in pig mask, ladyyelling, hens raising hell, pig galloping along beside. There's a final shot­gun blast, but by then they're out of range.About a mile farther on they pause, for Slothrop's breakfast. "Goodshow," thumping the pig affectionately. She crouches, catching herbreath, gazing at him while he eats raw eggs and smokes half a ciga­rette. Then they set off again.
Soon they have begun to angle toward the sea. The pig seems toknow where she's going. Far away on another road, a great cloud ofdust hangs, crawling southward, maybe a Russian horse convoy. Fledg­ling storks are trying out their wings over the haystacks and fields. Topsof solitary trees are blurred green, as if smudged accidentally by a

574

in

atl
at



sleeve. Brown windmills turn at the horizon, across miles of straw-sprin­
kled red earth.

A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt-
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby or Rover,
You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!

By nightfall they have entered a wooded
stretch. Fog drifts in the

hollows. A lost unmilked cow complains somewhere in the darkness.

The pig and Slothrop settled down to sleep among pines
thick with

shreds of tinfoil, a cloud of British window dumped to fox the German

radars in some long-ago raid, a whole forest of Christmas trees,
tinsel

rippling in the wind, catching the starlight, silent,
ice-cold crownfire

acres wild over their heads all night. Slothrop keeps waking to find the

pig snuggled in a bed of pine needles, watching
over him. It's not for

danger, or out of restlessness. Maybe she's
decided Slothrop needs

looking after. In the tinfoil light she's very sleek and convex,
her bristles

look smooth as down. Lustful thoughts come filtering into Slothrop's
mind, little peculiarity here you know, hehheh, nothing he can't

handle.

. . . They fall asleep under the decorated trees, the pig
a wandering

eastern magus, Slothrop in his costume a gaudy present waiting
for

morning and a child to claim him.
Next day, about noon, they enter a slow-withering city,

alone on the

Baltic coast, and perishing from an absence of children. The sign
over

the city gate, in burned bulbs and empty sockets,
reads ZWOLFKINDER.

The great wheel, dominating the skyline for miles
out of town, leans a

little askew, grim old governess, sun catching long streaks of rust, sky

pale through the iron lattice that droops its long
twisted shadow across

the sand and into the plum sea. Wind cat-howls in and out the doorless

halls and houses.
"Frieda." A voice calling from the blue shadow behind a wall. Grunt­

ing, smiling, the pig stands her ground-look
who I brought home. Soon

a thin freckled man, blond, nearly bald, steps out into the sun. Glancing
at Slothrop, nervous, he reaches to scratch Frieda

between the ears. "I

am Pokier. Thank you for bringing her back."

5 75



"No, no-she brought me."
"Yes."
Pokier is living in the basement of the town hall. He has some coffeeheating on a driftwood fire in the stove.
"Do you play chess?"
Frieda kibitzes. Slothrop, who tends to play more by superstition thanstrategy, is obsessed with protecting his knights, Springer and Springer-willing to lose anything else, thinking no more than a move or twoahead if that, he alternates long lethargic backing and filling with burstsof idiot razzle-dazzle that have Pokler frowning, but not with worry.About the time Slothrop loses his queen, "Sa-a-a-y, waitaminute, didyou say Pokler?"

Zip the man is out with a Luger as big as a house-really fast guy­with the muzzle pointing right at Slothrop's head. For a moment Slo­throp, in his pig suit, thinks that Pokler thinks that he, Slothrop, hasbeen fooling around with Frieda the Pig, and that there is about to be ashotgun, or Luger, wedding here-in fact the phrase unto thee I pledgemy trough has just arrived in his brain when he realizes that what Po­kler's actually saying is, "You'd better leave. Only two more moves andI'd've had you anyway."
"Lemme at least tell you my story," blithering fast as he can the Zu­rich information with Pokler's name on it, the Russian-American-Hererosearch for the S-Gerat, wondering meantime, in parallel sort of, if thatOberst Enzian wasn't right about going native in the Zone-beginningto get ideas, fixed and slightly, ah, erotic notions about Destiny are youSlothrop? eh? tracing back the route Frieda the pig brought him along,trying to remember forks where they might have turned anotherway....

"The Schwarzgerat." Pokler shakes his head. "I don't know what itwas. I was never that interested. Is that really all you're after?"Slothrop thinks that over. Their coffee cups take sunlight from thewindow and bounce it back up to the ceiling, bobbing ellipses of bluelight. "Don't know. Except for this kind of personal tie-in with ImipolexG .... "
"It's an aromatic polyimide," Pokler putting the gun back in his shirt."Tell me about it," sez Slothrop.Well, but not before he has told something of his Ilse and her summerreturns, enough for Slothrop to be taken again by the nape and pushedagainst Bianca's dead flesh. . . . Ilse, fathered on Greta Erdmann's sil­ver and passive image, Bianca, conceived during the filming of the very



scene that was in his thoughts as Pokler pumped in the fatal charge of

sperm-how could they not be the same child?
She's still with you, though harder to see these days, nearly invisible

as a glass of gray lemonade in a twilit room . . . still she is there,
cool

and acid and sweet, waiting to be swallowed down to touch your deep­
est cells, to work among your saddest dreams.

D D D D D D D

Pokler does manage to tell a little about Laszlo Jamf, but keeps getting
sidetracked off into talking about the movies, German movies Slothrop
has never heard of, much less seen . . . yes here's some kind of fanatical

movie hound all right- "On D-Day," he confesses, "when I heard Gen­
eral Eisenhower on the radio announcing the invasion of Normandy, I

thought it was really Clark Gable, have you ever noticed? the
voices are

identical. . . .
"

In the last third of his life, there came over Laszlo Jamf-so it seemed

to those who from out in the wood lecture halls watched his eyelids
slowly granulate, spots and wrinkles grow across his image, disintegrat­
ing it toward old age-a hostility, a strangely personal hatred,

for the

covalent bond. A conviction that, for synthetics to have a future at all,
the bond must be improved on-some students even read "tran­
scended." That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons

by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life,
struck Jamf as a

cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger, how everlasting was
the ionic bond-where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized!
and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . .
how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stub­
bornness!

"Whatever lip-service we may pay to Reason," he told Pokler's class

back at the T.H., "to moderation and compromise, nevertheless there

remains the lion. A lion in each one of you. He is either tamed-by too

much mathematics, by details of design, by corporate procedures-or
he stays wild, an eternal predator.

"The lion does not know subtleties and half-solutions. He does not ac­

cept sharing as a basis for anything! He takes, he
holds! He is not a Bol­

shevik or a Jew. You will never hear relativity from the lion. He
wants

the absolute. Life and death. Win and lose. Not truces or arrangements,

ere�
but the joy of the leap, the roar, the blood."

577



If this be National Socialist chemistry, blame that something-in-the­air, the Zeitgeist. Sure, blame it. Prof.-Dr. Jamf was not immune. Nei­ther was his student Pokler. But through Inflation and Depression, Po­kler's idea of "the lion" came to have a human face attached to it, amovie face natiirlich, that of the actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whom Po­kler idolized, and wanted to be like.
Klein-Rogge was carrying nubile actresses off to rooftops when KingKong was still on the tit with no motor skills to speak of. Well, one nu­bile actress anyway, Brigitte Helm in Metropolis. Great movie. Exactlythe world Pokler and evidently quite a few others were dreaming aboutthose days, a Corporate City-state where technology was the source of

power, the engineer worked closely with the administrator, the masseslabored unseen far underground, and ultimate power lay with a singleleader at the top, fatherly and benevolent and just, who wore magni­ficent-looking suits and whose name Pokler couldn't remember, beingtoo taken with Klein-Rogge playing the mad inventor that Pokler andhis codisciples under J amf longed to be-indispensable to those who ranthe Metropolis, yet, at the end, the untamable lion who could let it allcrash, girl, State, masses, himself, asserting his reality against them all inone last roaring plunge from rooftop to street. . . .A curious potency. Whatever it was the real visionaries were pickingup out of the hard tessitura of those days and city streets, whateverKathe Kollwitz saw that brought her lean Death down to hump Itswomen from behind, and they to love it so, seemed now and then tohave touched Pokler too, in his deeper excursions into the Mare Noctur­num. He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and nerves,scalp to soles, in ritual submissions to the Master of this night space andof himself, the male embodiment of a technologique that embracedpower not for its social uses but for just those chances of surrender, per­sonal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming col­lapse .... To Attila the Hun, as a matter of fact, come west out of thesteppes to smash the precious structure of magic and incest that held to­gether the kingdom of the Burgundians. Pokler was tired that night, allday out scavenging for coal. He kept falling asleep, waking to imagesthat for a half a minute he could make no sense of at all-a close-up of aface? a forest? the scales of the Dragon? a battle-scene? Often enough,it would resolve into Rudolf Klein-Rogge, ancient Oriental thanatoma­niac Attila, head shaved except for a topknot, bead-strung, raving withgrandiloquent gestures and those enormous bleak eyes. . . . Poklerwould nod back into sleep with bursts of destroying beauty there for hisdreams to work on, speaking barbaric gutturals for the silent mouths,

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smoothing the Burgundiaus into something of the meekness, the gray­
ness of certain crowds in the beerhalls back at the T.H. . . . and wake

again-it went on for hours-into some further progression
of carnage,

of fire and smashing. . . .
On the way home, by tram and foot, his wife bitched at Pokler for

dozing off, ridiculed his engineer's devotion to cause-and-effect.
How

could he tell her that the dramatic connections were really all there, in
his dreams? How could he tell her anything?

Klein-Rogge is remembered most of all for his role as Dr. Mabuse.
You were meant to think of Hugo Stinnes, the tireless operator behind

the scenes of apparent Inflation, apparent history: gambler, financial

wizard, archgangster . . . a fussy biirgerlich mouth, jowls, graceless
moves, a first impression of comic technocracy . . . and yet, when the

rages came over him, breaking through from beneath the
rationalized

look, with his glacial eyes become windows into the bare savanna, then
the real Mabuse surfaced, vital and proud against the gray forces sur­

rounding him, edging him toward the doom he must've
known he

couldn't escape, the silent inferno of guns, grenades, streets full of

troops attacking his headquarters, and his own madness at
the end of

the secret tunnel. ... And who brought him down but matinee idol
Bernhardt Goetzke as State Prosecutor von Wenk, Goetzke who played
tender, wistful bureaucratic Death in Der Miide Tod, here too running
true to form, too tame, too gentle for the jaded Countess he coveted­
but Klein-Rogge jumped in, with all claws out, drove her effeminate
husband to suicide, seized her, threw her on his bed, the languid bitch
-took her! while gentle Goetzke sat in his office, among his papers and

sybarites-Mabuse trying to hypnotize him, drug him, bomb him to
death in his own office-nothing worked, each time the great Weimar

inertia, files, hierarchies, routines, kept saving him. Mabuse was the sav­

age throwback, the charismatic flash
no Sunday-afternoon Agfa plate

could ever bear, the print through the rippling solution each time flaring
up to the same annihilating white (Piscean depths Pokler

has cruised

dream and waking, beneath him images of everyday Inflation dreari­

ness, queues, stockbrokers, boiled potatoes
in a dish, searching with

only gills and gut-some nervous drive toward myth he
doesn't even

know if he believes in-for the white light, ruins of Atlantis, intimations
of a truer kingdom). . . .

Metropolitan inventor Rothwang, King Attila, Mabuse der Spieler,
Prof.-Dr. Laszlo Jamf, all their yearnings aimed the same way, toward a
form of death that could be demonstrated to hold joy and defiance,

nothing of bourgeois Goetzkian death, of self-deluding,
mature accept-

e pidil,
\\flatelf

nump j�
llienl

579



ance, relatives in the parlor, knowing faces the children can alwaysread....
"You have the two choices," Jamf cried, his last lecture of the year:outside were the flowery strokings of wind, girls in pale-colored dresses,oceans of beer, male choruses intensely, movingly lifted as they sangSemper sit in flores/ Semper sit in flo-ho-res ... "stay behind with car­bon and hydrogen, take your lunch-bucket in to the works every morn­ing with the faceless droves who can't wait to get in out of the sunlight-or move beyond. Silicon, boron, phosphorus-these can replace car­bon, and can bond to nitrogen instead of hydrogen-" a few snickershere, not unanticipated by the playful old pedagogue, be he always inflower: his involvement in getting Weimar to subsidize the IG's Stick­stoff Syndikat was well known-"move beyond life, toward the inor­ganic. Here is no frailty, no mortality-here is Strength, and the Time­less." Then his well-known finale, as he wiped away the scrawled C-Hon his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si-N.The wave of the future. But Jamf himself, oddly, did not move on. Henever synthesized those new inorganic rings or chains he had prophe­sied so dramatically. Had he only remained behind in the trough, aca­demic generations swelling away just ahead, or had he known some­thing Pokler and the others didn't? Were his exhortations in the lecturehall some kind of eccentric joke? He stayed with C-H, and took hislunchbucket to America. Pokler lost touch with him after the Tech­nische Hochschule-so did all his old pupils. He was now under the sin­ister influence of Lyle Bland, and if he was still seeking to escape themortality of the covalent bond, Jamf was doing it in the least obvious

way there was.

D D D D D D D

If that Lyle Bland hadn't joined the Masons, he'd still probably be up tothose nefarious tricks of his. Just as there are, in the World, machineries ilicommitted to injustice as an enterprise, so too there seem to be provi-sions active for balancing things out once in a while. Not as an enter-prise, exactly, but at least in the dance of things. The Masons, in the illdance of things, turned out to be one of these where Bland was con- wicerned.
Imagine the fellow's plight-got so much money he don't know whatto do with it all. Don't go screaming, "Give it to me!" either. He's givenit to you, though in roundabout ways you might need a good system of

580



f there"
edili�

thev�
d \\it��'
ve�'m�

llie )unU�
eplace�

eWlru('['

search to unsnarl. Oh, has he given it to you. By way of the Bland Insti­
tute and the Bland Foundation, the man has had his meathooks well

into the American day-to-day since 1919. Who do you think sat on top
of the patent for that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure you've
heard that story-maybe even snickered along with paid anthropolo­
gists who called it Automotive Age Myth or some shit-well,

turns out

the item was real, all right, and it was Lyle Bland who sprang for those
academic hookers doing the snickering and the credentialed lying. Or
how about the great Killer Weed advertising campaign of the thirties,
who do you think worked hand-in-glove (or, as grosser individuals

have

put it, penis-in-mouth) with the FBI on that one?
And remember all

those guy-goes-to-the-doctor-can't-get-a-hardon jokes? Planted by
Bland, yup-half a dozen basic variations, after having done depth'
studies for the National Research Council that indicated an unaccept­
able 36% of the male work force weren't paying enough attention to
their cocks-not enough genital obsession there, and it was undermin­

ing the efficiency of the organs doing the real work.

Psychological studies became, in fact, a Bland specialty. His probe
into the subconscious of early-Depression America is considered a

classic, and widely credited with improving the plausibility of Roose­
velt's "election" in 1932. Though many of his colleagues found a pos­
ture of hatred for FDR useful, Bland was too delighted to go through
the motions. For him, FDR was exactly the man: Harvard, beholden to
all kinds of money old and new, commodity and retail, Harriman

and

Weinberg: an American synthesis which had never occurred before,
and which opened the way to certain grand possibilities-all grouped
under the term "control," which seemed to be a private code-word­

more in line with the aspirations of Bland and others. A year later Bland

joined the Business Advisory Council set up under Swope
of General

Electric, whose ideas on matters of "control" ran close to those of
Wal­

ter Rathenau, of German GE. Whatever Swope's outfit did, it did in se­
cret. Nobody got to see its files. Bland wasn't about to tell anybody,

ei­

ther.
He had gotten to be buddies, after World War I, with

the office of the

Alien Property Custodian. Their job was to dispose of confiscated Ger­
man interests in the U.S. A lot of Midwestern money was involved here,

which is what got Bland embroiled in the Great Pinball Difficulty,
and

so into the Masons. Seems that through something called the Chemical
Foundation-cover names in those days had no style to them-the APC
had sold Bland a few of Laszlo Jamf's early patents, along with the U.S.

agency of Glitherius Paint
& Dye, a Berlin firm. A few years later, in

581

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1925, in the course of being put together, the IG bought back 50% ofAmerican Glitherius from Bland, who was using his end of it as a pat­ent-holding company. Bland got cash, securities, and controlling inter­est in a Glitherius subsidiary in Berlin being run by a Jew namedPflaumbaum, yesyes, the same PRaumbaum Franz Pokler worked for tillthe place burned down and Pokler went back out on the streets. (In­deed, there were those who could see Bland's hand in that disaster,though the Jew got blamed, fucked under by the courts, attached till hewas bankrupt, and, in the fullness of time, sent east along with manyothers of his race. We would also have to show some interlock betweenBland and the Ufa movie-distribution people who sent Pokler out withhis advertising bills to Reinickendorf that night, to his fateful meetingwith Kurt Mondaugen and the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt-not to men­tion separate connections for Achtfaden, Narrisch, and the other S­Cerat people-before we'd have a paranoid structure worthy of thename. Alas, the state of the art by 1945 was nowhere near adequate tothat kind of data retrieval. Even if it had been, Bland, or his successorsand assigns, could've bought programmers by the truckload to come inand make sure all the information fed out was harmless. Those like Slo­throp, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrownback on dreams, psychic Rashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistem­ologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.)After the Pflaumbaum fire, lines of power among Bland and his Ger­man colleagues had to be renegotiated. It dragged on for a few years.Bland found himself in Depression St. Louis, talking with one AlfonsoTracy, Princeton '06, St. Louis Country Club, moving into petrochemi­cals in a big way, Mrs. Tracy dithering in and out of the house withyardage and armloads of Rowers, preparing for the annual VeiledProphet Ball, Tracy himself preoccupied with the appearance of someindividuals down from Chicago in Rashy pinstripe suits, two-tone shoesand snap-brim fedoras, all talking in accents staccato as a Thompson."Oh, do I need a good electronics man," Tracy moaned. «What doyou do with these wops? The whole shipment was bad, and now theywon't take it back. If I step out of line, they'll murder me. They'll rapeMabel, they'll go back to Princeton some dark night a-and castrate mykid! You know what I think it is, Lyle? A plot!"Vendettas, jeweled gauntlets, subtle poisons come infiltrating thiswell-mannered parlor with the picture of Herbert Hoover on the piano,the pinks in the Nieman-Marcus bowl, the Bauhaus-style furniture likealabaster slabs of a model city (you expect little HO trains to comewhirring out from under the davenport, cans 'n' reefers on and on

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across the carpet's ash-colored lowland ... ). Alfonso Tracy's long
face, creased either side of the nose and on around the mustache line,

dragged down by worries, thirty years without a genuine smile ("Even
Laurel & Hardy doesn't work for me any more!"), morose with fright in
his easy chair. How could Lyle Bland not be touched?

"Got just the fella," sez he, touching Tracy's arm, compassionate.
Al­

ways good to have an engineer on tap. This one did some just top-notch
electronic-surveillance designs once for the then-fledgling FBI, on a
contract the Bland Institute landed a few years ago and subbed part of

out to Siemens over there in Germany. "Have him in tomorrow on the

Silver Streak. No problem, AI."
"Come on out and have a look," sighs Tracy. They hop in the Pack­

ard and drive out to the green little river town of Mouthorgan, Missouri,
which is a railroad station, a tanning factory, a few frame houses, and

dominating the area a gigantic Masonic hall, not a window on
the whole

massive monolith.

After a lot of rigmarole at the door, Bland is finally allowed in and led

through velvet poolrooms, elaborate polished-wood gambling setups,
chrome bars, soft bedrooms, on to a large warehouse section in back,
which is crammed ten high with more pinball machines than Bland's
ever seen in one place in his life, Oh Boys, Grand Slams, World Serieses,

Lucky Lindies as far as the eye can reach.
"And everyone is fucked up," sez melancholy Tracy. "Look at this."

It's a Folies-Bergeres: four-color lovelies doing the cancan all over it,
zeros happening to coincide with eyes, nipples, and cunts, one of your
racy-type games here, a little hostile toward the

ladies but all in fun!
"You got a nickel?" Chungg, boing there goes the ball just missing

a

high-scoring hole, hmm looks like a permanent warp there ahnnnggghk
knocks a flasher worth 1000 but only 50 lights up on the board-"You
see?" Tracy screams as the ball heads like a rock for the bottom,

outside

. chance get it with a flipper zong flipper flips the other fucking way,
and

the board lights up TILT.
"Tilt?" Bland scratching his head. "You didn't even-"

"They're all like that," Tracy watering with frustration.
"You try it."

The second ball isn't even out of the chute before Bland gets another

TILT, again without having applied any English. Third ball gets
stuck

somehow against a solenoid and (helphelp, it's hollering, wounded high
little voice, oh I'm being electrocuted ... ) dingdingding, gongs and

racing numbers up on the board, 400,000, 675,000 bong a
million! great­

est Folies-Bergeres score in history and climbing, the poor spherical soul

against the solenoid thrashing, clonic, horrible (yes they're
sentient all

583

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right, beings from the planetoid Katspiel, of veryvery elliptical orbit­which is to say it passed by Earth only once, a long time ago, nearlyback at the grainy crepuscular Edge, and nobody knows where Katspielis now or when, or if, it'll be back. It's that familiar division between re­turn and one-shot visitation. If Katspiel had enough energy to leave thesun's field forever, then it has left these kind round beings in eternalexile, with no chance of ever being gathered back home, doomed tomasquerade as ball bearings, as steelies in a thousand marble games-toknow the great thumbs of Keokuk and Puyallup, Oyster Bay, Ingle­wood-Danny D' Allesandro and Elmer Ferguson, Peewee Brennan andFlash Womack . . . where are they now? where do you think? they allgot drafted, some are dead on I wo, some gangrenous in the snow in theforest of Arden, and their thumbs, first rifle inspection in Basic, GI'd,driven deep back into childhood as little finger sweat-cams off M-1 op­erating handle, thumb pushing down follower still deep in breech, boltsshhOCK! whacks thumb oh shit yes it hurts and good-by to another un­beatable and legendary thumb, gone for good back to the summer dust,bags of chuckling glass, bigfooted basset hounds, smell of steel play­ground slides heating in the sun), well here come these cancan girlsnow, Folies-Bergeres maenads, moving in for the kill, big lipstick smilesaround blazing choppers, some Offenbach galop come jigging in nowout of the loudspeakers that are implicit in this machine's design, longgartered legs kicking out over the agony of this sad spherical permanentA WOL, all his companions in the chute vibrating their concern andlove, feeling his pain but helpless, inert without the spring, the hustler'shand, the drunk's masculinity problems, the vacuum hours of a gray capand an empty lunchbox, needing these to run their own patterns downthe towering coils, the deep holes with their promises of rest that onlykick you wobbling out again, always at the mercy of gravity, findingnow and then the infinitesimally shallow grooves of other runs, greatruns (twelve heroic minutes in Virginia Beach, Fourth of July, 1927, adrunken sailor whose ship went down at Leyte Gulf . . . flipped up offthe board, your first three-dimensional trip is always your best, whenyou came down again it wasn't the same, and every time you'd pass any­where near the micro-dimple you made when you fell, you'd get a rush... sobered, a few, having looked into the heart of the solenoid, seenthe magnetic serpent and energy in its nakedness, long enough to bechanged, to bring back from the writhing lines of force down in that pitan intimacy with power, with glazed badlands of soul, that set themapart forever-check out the portrait of Michael Faraday in the TateGallery in London, Tantivy Mucker-Maffick did once, to fill up a
584

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calorOi womanless and dreary afternoon, and wondered then how eyes of men
could grow so lambent, sinister, so educated among the halls of dread

and the invisible . . . ) but now the voices of the murder-witness co­

quettes grow shrill, with more of a blade's edge, the music changes key,
pitching higher and higher, the ruffled buttocks bumping backward
more violently, the skirts flipping redder and deeper each time, covering
more of the field, eddying to blood, to furnace finale, and how's the Kat­

spiel Kid gonna get out of this one?
Well, wouldn't you know it, just as things look worst, Providence

plants a short-statatatah! the lights go out leaving a diminishing red

glow on the shaven cheeks and chins of the two operators cringing be­
fore the girls' destroying kooch-dance, the solenoid jitters to silence, the
chrome ball, released, rolls traumatized back to the comfort of its

friends.

"They're all like this?"
"Oh, was I took," groans Alfonso Tracy.
"It comes and goes," consoles Bland, and here we get a reprise of

Gerhardt von Coll's "Bright Days for the Black Market," with allow­
ances made for time, place and color:

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There'll al-ways-be another dollar,
Any way it hap-pens!
If they catch ya nap-pin',
Wake up-With, the dew on the grass
'n' you can hand 'em their ass­

You can make another dollar,
Third eye up on that py-ra-mid,
Oh give a listen kid,
It's just winkin' at you, singin', "Piss on throughl"

There's a will, there's a way,
Doesn't happen, ev'ry day,
But if ya got-the-brains, those mid-night-trains
'11 never whistle your dreams away, hey-

Just flip another dollar,
Heads or tails it'll be all right,
You can lose the fight, but
That ever-levin' War goes on and on, ya know,

Just follow that dollar and vo-dee, o-do-dol

nwn

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All the baggy-pants outfielders, doughboys in khaki, cancan girls nowsedate, bathing beauties even more so, cowboys and cigar-store Indians,google-eyed Negroes, apple-cart urchins, lounge lizards and movie
queens, cardsharps, clowns, crosseyed lamppost drunks, flying aces, mo­torboat captains, white hunters on safari and Negroid apes, fat men,chefs in chefs' hats, Jewish usurers, XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comic­book cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars,midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swingbands, high-society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, taxidancers, In­dianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewedOlympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, alljoin in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pin­ball machines flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid tothem, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of thecoinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in itsplace in the complex ensemble.
Outside the temple, the organization reps from Chicago lurk, playmorra, drink Canadian blends out of silver hip-flasks, oil and clean .38sand generally carryon in their loathsome ethnic way, Popish inscrutabi­lity in every sharp crease and shadowy jowl. No way to tell if someplacein the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints telling exactlyhow all these pinball machines were rewired-a randomness deliber­ately simulated-or if it has happened at real random, preserving atleast our faith in Malfunction as still something beyond Their grasp . . .a faith that each machine, individually, has simply, in innocence, goneon the blink, after the thousands of roadhouse nights, end-of-the-worldWyoming thunderstorms that come straight down on your hatless head,truckstop amphetamines, tobacco smoke clawing at insides of eyelids,homicidal grabs after some way out of the year's never-slackening shit... have players forever strangers brought about, separately, alone,each of these bum machines? believe it: they've sweated, kicked, cried,smashed, lost their balance forever-a single Mobility you never heard,a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories haveblandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enoughto keep us from finding them again . . . but for the moment, throughthe elaborate theatrical foofooraw of Mob 'n' Masons, it has concen­trated here, in the back of the Mouthorgan temple, an elegant chaos tobend the ingenuity of Bland's bought expert, Silver-Streaking BertFibel.

Last we saw of Fibel he was hooking, stretching, and running shockcord for that Horst Achtfaden back in his gliding days, Fibel who stayed
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on the ground, and saw his friend on to Peenemiinde-saw
him on?

isn't that a slice of surplus paranoia there, not quite justified is it-well,
call it Toward a Case for Bland's Involvement with Achtfaden Too,

if

you want. Fibel worked for
Siemens back when it was still part of the

Stinnes trust. Along with his design work he also put in some time as
a

Stinnes intelligence agent. There are also still loyalties to Vereinigte
Stahlwerke in effect, though Fibel happens to be working now at the
General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It's in Bland's inter­

est to have an agent in the Berkshires, can you guess why? Yup! to keep
an eye on adolescent Tyrone Slothrop, is why. Nearly

ten years after the

original deal was closed, IG Farben is still finding it
easier to subcon­

tract the surveillance of young Tyrone back to Lyle Bland.
This stonefaced kraut Fibel is a genius with solenoids and switches.

How all this machinery got "out of the glue," as they say over there, is a
sinful waste of time even to think about-he dives into topologies and

color-codes, the odor of rosin flux goes seeping into the poolrooms and

saloons, a Schnipsel here and there, a muttered also or two, and
before

you know it he's got most of them working again.
You can bet there's a

lotta happy Masons in Mouthorgan, Missouri.
In return for his good deed, Lyle Bland, who couldn't care less, is

made a Mason. He finds good fellowship, all kinds of comforts designed
to remind him of his virility, and even a number of useful business con­

tacts. Beyond this, all is just as tight as that Business Advisory
Council.

Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about
What Goes On, though

now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling
back

again, leaving you with few details but a lot of
Awful Suspicions. Some

of the American Founding Fathers were Masons, for instance. There is
a

theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic
Masonic

plot under the ultimate control of the group known as
the Illuminati. It

is difficult to look for long at the strange Single eye crowning the pyra­
mid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the

story, a little. Too many anarchists
in rqth-century Europe-Bakunin,

Proudhon, Salverio Friscia-were Masons for it to be pure
chance. Lov­

ers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can
count on the Ma­

sons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails. One of the
best

of the classic Weird Mason Stories has Doctor Livingstone (living stone?

oh, yes) come wandering into a native village in, not
even the heart, but

the subconscious of Darkest Africa, a place, a tribe he's never seen be­

fore: fires in the silence, unfathomable stares, Livingstone ambles up to

the village chief and flashes him a Masonic high sign-the
chief recog­

nizes it, returns it, all smiles, and orders every fraternal hospitality
laid

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on for the white stranger. But recall that Dr. Livingstone, like Wernhervon Braun, was born close to the Spring Equinox, and so had to con­front the world from that most singular of the Zodiac's singularpoints. . . . Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteriescame from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows moreabout it than you'll ever find here.)
We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman:sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his con­trol-finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay's atomic clit, making ready totickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a finevapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of theircity on the Inland Sea. . . .

By the time Bland joined up, the Masons had long, long degeneratedinto just another businessmen's club. A real shame. Business of all kinds,over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense-receptors and areas ofthe human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present­day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow
mummery. Not for all of them, though. Now and then you found athrowback. Lyle Bland happened to be one.

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back inthose days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used forspectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power,it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have beenmore or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through thegrim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, thoughlatent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.Bland found himself coming home to Beacon Hill after meetings lateat night, unable to sleep. He would lie down in his study on the daven­port, not thinking about anything in particular, and come back with ajolt, his heart pounding terribly, knowing he'd just been somewhere, butunable to account for the passage of time. The old American Empireclock beat in the resonant hallway. The Girandole mirror, passed on bygenerations of Blands, gathered images in its quicksilver pool that Lylecouldn't bring himself to face. In another room his wife, varicose and re-
I

Cligious, groaned in her sleep. What was happening to him? 0Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed davenport, n'Wall Street Journal with nothing in it he didn't already know, Lyle
.

nBland rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where hewas and gaahh! whoosh back in again. He lay there, more terrified thanhe'd ever been, even at Belleau Wood-not so much because he'd lefthis body, but because he knew that this was only a first step. The next co



Wernnt
d to c�

step would be to roll over in mid-air and
look back. Old magic had

found him. He was off on a journey. He knew he couldn't keep from

going on with it.
It took him a month or two before he could make the turn. When it

happened, he felt it as a turn not so much in space as in his
own history.

Irreversible. The Bland who came back to rejoin the inert white con­

tainer he'd seen belly-up on the sofa, thousands of years beneath him,
had changed forever.

Before very long, he was spending most of his time on that davenport,
and hardly any at all down on State Street. His wife, who never ques­
tioned anything, moved vaguely through the rooms, discussing only
household affairs, sometimes getting an answer if Bland happened to be

inside his body, but most often not. Odd-looking people began to
show

up at the door, without phoning. Creeps, foreigners
with tinted, oily

skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or-worse­
with Strange Faraway Smiles. She let them in the house,

all of them,

and the study doors were closed gently behind them, in her
face. She

could hear nothing but a murmur of voices, in what she guessed to
be

some foreign tongue. They were instructing her husband
in techniques

of voyage.
There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys

taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes,
to the final walls of ice. Our judgment lapsed, fatally: we paid more at­
tention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned-and worse,

we

named what they did "success," though they failed. Because they
came

back, back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John
Franklin and Salomon Andree: mourned their cairns and bones, and

missed among the poor frozen rubbish
the announcements of their vic­

tory. By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy,
we

had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.
What did Andree find in the polar silence: what should we have

heard?

Bland, still an apprentice, hadn't yet shaken off his fondness for
hallu­

cinating. He knows where he is when he's there,
but when he comes

back, he imagines that he has been journeying underneath history:
that

history is Earth's mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers
of

history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth's body.
The foreign­

ers sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive films of
sebum on

everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly
im­

patient with what they feel are the tastes of a
loafer and vulgarian. He

comes back raving about the presences he has found out there,
mem-

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bers of an astral IG, whose mlSSIOn-as indeed Rathenau impliedthrough the medium of Peter Sachsa-is past secular good and evil: dis­tinctions like that are meaningless out there. . . .
"Yess, yess," all staring at him, "but then why keep saying 'mind andbody'? Why make that distinction?"
Because it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a liv­ing critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to finda body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theoryhe must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of won­der, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he mustsoon let it go. . . . To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is reallysomething eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody . . . hav­ing hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered,packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken upagain by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on hisvoyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to everylast permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still findingnew molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new syn­thetics- "Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shellsof the dead, you must not waste your time with them. . . ."The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside ofEarth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to de­tect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith inKute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken fromEarth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary andnamed, over here-kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding ineach Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together liketerms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secretFunction whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spo­ken . . . plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoobottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appli­ance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization,meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangula­tion, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert . . . but to bring themtogether, in their slick persistence and our preterition ... to makesense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replica­tion, so much waste. . . .

Lucky Bland, to be free of it. One night he called his whole family to­gether around the davenport in the study. Lyle, [r, came in from Hous­ton, shivering with first-stage grippe from contact with a world whereair-conditioning is not so essential to life. Clara drove down from Ben-

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nington and Buddy rode the MTA in from Cambridge.
"As you know,"

Bland announced, "I have been taking these little trips lately." He was

wearing a simple white smock, and holding a red rose. He
looked un­

earthly, all were later to agree: his skin and eyes had a clarity
which is

seldom encountered, except on certain spring days, at certain latitudes,

just before sunrise. "I have found," he continued,
"that each time out, 1

have been traveling farther and farther. Tonight, 1 am going out for

good. That is, 1 am not coming back. So 1 wanted to say good-by
to you

all, and let you know that you'll be provided for." He'd been to see his
friend Coolidge ("Hot") Short, of the State Street law firm of Salitieri,
Poore, Nash, De Brutus, and Short, and made sure all the family fi­
nances were in perfect order. "I want you to know that 1 love you all.
I'd stay here if 1 could, but 1 have to go. 1 hope you can

understand."

One by one, his family came up to say good-by. Hugs, kisses,
hand­

shakes done, Bland sank back into that davenport's last embrace, closed

his eyes with a dim smile. . . . After
a bit he felt himself beginning to

rise. Those watching disagreed about the exact moment. Around 9:30

Buddy left to see The Bride of Frankenstein, and Mrs. Bland
covered

the serene face with a dusty chintz drape she'd received from a cousin
who had never understood her taste.

'minQ�

D D D D D D D

A Windy night. The lids of GI cans blow clanging across the parade
ground. Sentries in their idleness are practicing Queen

Anne salutes.

Sometimes gusts of wind come that rock the jeeps on their springs,
even

the empty deuce 'n' a halfs and civilian bobtail rigs-shock
absorbers

groan, deeply, in discomfort ... in the peaks of wind, living pine
trees

move, lined above the last sand dropoff into the North Sea....

Walking at a brisk pace, but out of step, across the lorry-scarred
Vlkll spaces of the old Krupp works here, Doctors Muffage and Spontoon

�/lw· look anything but conspiratorial. You take them immediately
for what

�em they seem: a tiny beachhead of London respectability here in benighted
Cuxhaven-tourists in this semicivilized colony of sulfa shaken into the
wells of blood, syrettes and tourniquets, junkie M.O.s and sadistic corps­
men, a colony they were spared for the Duration, thank heaven,

Muf­

fage's brother being highly placed in a certain Ministry, Spontoon
hav­

ing been technically disqualified because of a strange hysterical stigma,
shaped like the ace of spades and nearly the same color,

which would

appear on his left cheek at
moments of high stress, accompanied by se-

591



vere migraine. Only a few months ago they felt themselves as fully mo­bilized as any British civilian, and thus amenable to most Government
requests. About the present mission, though, both now are deep inpeacetime second thoughts. How quickly history passes these days."I can't think why he asked us," Muffage stroking his full Imperial (agesture that manages only to look compulsive), speaking in a voice per­haps too melodious for a man of his mass, "he must know I haven't done
one of these since '27."

"I assisted at a few whilst I was interning," Spontoon recalls. "That
was during the great vogue they had at mental institutions, you know.""I can name you a few National Institutions where it's still in vogue."The medicos share a chuckle, full of that British Weltschmerz that looks
so uncomfortable on the faces of the afflicted. "See here, then, Spon­toon, you'd rather assist me, is that it?"

"Oh, either way you know. I mean it's not as if there'll be some chapwith a book standing there, you know, writing it all down.""I wouldn't be too sure. Weren't you listening? Didn't you noticeanything ...
"

"Enthusiastic."
"Obsessional. I wonder if Pointsman isn't losing his grip," soundinghere remarkably like James Mason: "L(h)oo-ssing(?) hiss khrip."They are looking at each other now, separate night scapes of Marstonshelters and parked vehicles flowing darkly by together behind eachface. The wind carries smells of brine, of beach, of petrol. A distantradio tuned to the General Forces Programme features Sandy MacPher­son at the Organ.

"Oh, all of us . . ." Spontoon begins, but lets it lapse."Here we are."
The bright office is hung with crimson-lipped, sausage-limbed PettyGirl pin-ups. A coffee mess hisses in the corner. There's also a smell ofrancid shoe-dubbing. A corporal sits with his feet on a desk, absorbed inan American Bugs Bunny comic book.
"Slothrop," in answer to Muffage's inquiry, "yes yes the Yank in the,the pig suit. Well, he's in and out all the time. Completely dotty. Whatare you lot then, M.l. 6 or something?""Can't discuss it," raps Spontoon. Fancies himself a bit of a NaylandSmith, Spontoon does. "D'you know where we might find a GeneralWivern?"
"This time of night? Down at the alcohol dump, most likely. Followth� tr��ks, head for all the noise. If I weren't on duty, I'd be therem self.

.m

fr

�ex
forti

592



"Pig suit," frowns Muffage.
"Big bloody pig suit, yellow, pink, and blue,

on my oath," replies the

corporal. "You'll know him when you see him.
You wouldn't have a cig­

arette, one of you gentlemen, by any chance."
Sounds of carousing reach them as they trudge along the tracks, past

empty triple flats and tank cars. "Alcohol dump."
"Fuel for their Nazi rockets, I'm told. If they ever get one in working

order."
Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of

Army personnel, American sailors, NAAFI girls,
and German frauleins,

Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully,
amid noise which be­

comes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge of the gathering,
a

song, at whose center,
with a good snootful, each arm circling a smiling

and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone
an ap­

oplectic mauve, and leading the glee, is the
same General Wivern they

last saw in Pointsman's office back at Twelfth
House. From a tank car

whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark
white

stenciling along the side, spigots protrude
here and there, under which

an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots,
wastebas­

kets, and other containers are being advanced and
withdrawn. Ukuleles,

kazoos, harmonicas, and any number of
makeshift metal noisemakers

accompany the song, which is
an innocent salute to Postwar, a hope

that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near:

It's­

Mouthtrip-ping time!

Mouthtrip-ping time!
Time to open up that icebox

door­

Oh yes it's

Mouthtrip-ping time,
Mouthtrip-ping time,
And once you've eaten some, you'll come, for more!

Ah, mouthtrip-ping time,
Mouthtrip-ping time!
It's something old, but also very new-w-w­
Life's so sublime,
In mouthtrip-ping time-
We hope you're all mouthtrip-ping, toooooo!

Fo��
WI): Next chorus is

soldiers 'n' sailors all together for the first eight bars, girls
for the second, General Wivern singing the next eight solo, and tutti to

593



finish it up. Then comes a chorus for ukuleles and kazoos and so onwhile everyone dances, black neckerchiefs whipping about like themustaches of epileptic villains, delicate snoods unloosening to allowstray locks of hair to escape their tight rolls, skirt-hems raised to expose£lashing knees and slips edged in prewar Cluny lace a frail Right ofsmoky bat-wings here under the white electricity ... on the final cho­rus the boys circle clockwise, girls anticlockwise, the ensemble openingout into a rose-pattern, from the middle of which dissipatedly leeringtosspot General Wivern, tankard aloft, is hoisted briefly, like an erectstamen.
About the only one not participating here, aside from the two prowl­ing surgeons, is Seaman Bodine, whom we left, you recall, carrying on inthe bathtub at Same Bummer's place back in Berlin. Impeccable to­night in dress whites, straight-faced a .. �j sober, he trudges among themerrymakers, thickly sprouting hair from jumper sleeves and V -neck, somuch of it that last week he spooked and lost a connection just in fromthe CBI theatre with close to a ton of bhang, who mistook him for aseagoing version of the legendary yeti or abominable snowman. Tomake up some of what he blew on that one, Bodine is tonight promotingthe First International Runcible Spoon Fight, between his shipmateAvery PurRe and an English Commando named St. John Bladdery."Place yer bets, yes yes the odds are even, 50/50," announces suavecroupier Bodine, pushing through the gathered bodies, many of themfar from upright, one shaggy hand clutching a wad of occupation scrip.With the other, from time to time, he will tug the big collar of hisjumper around and blow his nose on it, grommets on the hem of his T­shirt blinking, light bulbs dancing overhead in the wind he's raised, hisown several shadows thrashing in all directions and merg{ng with oth­ers.

"Greetings, gate, need an opiate?" Tiny red eyes in a vast pink [ell-oof a face, and an avaricious smile. It is Albert Krypton, corpsman strikerof the U.S.S. John E. Badass, who now produces from inside a secretjumper pocket a glass vial full of white tablets. "Codeine, Jackson, it'sbeautiful-here. "
Bodine sneezes violently and wipes the snot away with his sleeve."Not for any fucking cold, Krypton. Thanks. You seen Avery?""He's in great shape. He was getting in some last-minute practicedown the goat hole when I came over."
"Listen, old buddy," begins the enterprising tar. This decrypts into 3ounces of cocaine. Bodine comes up with a few squashed notes. "Mid-

��ao
"I

\Jlin�
i "G

"In
I

"Fi
where

Tne

rn�nt)
"Lo

morne

fureeo
�la N
�ottles
ij�nt.

I
lone

"�ea
594



nd � night, if you can. Told him I'd see him out at Putzi's
after the fight."

lfre' "Solid. Hey, you checked under the barracks lately?" Seems the CBI
to � returnees get together to play marbles with opium balls. You can pick

toelp up hundreds if you're any good. Corpsman Krypton pockets his moneyI �iaiji and leaves Bodine flexing his thumb and thinking about it, moves on
nn�� copping feels, pausing to drink from a shell case of grain alcohol

and

eO�lli grapefruit juice, whilst dealing the odd tablet of codeine. He has
a brief

1:'lef� paranoid episode as two red-hatted MPs show up, stroking their billy
ane, clubs and giving him, he fancies, pregnant looks. He slides into

the

night, peeling away, banking through dark sky. He is coming
on to a

\O�r. proprietary mixture known as the Krypton Blue, and so it
is a giddy pas­

fu�IX sage to the dispensary, not without moments of deep
inattention.

caole' Inside, his connection, Pharmacist Birdbury, is conducting the last
act of La Forza del Destino crackling in from Radio Luxembourg, and

singing along. His mouth snaps shut as Krypton comes taxiing
in. With

him is what appears to be a gigantic, multicolored pig, the plush nap of
its coat reversed here and there, which widens the possible range of col­
ors. "Micrograms," Krypton striking his head dramatically, "that's right,
micrograms, not milligrams. Birdbury, gimme something, I've

OD'd."

"Ssh.
»

The dispenser's high forehead wrinkling in and out of operati­
cal cross-furrows. Krypton goes back in among the shelves, and watches

the lighted room through a bottle of paregoric till the opera's
over.

Comes back in time to hear the pig asking, "Well where else would he
head for?"

"I got it third-hand," Birdbury laying down the hypodermic
he's been

using as a baton. "Ask Krypton here, he gets around a bit."

"Greetings, gate," sez Albert, "let's inoculate."
"I hear Springer is supposed to be coming in tonight."
"First I've heard. But go on out to Putzi's, why don't you. That's

where all that sort of thing goes on."
The pig looks up at a clock on the wall. "Got a funny schedule

to­

night, is all."
"Look here, Krypton, there's a bigwig from SPOG due in here any

moment, so whatever it was, you know....
"

They haggle over the
three ounces of cocaine, the pig politely withdrawing to leaf through an
old News of the World. Presently, taping the last of the crystal-stuffed
bottles to his bare leg, Krypton invites everyone to the runcible spoon
fight. "Bodine's holding some big money, folks in from all over

the

rei,

Zone-"
"Seaman Bodine?" inquires the amazed plush pig.

595



"The king of Cuxhaven, Porky."
"Well I ran him an errand once in Berlin. Tell him Rocketman sezhowdy."
Krypton, bellbottom pulled up, opening one bottle just to see what hehas, pauses, goggling. "You mean that hash?"
"Yup."
Krypton snuffs a big fingerful of the flaky white into nostrils right 'n'left. The world goes clarifying. Bitter snot begins to form in a stubbornfist at the back of his throat. Already the Potsdam Pickup is part of thefolklore of the Zone. Would this pig here be trying to cash in on theglory of Rocketman (whose existence Krypton has never been that sureof)? Cocaine suspicions, cringing and mean as rats . . . shining bottlesof a thousand colors, voices from the radio, the drape ar.d hand of thepig's shag coat as Krypton reaches out to stroke . . . no, it's clear thatthe pig isn't looking for anything, isn't a cop, isn't dealing, or about tohustle anybody. . . . "Just wanted to see how it felt, you know," sezKrypton.

"Sure." Now the doorway is suddenly full of red hats, leather andbrass. Krypton stands very still, the top to the open cocaine bottle inone hand.
"Slothrop?" sergeant in command comes edging into the room, handresting on his sidearm. The pig looks over at Birdbury, who's shaking hishead no, not me, as if he means it.
"Wasn't me, either," Krypton feels he ought to mention."Well somebody blew the whistle," the pig mutters, looking really ID�hurt.

. 1"Stand by," whispers Albert. To the MP: "Excuse me," moseyingstraight over to the wall switch, which he flicks off, Slothrop at once �ndashing through all the shouting past Birdbury's desk wham into a tall torrack of medicines his straw stomach bounces him off of, but which thenfalls over on somebody else with a stupendous glass crash and scream- �r,on down a pitchblack aisle, arms out to guide him, to the back exit,where he meets Krypton.
"I"Thanks."

"Quick."
nere,Outside they cut eastward, toward the Elbe and the docks, pounding palong, skidding in mudpuddles, stumbling over lorry-ruts, wind sweep- m�ing among the Quonsets to bat them in the face, cocaine falling in little 1 ue�'white splashes from underneath Krypton's left bellbottom. Behind them Ownthe posse are hollering and shining flashlights, but don't seem to know reeowhere they've gone. Good. "Follow the yellow-brick road," hums AI- neso596



cketmau
bert Krypton, on pitch, "follow the yellow-brick road," what's this, is he

actually, yes he's skipping. . . .
.

Presently, out of breath, they arrive at the pier where the Badass and
its division, four haze-gray piglets, are tied up, to find the runcible

spoon fight just under way at the center of a weaving, cheering
crowd of

civilian and military drunks. Stringy Avery Purfle, sideburns slick as
seal's fur in the pallid light, Adam's apple working in and out at a nerv­
ous four or five cycles a minute, shuffles around his opponent, the serene
and oxlike St. John Bladdery, both with runcible spoons in the on-guard
position, filed edges bright.

Krypton stashes Slothrop in a garbage bin and goes looking for
Sea­

man Bodine. After a number of short, glittering feints, Purfle dodges in,

quick as a fighting-cock. With a high slash that Bladdery tries to parry
in third, Purfle rips through the Commando's blouse and draws blood .
But when he goes to jump back, it seems thoughtful Bladdery has

brought his combat boot down on the American's low dress shoe,
nail­

ing him where he stands.
Promotor Bodine and his two combatants are burning crystals of

awareness in this poisoned gray gathering: a good half of the crowd are
out in the foothills of unconsciousness, and the rest are not exactly sure
what's going on. Some think that Purfle and Bladdery are really mad at
each other. Others feel that it is meant to be comedy, and they will

laugh at inappropriate moments. Now and then the odd beady eyes
will

appear up in the night superstructures of the warships, staring,
star­

ing....
Purfle and Bladdery have made simultaneous thrusts and are now

corps d corps-with a scrape and clank the runcible spoons
are locked,

and elbows tense and set. The outcome rests with scrawny Purfle's gift
for trickery, since Bladdery appears ready to hold the position all night.

"Rocketman's here," Krypton tugging at Bodine's damp wrinkled col-

lar, "in a pig suit."
"Not now, man. You got the, ah-"
"But but the heat's after him, Bodine, where can we hide him?"

"Who cares, it's some asshole, is all. A fake. Rocketman wouldn't be

here."
Purfle yanks his runcible-spoon hand back, leaning to the side, twist­

ing his own weapon to keep its tines interlocked with those
of Blad­

dery's, pulling the commando off-balance long enough to
release his

own foot, then deftly unlinking the spoons and dancing away. Bladdery
recovers his footing and moves heavily in pursuit, probing in with a se­
ries of jabs then shifting the spoon to his other hand and surprising

. or aoo�
�ow,"

mo�\;

�re,.

acKlf

597



Purfle with a slash that grazes the sailor's neck, missing the jugular, butnot by much. Blood drips into the white jumper, black under these arc­lights. Sweat and cold shadows lie darkly in the men's armpits. Purtle,made reckless by the pain, goes flying at Bladdery, a flurry of blind wildpokes and hackings, Bladdery hardly needing to move his feet, weavingfrom the knees up like a great assured pudding, finally able to grabPurtle's spoon hand at the wrist and twirl him about, like jitterbugging agirl, around in front of him, his own knife-edge now up and bisectingPurfle's Adam's apple, ready to slice in. He looks up, around, wheezing,sweaty, seeking some locus of power that will thumb-signal him what todo.
Nothing: only sleep, vomiting, shivering, a ghost and flowered odor ofethanol, solid Bodine counting his money. Nobody really watching. Itthen comes to Bladdery and Purfle at once, tuned tv one another at thefiled edge of this runcible spoon and the negligible effort it will take tofill their common world with death, that nobody said anything about afight to the finish, right? that each will get part of the purse whoeverwins, and so the sensible course is to break it up now, jointly to go hassleBodine, and find some Band-Aids and iodine. And still they linger intheir embrace, Death in all its potency humming them romantic tunes,chiding them for moderate little men . . . So far and no farther, is thatit? You call that living?

An MP car, horn and siren and lights all going, approaches. Reluc­tantly, Purfle and Bladdery do relax, and, sighing out of puffed cheeks,part. Bodine, ten feet away, tosses over the heads of the awakeningcrowd a fat packet of scrip which the Commando catches, riffle-splits,and gives half of to Purfle, who's already on route to the gangplank ofhis gray mother the fohn E. Badass, where the quarterdeck watch arelooking more lively, and even a card game in the ship's laundry breakingup so everybody can go watch the big bust. Drunkards ashore begin tomill, sluggish and with no sense of direction. From beyond the pale of riielectric light comes a rush of girls, shivering, aroused, berufHed, towitch St. John Bladdery away under cover of pretty-pastel synthetics illand amorous squeals. Bodine and Krypton, hipwriggling and cursing Cotheir way through the crowd, stumbling over wakers and sleepers, stop �ruby the dumpster to collect Slothrop, who rises from a pile of eggshells, Crbeer cans, horrible chicken parts in yellow gravy, coffee grounds and �Iowaste paper spilling or clattering off of him, raises his mask, and smiles • nulhowdy at Bodine.
"Rocketman, holy shit, it really is. What's happening, 01' buddy?" al�"Been double-crossed, need a ride to Putzi' s." Lorries have been

598



showing up, into whose canvas shadows MPs are beginning
to load

everybody slower-moving than they are. Now two civilians, one
with a

beard, come charging down the pier, hollering, "A pig suit, a pig suit,
there, look," and, "You-Slothrop-stay where you are."

Not about to, Slothrop with a great clank and crunch rolls out of the

garbage and at a dead run follows Bodine and Krypton,
chickenfat

flowing away, eggshells flying off behind him. A Red Cross
Clubmobile

or canteen truck is parked down at the next nest of destroyers, its light
spilling neatly square on the asphalt, a pretty girl with a Deanna

Durbin

hairdo framed inside against stacks of candy bars, cigarettes, chock­

shaped sandwiches in waxed paper.
"Coffee, boys?" she smiles, "how about some sandwiches? We're sold

out of everything tonight but ham," then seeing Slothrop, "oh, dear, I'm

sorry....
"

"Keys to the truck," Bodine coming up with a Cagney
sneer and

nickel-plated handgun, "c'mon," cocking the hammer.

Tough frown, shoulderpadded shrug. "In the ignition, Jackson."
Al­

bert Krypton climbs in the back to keep her company while Slothrop
and Bodine jump in front and get under way in a tight, screeching U­
turn just as the two civilians come running up.

"Now who th' hell's zat," Slothrop looking back out the window at
their shouting shapes diminishing, "did you check that one bird with

the

ace of spades on his cheek?"
Bodine swerves past the disturbance around the John E.

Badass and

aW�f� gives everybody the obligatory finger. Slothrop slouches
back in the

rime,�: seat, putting the pig mask up like a knight's beaver, reaching
over to pry

an�la!i a pack of cigarettes out of Bodine's jumper pocket, lighting
one up,

'walt!, weary, wishing he could just sleep.... In back of him suddenly
the

'Dr�t Red Cross girl shrieks, "My God, what's that?"
"Look," Krypton patiently, "you get some on the end of your finger,

right, then you close off one half of your nose, a-and-"
"It's cocaine!" the girl's voice rising to an alarming intensity, "is what

it is! It's heroin! You're dope fiends! and you've kidnapped me! Oh, my
God! This is a, don't you realize, it's a Red Cross Clubmobile!

It's the

property of the Red Cross! Oh, you can't do
this! I'm with the Red

Cross! Oh, help me, somebody! They're dope fiends! Oh, please! Help!
Stop and let me out! Take the truck if you want, take everything

in it,

but oh please don't-"
"Steer a minute," Bodine turning around and pointing his shiny pistol

at the girl.
l'e!t "You can't shoot me,"

she screams, "you hoodlum, who do you think

599



you are, hijacking Red Cross property! Why don't you just-go some­where and-sniff your dope and-leave us alone!"
"Cunt," advises Seaman Bodine, in a calm and reasonable tone, "youare wrong. I can shoot you. Right? Now, you happen to be working forthe same warm and wonderful organization that was charging fifteencents for coffee and doughnuts, at the Battle of the fucking Bulge, if youreally wanna get into who is stealing what from who."
"Whom," she replies in a much smaller voice, lower lip quiveringkind of cute and bitchy it seems to Slothrop, checking it out in the rear­view mirror as Bodine takes over the wheel again."Oho, what's this," Krypton watching her ass, "what have we here,"shifting under its khaki skirt as she stands with long legs braced for theirrattling creaking 60 or 70 miles an hour and Bodine's strange corneringtechniques, which look to be some stylized form of suicide."What's your name?" Slothrop smiling, an avuncular pig."Shirley."

"Tyrone. Howdy."
"Tra-la-la," Krypton now looting the cash register, gobbling Hersheybars and stuffing his socks with packs of smokes, "love in bloom." Aboutthen Bodine slams on the brakes and goes into a great skid, ass end oftheir truck slewing toward an icy-lit tableau of sentries in white-sten­ciled helmet liners, white belts, white holsters, a barricade across theroad, an officer running toward a jeep hunched up and hollering into awalkie- talkie.

"Roadblock? What the shit," Bodine grinding it into reverse, variousgoodies for the troops crashing off of their shelves as the truck lurchesaround. Shirley loses her footing and staggers forward, Krypton grab­bing for her as Slothrop leans to take the handgun off the dashboard,finding her half-draped over the front seat when he gets back around tothe window. "Where the fuck is low now? What is it, a Red Crossgearbox, you got to put a nickel in someplace to get it in gear, hey Shir­ley?"
"Oh, goodness," Shirley squirming over into the front between them,grabbing the shift, "like this, you drip." Gunshots behind them."Thank you," sez Bodine, and, leaving rubber in a pungent smokingshriek, they're off again.
"You're really hot, Rocketman, wow," Krypton lying in back offeringankle and taped cocaine bottle to Shirley with a smile."Do tell."
"No thanks," sez Shirley. "I'd really better not.""C'rnon . . . aw . . ."

600

-

�
�

.

__--



-go� "Were those snowdrops back there?" Slothrop squinting into the

lampshine ahead, "GIs? What're GIs doing here in the British sector, do

you know?"

"Maybe not," Bodine guesses, "maybe only Shore Patrol, c'mon, let's
not get any more paranoid than we have to....

"

"Look, see, I'm doing (snuff) it and I'm not growing (snuff) fangs or

anything....
"

"Well, I just don't know," Shirley kneeling backwards, breasts

propped on the back of the seat, one big smooth country-girl hand on
Slothrop's shoulder for balance.

"Look," Bodine sez, "is it currency, or dope, or what? I just like to
know what to expect, cause if the heat's on-"

"Only on me, far as I know. This is nothing to do with dealing, it's a
whole different drill."

"She's the rose of no-man's laaaand," sings Albert Krypton, coaxing.
"Why you going to Putzi's?"
"Got to see that Springer."
"Didn't know he was coming in."

"Why does everybody keep saying that?"
"Rebebber, dow," Shirley talking with only one nostril here, "dot too

buch, Albert, just a teensy bit."

"Just that nobody's seen him for a while."
"Be inhaling now, good, good, O.K., now. Umm, there's a little still,

uh, kind of a booger that's blocking it . . . do it again, right. Now the
other one."

"Albert, you said only one."
"Look, Rocky, if you do get busted-"
"Don't want to think."

"[eepers," sez Shirley.
"You like that? Here, just do a little more."
"What'd you do?"

"Nothing. Wanted to talk to somebody at that SPOG. Find out what
was happening. We were just supposed to talk, you know, off the rec­
ord, tonight in the dispensary. Neutral ground. Instead The Man shows

up. Now there are also these other two creeps
in civvies."

"You a spy, or something?"
"Wish I was even that. Oh boy. I should've known better."
"Well it sounds pretty bad." And Seaman Bodine drives along not lik­

ing it much, brooding, growing sentimental. "Say," presently, "if they
do, well, catch up with you, I could get in touch with your Mom, or

something.
"

a('f�t

nn�lli:

601



"My-" A sharp look. "No, no, no
"Well, somebody."
"Can't think of a soul."
"Wow, Rocketman.... "
Putzi's turns out to be a sprawling, half-fortified manor house datingfrom the last century, off the Dorum road and seaward down a sandypair of wheel-tracks with reeds and tough dune grass growing in be­tween, the house perched like a raft atop a giant comber of a sandhillthat sweeps upward from a beach whose grade is so subtle that it be­comes water only by surprise, tranquil, salt-pale, stretching miles intothe North Sea like clouds, here and there more silver, long cell or skinshapes, tissue-thin, stilled under the moon, reaching out toward Helgo­land.

The place never got requisitioned. Nobody has ever seen the owner,or even knows if "Putzi" is anybody real. Bodine drives the truck righton into what used to be the stable and they all get out, Shirley hoorah­ing in the moonlight, Krypton mumbling oboy, oboy through bigmouthfuls of that frau bait. There is some password and security hassleat the door, on account of the pig getup, but Slothrop flashes his whiteplastic knight and that works. Inside they find a brightly lit and busycombination bar, opium den, cabaret, casino and house of ill repute, allits rooms swarming with soldiers, sailors, dames, tricks, winners, losers,conjurors, dealers, dopers, voyeurs, homosexuals, fetishists, spies andfolks just looking for company, all talking, singing or raising hell at anoise level the house's silent walls seal off completely from the outside.Perfume, smoke, alcohol, and sweat glide through the house in turbu­lences too gentle to feel or see. It's a floating celebration no one'sthought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gatheringnewcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which vic-tory? which war?
Ie�Springer is nowhere in sight, and from what Slothrop can gather from a�(random questioning won't be by till later, if at all. Now this happens to · fu�be the very delivery date for that discharge they arranged sailing in with IanFrau Gnahb to Stralsund. And tonight, of all nights, after a week of not �Ibothering him, the police decide to come after Slothrop. Oh yes, yes in- Iondeed NNNNNNNN Good Evening Tyrone Slothrop We Have Been uriWaiting For You. Of Course We Are Here. You Didn't Think We Had \allJust Faded Away, No, No Tyrone, We Must Hurt You Again If You Are t fuGoing To Be That Stupid, Hurt You Again And Again Yes Tyrone You De'Are So Hopeless So Stupid And Doomed. Are You Really Supposed To �ISFind Anything? What If It Is Death Tyrone? What If We Don't Want Knl

602



You To Find Anything? If We Don't Want To Give You Your Discharge
You'll Just Go On Like This Forever Won't You? Maybe We Want You

Only To Keep On. You Don't Know Do You Tyrone. What Makes
You

Think You Can Play As Well As We Can? You Can't. You Think You're
Good But You're Really Shit And We All Know It. That Is In Your Dos­
sier. (Laughter. Humming.)

Bodine finds him sitting inside a coat closet, chewing on a velvet ear
of his mask. "You look bad, Rocky. This is Solange. She's a masseuse."
She is smiling, quizzical, a child brought to visit the weird pig in his
cave.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
"Let me take you down to the baths," the woman's voice a soapy

sponge already caressing at his troubles, "it's very quiet, restful.
. . ."

"I'll be around all night," Bodine sez. "I'll tell you if Springer shows."
"This is some kind of a plot, right?" Slothrop sucking saliva from vel­

vet pile.
"Everything is some kind of a plot, man," Bodine laughing.
"And yes but, the arrows are pointing all different ways," Solange

il­

lustrating with a dance of hands, red-pointed fingervectors.
Which is

Slothrop's first news, out loud, that the Zone can sustain many
other

plots besides those polarized upon himself . . . that these are
the els

and busses of an enormous transit system here in the Raketenstadt,

more tangled even than Boston's-and that by riding each branch the

proper distance, knowing when to transfer, keeping some state of
mini­

mum grace though it might often look like he's headed the wrong way,
this network of all plots may yet carry him to freedom. He understands
that he should not be so paranoid of either Bodine or Solange, but ride
instead their kind underground awhile, see where it takes him....

Solange leads Slothrop off to the baths, and Bodine continues
to

search for his customer, 2% bottles of cocaine clinking and clammy
against his bare stomach under his skivvy shirt. The Major isn't at any

of

the poker or crap games, nor attending the floor show wherein one Y0-
lande, blonde and shining all over with baby oil, dances table to table

picking up florin pieces and sovereigns, often hot from the
flame of

some joker's Zippo, between the prehensile lips of her cunt-nor is
he

drinking, nor, according to Monika, Putzi's genial, cigar-smoking,
mate­

lasse-suited madame, is he screwing. He hasn't even been by to hassle
the piano player for "San Antonio Rose." It takes Bodine half an

hour

before colliding with the man finally, reeling out the swinging doors of a

pissoir, groggy from a confrontation with the notorious Eisenkrote,
known throughout the Zone as the ultimate test of manhood, before

603



which bemedaled and brevetted Krautkillers, as well as the baddest
shit-on-my-dick-or-blood-on-my-blade escapees from the grossest ofZonal stockades, all have been known to shrink, swoon, chicken out,and on occasion vomit, yes right where they stood. For it is indeed anIron Toad, faithfully rendered, thousand-warted and some say faintlysmiling, a foot long at its longest, lurking at the bottom of a rank shit­stained toilet and hooked up to the European Grid through a rheostatcontrol rigged to deliver varying though not lethal surges of voltage andcurrent. No one knows who sits behind the secret rheostat (some say it'sthe half-mythical Putzi himself), or if it isn't in fact hooked up to an au­tomatic timer, for not everybody gets caught, really-you can piss onthe Toad without anything at all happening. But you just never know.Often enough to matter, the current will be there-piranha-raid andsalmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladderof salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground,the great, the planetary pool of electrons making you one with your pro­totype, the legendary poor drunk, too drunk to know anything, pissingon some long-ago third rail and fulminated to charcoal, to epilepticnight, his scream not even his own but the electricity's, the amps speak­ing through his already shattering vessel, shattered too soon for themeven to begin to say it, voice their terrible release from silence, nobodylistening anyhow, some watchman poking down the track, some oldman unable to sleep out for a walk, some city drifter on a bench under amillion June bugs in green nimbus around the streetlight, his neck relax­ing and tightening in and out of dreams and maybe it was only a catscrewing, a church bell in a high wind, a window being broken, no di­rection to it, not even alarming, replaced swiftly by the old, the coal-gasand Lysol, silence. And somebody else finds him next morning. Or youcan find him any night at Putzi's if you're man enough to go in piss onthat Toad. The Major has got off this time with only a mild jolt, and is ina self-congratulating mood.

"Ugly 'sucker tried his best," wrapping an arm about Bodine's neck,"but got his warty 01' ass handed to him tonight, damn 'f he didn't.""Got your 'snow,' Major Marvy. Half a bottle shy, sorry, it's the best Icould do."
"That's all reet, sailor. I know so many nose habits between here 'n'Wiesbaden you'd need three ton 'n' that wouldn't last the 'suckers aday." He pays off Bodine, full price, overriding Bodine's offer to proratefor what's missing. "Call it a little lagniappe, goodbuddy, that's DuaneMarvy's way 0' doin' thangs. Damn that 01' toad's got my peeker tofeelin' pretty good now. Damn 'f I wouldn't like to stick it inside one

604

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OSsel!
icken
inoeee

them little whores. Hey! Boats, where can I find me some pussy around
here?"

The sailor shows him how to get downstairs to the whorehouse. They
take you into a kind of private steam bath first, you can screw right
there if you want, doesn't cost any extra. The madame-hey! ha, hal
looks like some kind of a dyke with that stogie in her face! raises an eye­
brow at Marvy when he tells her he wants a nigger, but thinks she can

get hold of one.
"It isn't the House of All Nations, but we do aim for variety," running

the tortoise end of her cigar-holder down a call-sheet, "Sandra is en­

gaged for the moment. An exhibition. In the meantime, here is our de­

lightful Manuela, to keep you company."
Manuela is wearing only a high comb and black-lace mantilla,

shadow-flowers falling to her hips, a professional smile for the fat Amer­
ican, who is already fumbling with uniform buttons.

"Hubba, hubba! Hey, she's pretty sunburned herself. Ain'tcha? You

got a leetle mulatto in there, a leetle Mayheecano, honey? You sabe
es­

pafiol? You sabe fucky-fucky?"
"Si," deciding tonight to be from the Levante, "I am Spanish. I from

Valencia.
"

"Va-len-cia-a-a," sings Major Marvy, to the well-known tune of the
same name, "Senorita, fucky-fucky, sucky-sucky sixty-ni-i-ine, la-lalala
la-Ia la-Ia laaa ...

"

dancing her in a brief two-step about the grave
center of the waiting madame.

Manuela doesn't feel obliged to join in. Valencia was one of the last
cities to fall to Franco. She herself is really from the Asturias, which
knew him first, felt his cruelty two years before the civil war even began
for the rest of Spain. She watches Marvy's face as he pays Monika,
watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself
than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying. Marvy isn't her first,
but almost her first, American. The clientele here at Putzi's is mostly
British. During the War-how many camps and cities since her capture
in '38?-it was German. She missed the International Brigades, shut

away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after
the Fascists had occupied all the north-missed the flowers, children,
kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she's never

been, Valencia, this evening's home. . . . Ya salimos de Espana. . . . Pa'
luchar en otros frentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela. . . .

She hangs his uniform neatly in a closet and follows her trick into

heat, bright steam, the walls of the seething room invisible, feathered
hairs along his legs, enormous buttocks and back beginning to come up

605

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lati



dark with the dampness. Other souls move, sigh, groan unseen amongthe sheets of fog, dimensions in here under the earth meaningless-theroom could be any size, an entire city's breadth, paved with birds notentirely gentle in twofold rotational symmetry, a foot-darkened yellowand blue, the only colors to its watery twilight.
"Aaahhh, hot damn," Marvy slithering fatly down, sleek with sweat,over the tiled edge into the scented water. His toenails, cut Army­square, slide under last. "Come on, everybody in the pool," a greathappy bellow, seizing Manuela's ankle and tugging. Having taken a fallor two on these tiles, and seen a girl friend go into traction, Manuela

comes along gracefully, falling hard enough astraddle, bottom hittinghis stomach a loud smack, to hurt him, she hopes. But he only laughsagain, loudly abandoned to the warmth and buoyancy and sounds en­
compassing-anonymous fucking, drowsiness, ease. Finds himself with
a thick red hardon, and slips it without ado into the solemn girl half-hid­den inside her cloud of damp black Spanish lace, eyes anyplace but onhis, aswing now through the interior fog, dreaming of home.Well, that's all reet. He isn't fucking her eyes, is he? He'd rather nothave to look at her face anyhow, all he wants is the brown skin, the shutmouth, that sweet and nigger submissiveness. She'll do anything he or­ders, yeah he can hold her head under the water till she drowns, he canbend her hand back, yeah, break her fingers like that cunt in Frankfurtthe other week. Pistol-whip, bite till blood comes ... visions go swarm­ing, violent, less erotic than you think-more occupied with thrust, im­pact, penetration, and such other military values. Which is not to say heisn't enjoying himself innocently as you do. Or that Manuela doesn'tfind herself too, in some casual athletic way, liking the ride up anddown the stubborn red shaft of Major Marvy, though her mind is on athousand other things now, a frock of Sandra's that she covets, words tovarious songs, an itch below her left shoulderblade, a tall English soldiershe saw as she came through the bar around suppertime, his brown fore­arm, shirt rolled to the elbow, against the zinc top of the table. . . .Voices in the steam. Alarms, many feet clopping in shower shoes, sil­houettes moving by, a gray cloudy evacuation. "What in thee hell,"Major Marvy about to come, rising on his elbows distracted, squintingin several directions, rapidly getting a softoff.
"Raid," a voice going past. "MPs," shivers somebody else."Caaahh!" screams Major Marvy, who has just recalled the presenceof 2 Yz ounces of cocaine in his uniform pockets. He rolls, walrus-heavy,Manuela sliding away and off his limpening nervous penis, hardlyaroused but enough of a professional to feel the price includes a token

606

ed

ro

-
_--y. �--;._------ •

/ -



puto and sinvergiienza now. Scrambling up out of the water, skidding
on the tiles, Duane Marvy, bringing up the rear, emerges into an ice­
cold changing-room to find the last of the bathers fled, the closets stone­

empty except for one multicolored velvet something or
other. "Hey

where's my uniform!" stomping on the floor, fists at his sides,
face very

red. "Oh you motherless bastards," thereupon throwing several bottles
and ashtrays, breaking two windows, attacking the wall with an ornate
umbrella stand, feeling better for it in his mind. He hears combat boots

crashing overhead and in rooms nearby, girls screaming, a phonograph
record knocked screeching into silence.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume

complete with mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an
inno­

cent funseeking pig. As humorless limey voices move closer through the
rooms of Putzi's, he rips frantically at silk lining and straw padding to
make room for his own fat. And, struggled at last inside, whew, zipped
up, mask hiding face, safe, clownish-anonymous, pushes

out through
bead curtains, then upstairs to the bar, only to run spang into a full divi­
sion of the red-hatted 'suckers coming his way, all in step, swear to God.

"Here's our elusive swine, gentlemen," pocked face, blunt and

ragged mustache, pointing a pistol right at his head, others moving up
quickly. A civilian comes pushing through, spade-shape blazing

dark on

his smooth cheek.

"Right. Dr. Muffage is outside with the ambulance, and we'd
like two

of your chaps for a moment, sergeant, till we're all secure."

"Certainly, sir." Wrists weak from steam and comfort gathered skill­

fully behind his back before he can even get mad enough to start yelling
at them-cold steel, ratcheting like a phone number being dialed late at

night, with no hope in hell of any answer ever. . . .
"Goddamn," he finally gets out, mask muffling his voice, giving it an

echo that hurts his ears, "what'n thee hell's wrong with you, boy? Don't

you know who I am?"

But oh-oh, waitaminute-if they've found the uniform, Marvy ID and
cocaine in the same set of pockets, maybe it isn't such a hot idea to tell
them his name just yet. . . .

"Leftenant Slothrop, we presume. Come along, now."
He keeps silent. Slothrop, O.K., we'll just wait, see what the score is,

square the dope thing later, play dumb, say it must've been planted.
Maybe even find him a Jewish lawyer good enough to nail the 'suckers
for false arrest.

He's escorted out the door and into the idling ambulance. The
bearded driver gives him only a quick over-the-shoulder glance, then

607



lets in the clutch. Before he can think to struggle, the other civilian andthe MPs have quickly strapped Marvy at knees and chest to a stretcher.A pause by an Army lorry to let the MPs off again. Then they con­tinue on. Toward Cuxhaven. Marvy thinks. Nothing but night, moon­softened blackness out the window. Can't tell....
"Sedation now?" Ace of Spades crouches beside him, shining apocket flashlight over ampoules in his kit, rattling syringes and points."Mm. Yes, we're almost there."
"I don't see why they couldn't have given us hospital space for this."The driver laughs. "Oh yes, 1 can just see that."
Filling the hypodermic slowly, "Well we are under orders ... 1

mean there's nothing-"
"Dear chap, it's not the most respectable operation.""Hey," Major Marvy tries to raise his head. "Operation? What's this,boy?"
"Ssh," ripping away part of one pigsuit sleeve, baring Marvy's arm."I don't want no needle-" but it's already in the vein and dis­harging as the other man seeks to calm him. "I mean you really got thewrong fella, you know?"
"Of course, Leftenant."
"Hey, hey, hey. No. Not me, I'm a major." He should be more em­phatic about this, more convincing. Maybe it's the' sucking pig mask inthe way. Only he can hear his voice, now given back entirely to himself,flatter, metallic ... they can't hear him. "Major Duane Marvy." Theydon't believe him, don't believe his name. Not even his name....Panic strikes him, deeper than the sedative has reached, and he beginsto buck truly in terror against the straps, feeling small muscles along hischest stretch into useless twinges of pain, oh God, beginning to screamnow with all his might, no words, only cries, as loud as the strap acrosshis chest will let him.

"For pity's sake," the driver Sighs. "Can't you shut him up, Spon­toon?"
Spontoon has already ripped the pig mask away, and replaces it nowwith one of gauze, which he holds on with one hand while drippingether with the other-whenever the thrashing head comes within range."Pointsman has taken leave of his senses," he feels obliged to say, irri­tated out of all patience, "if he calls this a 'calm imperturbable.'

"

"All right, we're on the strand now. No one in Sight." Muffage drivesdown toward the water, the sand just solid enough to hold the ambu­lance, everything very white in the small moon, which is at its zenith
. perfect ice.
608

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"Oh," Marvy moans. "Oh fuck. Oh no. Oh Jesus," the words in long
drugged diminuendo, struggles against his bonds weakening as Muffage
parks them at last, an olive-drab derelict tiny on this broad beach, the
enormous slick stretching away moonward, to the threshold of the north
wind.

"Plenty of time," Muffage looking at his watch. "We're catching the
C-47 at one. They said they could hold up for a bit." Sighs of comfort
before turning to their task.

"That man's connections," Spontoon shaking his head, removing the
instruments from their disinfectant solution and laying them on a sterile
cloth beside the stretcher. "My, my. Let's hope he never turns to a life
of crime, eh?"

"Fuck," groans Major Marvy softly, "oh, fuck me, will you?"
Both men have scrubbed, and donned masks and rubber gloves.

M uffage has switched on a dome light which stares down, a soft radiant
eye. The two work quickly, in silence, two wartime pros used to field
expediency, with only an occasional word from the patient, a whisper, a
white pathetic grope in his ether-darkness after the receding point of
light that's all he has left of himself.

It's a simple procedure. The crotch of the velvet costume is torn
away. Muffage decides to dispense with shaving the scrotum. He douses
it first with iodine, then squeezes in turn each testicle against the red­
veined and hairy bag, makes the incision quickly and cleanly through
skin and surrounding membranes, popping the testicle itself out through
the wound and welling blood, pulling it out with the left hand till the
cords hard and soft are strung visible under the light. As if they are mu­
sical strings he might, a trifle moon-mad, strum here on the empty
beach into appropriate music, his hand hesitates: but then, reluctantly
bowing to duty, he severs them at the proper distances from the slip­
pery stone, each incision then being bathed in disinfectant, and the two
neat slits, side by side, finally sutured up again. The testicles are
plopped into a bottle of alcohol.

"Souvenirs for Pointsman," Muffage sighs, stripping off the surgical
gloves. "Give that one another shot. It might be better if he sleeps
through, and someone back in London explains this to him."

Muffage starts up the motor, backs in a half-circle and slowly heads
back up toward the road, the vast sea lying still behind.

Back at Putzi's, Slothrop curls in a wide crisp-sheeted bed beside So­

lange, asleep and dreaming about Zw6lfkinder, and Bianca smiling, he
and she riding on the wheel, their compartment become a room, one
he's never seen, a room in a great complex of apartments big as a city,

r�

am

609



whose corridors can be driven or bicycled along like streets: trees liningthem, and birds singing in the trees.
And "Solange," oddly enough, is dreaming of Bianca too, thoughunder a different aspect: it's of her own child, Ilse, riding lost throughthe Zone on a long freight train that never seems to come to rest. Sheisn't unhappy, nor is she searching, exactly, for her father. But Leni's

early dream for her is coming true. She will not be used. There is
change, and departure: but there is also help when least looked for fromthe strangers of the day, and hiding, out among the accidents of this
drifting Humility, never quite to be extinguished, a few small chancesfor mercy....

Upstairs, one Mollner, valise full of his night's treasures-an Ameri­
can major's uniform and papers, and 2 Yz ounces of cocaine-explains tothe shaggy American sailor that Herr von Coll is a very busy man, at­tending to business in the north, as far as he knows, and has not com­missioned him to bring to Cuxhaven any kind of papers, no military dis­charges, passports-nothing. He's sorry. Perhaps the sailor's friend ismistaken. Perhaps, again, it's only a temporary delay. One appreciatesthat forgeries take time.

Bodine watches him leave, unaware of what's inside that valise. Al­bert Krypton has drunken himself unconscious. Shirley comes wander­ing in, bright-eyed and restless, wearing a black garter belt and stock­ings. "Hmrn," she sez, with a certain look.
"Hmm," sez Seaman Bodine.
"And anyway, it was only ten cents at the Battle of the Bulge."

o 0 0 0 DOD
So: he has traced Weissmann's battery from Holland, across the saltmarshes and lupine and bones of cows, to find this. Lucky he's not su­perstitious. He'd be taking it for a prophetic vision. There is of course aperfectly rational explanation, but Tchitcherine has never read MartinFierro.

He watches from his temporary command post in a copse of juniperson a low hill. Through the binoculars he sees two men, one white, oneblack, holding guitars. Townspeople are gathered in a circle, but theseTchitcherine can crop out, leaving in his elliptical field a scene with thesame structure as the male-female singing contest in the middle of a flatgrassland in Central Asia well over a decade ago-a coming-together of
610

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lini� opposites that signaled then his own approach to the Kirghiz Light.
What does it signal this time?

Over his head, the sky is streaked and hard as marble. He knows.
Weissmann installed the S-Gerat and fired the 00000 somewhere close

by. Enzian can't be far behind. It will be here.
But he has to wait. Once that would have been unbearable. But since

Major Marvy dropped out of sight, Tchitcherine has been a
little more

cautious. Marvy was a key man. There is a counterforce in the Zone.
Who was the Soviet intelligence man who showed up just before the

fiasco in the clearing? Who tipped the Schwarzkommando off to the
raid? Who got rid of Marvy?

He's been trying hard not to believe too much in the
Rocket-cartel.

Since his illumination that night, Marvy drunk, Bloody Chiclitz de­

claiming on the virtues of Herbert Hoover,
Tchitcherine has been

watching for evidence. Gerhardt von Coll, with his corporate octopus
wrapping every last negotiable item in the Zone, must

be in it, con­

sciously or otherwise. Tchitcherine last week was on
the point of flying

back to Moscow. He'd seen Mravenko, one of the VIAM people, briefly
in Berlin. They met in the Tiergarten, two officers ostensibly strolling

in

the sun. Work crews shoveled cold patch into holes in the pavement,

banging it flat with shovels. Bicycle riders ratcheted by,
skeleton-func­

tional as their machines. Small clusters of civilians and military were

back under the trees, sitting on fallen trunks or lorry wheels, stirring
through bags and valises, dealing. "You're in trouble,"

Mravenko said.

He'd been a remittance man too, back in the thirties, and the most

maniacal, systemless chess player in Central Asia. His tastes ran
low

enough to include even blindfold chess, which Russian
sensibilities find

unutterably gross. Tchitcherine sat down at the board
each time more

upset than the last, trying to be amiable, to jolly the
madman into some

kind of rational play. Most often he'd lose. But it was either Mravenko
or the Semirechie winter.

"Do you have any idea what's going on?"
Mravenko laughed. "Does anybody? Molotov isn't telling Vishinsky.

But they know things about you. Remember the Kirghiz Light?
Sure

you do. Well, they found out about that. I didn't tell them,
but they got

to somebody."
"It's ancient history. Why bring it up now?"
"You're regarded as 'useful,'

"

Mravenko said.

They looked at each other, then, for a long time. It was a
death sen­

tence. Usefulness out here ends as quickly as a communique. Mravenko

was afraid, and not entirely for Tchitcherine, either.

iliou�

611



"What will you do, Mravenko?"
"Try not to be very useful. They're not perfect, though." Both menknew this was meant to be comfort, and isn't working too well. "Theydon't really know what makes you useful. They go on statistics. I don'tthink you were supposed to survive the War. When you did, they had tolook at you more closely."
"Maybe I'll survive this, too." And that was when he got the idea offlying to Moscow. But just about then word came in that Weissmann'sbattery couldn't be traced any further than the Heath. And the re­newed hope of meeting Enzian stopped him from going-the seductivehope that's leading him further each day from any chance of continuingon past the other side of that meeting. He never supposed he would.The real question is: will they get him before he gets Enzian? All heneeds is a little more time . . . his only hope is if they're looking for En­zian too, or the S-Gerat, and using him the same way he thinks he'susing Slothrop....

The horizon is still clear: has been all day. Cypress-shaped junipersstand in the rust and hazy distances, still as monuments. The first purpleflowers are showing on the heather. It is not the busy peace of late sum­mer, but the peace of a burial ground. Among the prehistoric Germantribes, that's what this country was: the territory of the dead.A dozen nationalities, dressed as Argentine estancieros, crowd aroundthe soup-kitchen commissary. EI Nato is standing on the saddle of hishorse, Gaucho style, looking off into the German pampas. Felipe iskneeling out in the sun, making his noontime devotionals to the livingpresence of a certain rock back in the wasteland of La Rioja, on theeastern slopes of the Andes. According to an Argentine legend from thelast century, Maria Antonia Correa followed her lover into that aridland, carrying their newborn child. Herders found her a week later,dead. But the infant had survived, by nursing from her corpse. Rocksnear the site of the miracle have since been the objects of yearly pil­grimages. But Felipe's particular rock embodies also an intellectual sys­tem, for he believes (as do M. F. Beal and others) in a form of mineralconsciousness not too much different from that of plants and animals,except for the time scale. Rock's time scale is a lot more stretched out."We're talking frames per century," Felipe like everybody else herelately has been using a bit of movie language, "per millennium!" Colos­sal. But Felipe has come to see, as those who are not Sentient Rockstersseldom do, that history as it's been laid on the world is only a fraction,an outward-and-visible fraction. That we must also look to the untold,to the silence around us, to the passage of the next rock we notice-to
612

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/� -____"_�I' _-,



its aeons of history under the long and female persistence of water and
air (who'll be there, once or twice per century, to trip the shutter?),
down to the lowland where your paths, human and mineral, are most

likely to cross. . . .
Graciela Imago Portales, dark hair parted in the middle and drawn

back from her forehead, wearing a long black riding skirt and black
boots, sits shuffling cards, stacking herself flushes, full houses, four of a
kind, just for her own amusement. The supernumeraries have brought
next to nothing to play with. She knew it would come to this: she'd
thought once that by using it only in games, money would lose its real­
ity. Wither away. Has it, or is she playing a game with herself? It seems
Belaustegui has been watching her more closely since they got here. She
doesn't want to threaten his project. She's been to bed with the solemn

engineer a few times (though at first, back in B.A., she'd have sworn to

you she couldn't have drunk him even with a
silver straw), and she

knows he's a gambler too. A good pair, wired front-to-front: she picked
it up the first time he touched her. The man knows his odds, the shapes
of risk are intimate to him as loved bodies. Each moment has its value,
its probable success against other moments in other hands, and the
shuffle for him is always moment-to-moment. He can't afford to remem­
ber other permutations, might-have-beens-only what's present, dealt
him by something he calls Chance and Graciela calls God. He will stake
everything on this anarchist experiment, and if he loses, he'll go on to

something else. But he won't hold back. She's glad of that. He's a source
of strength. She doesn't know, if the moment came, how strong she'd
be. Often at night she'll break through a fine membrane of alcohol and
optimism to see really how much she needs the others, how little use,
unsupported, she could ever be.

The sets for the movie-to-be help some. The buildings are real, not a
false front in sight. The boliche is stocked with real liquor, the pulperia
with real food. The sheep, cattle, horses, and corrals are real. The huts
are weatherproof and are being slept in. When von Coll leaves-if he
ever comes-nothing will be struck. Any of the extras who want to stay
are welcome. Many of them only want to rest up awhile for more DP
trains, more fantasies of what home was like before the destruction, and

some dream of getting somewhere. They'll move on. But will others
come? And what will the military government think of a community
like this in the middle of their garrison state?

It isn't the strangest village in the Zone. Squalidozzi has come in out
of his wanderings with tales of Palestinian units strayed all the way from

Italy, who've settled down farther east and started up Hasidic com-

613

en

on



munes, on the pattern of a century and a half ago. There are onetime
company towns come under the fleet and jittery rule of Mercury, dedi­cated now to a Single industry, mail delivery, eastward and back, in
among the Soviets and out, 100 marks a letter. One village in Mecklen­burg has been taken over by army dogs, Dobermans and Shepherds,each one conditioned to kill on sight any human except the one whotrained him. But the trainers are dead men now, or lost. The dogs havegone out in packs, ganged cows in the fields and brought the carcassesmiles overland, back to the others. They've broken into supply depotsRin-Tin-Tin style and looted K-rations, frozen hamburger, cartons ofcandy bars. Bodies of neighboring villagers and eager sociologists litterall the approaches to the Hund-Stadt. Nobody can get near it. One ex-"peditionary force came armed with rifles and grenades, but the dogs allscattered in the night, slender as wolves, and no one could bring himselfto destroy the houses and shops. Noone wanted to occupy the village,either. So they went away. And the dogs came back. If there are lines of

power among themselves, loves, loyalties, jealousies, no one knows.Someday G-5 might send in troops. But the dogs may not know of this,
may have no German anxieties about encirclement-may be living en­tirely in the light of the one man-installed reflex: Kill The Stranger.There may be no way of distinguishing it from the other given quan­tities of their lives-from hunger or thirst or sex. For all they know, kill­the-stranger was born in them. If any have remembered the blows, theelectric shocks, the rolled-up newspapers no one read, the boots andprods, their pain is knotted in now with the Stranger, the hated. If thereare heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting outloud any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill raIlthat take them over, even the pensive heretics themselves, at any first fullscent of the Stranger. But in private they point to the remembered GWimage of one human, who has visited only at intervals, but in whose

presence they were tranquil and affectionate-from whom came nour-ishment, kind scratches and strokings, games of fetch-the-stick. Where ver�is he now? Why is he different for some and not for others?There is a possibility, among the dogs, latent so far because it's neverbeen seriously tested, of a crystallizing into sects, each around the imageof its trainer. A feasibility study, in fact, is going on even now at stafflevel in G-5, to see whether original trainers might not be located, andthis crystallizing begun. One sect might try to protect its trainer againstattacks from others. Given the right combinations and an acceptabletrainer-loss figure, it might be cheaper to let the dogs finish themselvesoff than to send in combat troops. The study has been contracted to, of
614

--
- _-

/:::---��l·



I'tf

all people, Mr. Pointsman, who is now restricted to one small office at
Twelfth House, the rest of the space having been taken over by an
agency studying options for nationalizing coal and steel-given him
more out of sympathy than anything else. Since the castrating of Major
Marvy, Pointsman has been officially in disgrace. Clive Mossmoon and
Sir Marcus Scammony sit in their club, among discarded back copies of
British Plastics, drinking the knight's favorite, Quimporto-a weird pre­
war mixture of quinine, beef-tea and port-with a dash of Coca-Cola
and a peeled onion. Ostensibly the meeting is to finalize plans for the
Postwar Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat, a source of great corporate fun
these days ("Imagine the look on some poor bastard's face when the
whole sleeve simply falls out of the shoulder-" "O-or how about mixing
in something that will actually dissolve in the rain?"). But Mossmoon
really wants to discuss Pointsman: "What shall we do with Pointsman?"

"I found the most darling boots in Portobello Road," pipes Sir Mar­
cus, whom it's always hard to get around to talking business. "They'll
look stunning on you. Blood-red cordovan and halfway up your thighs.
Your naked thighs."

"We'll give it a go," replies Clive, neutral as can be (though it's a
thought, old Scorpia's been so damned bitchy lately). "I could use a spot
of relaxation after trying to explain Pointsman away to the Higher Levels."

"Oh, the dog chap. I say, have you ever thought about a Saint Ber-
nard? Big, shaggy darlings."

"On occasion," Clive keeps at it, "but mostly I think about Pointsman."
"Not your sort, darling. Not at all. And he is getting on, poor chap."
"Sir Marcus," last resort, usually the willowy knight demands to be

called Angelique, and there seems no other way to get his attention, "if
this show prangs, we're going to see a national crisis. I've got Ginger
Groupers jamming my switchboard and my mailbox day and night-"

"Mm, I'd like to jam your male box, Clivey-"
"-and 1922 Committee coming in the windows. Bracken and Bea­

verbrook go on, you know, it isn't as if the election put them out of a job
or something-"

.

"Dear chap," smiling angelically, "there isn't going to be any crisis.
Labour wants the American found as much as we do. We sent him out

to destroy the blacks, and it's obvious now he won't do the job. What
harm can he cause, roaming around Germany? For all we know he's
taken ship for South America and all those adorable little mustachios.
Let it be for a while. We've got the Army, when the time is right. Slo­
throp was a good try at a moderate solution, but in the end it's always
the Army, isn't it?"

Dill·

�Iri



"How can you be so sure the Americans will ever condone that?"
A long disagreeable giggle. "Clive, you're such a little boy. You don'tknow the Americans. I do. I deal with them. They'll want to see how we

do with our lovely black animals-oh dear, ex Africa semper aliquidnovi, they're just so big, so strong-before they try it on their own, ah,
target groups. They may say a good many harsh things if we fail, butthere'll be no sanctions."

"Are we going to fail?"
"We're all going to fail," Sir Marcus primping his curls, "but the Op­eration won't."
Yes. Clive Mossmoon feels himself rising, as from a bog of trivial frus­

trations, political fears, money problems: delivered onto the sober shore
of the Operation, where all is firm underfoot, where the self is a pettyindulgent animal that once cried in its mired darkness. But here there is
no whining, here inside the Operation. There is no lower self. The issues
are too momentous for the lower self to interfere. Even in the chastise­
ment room at Sir Marcus's estate, "The Birches," the foreplay is a gameabout who has the real power, who's had it all along, chained and cor­seted though he be, outside these shackled walls. The humiliations of
pretty "Angelique" are calibrated against their degree of fantasy. Nojoy, no real surrender. Only the demands of the Operation. Each of ushas his place, and the tenants come and go, but the places remain. . . .It wasn't always so. In the trenches of the First World War, Englishmen came to love one another decently, without shame or make-be­lieve, under the easy likelihoods of their sudden deaths, and to find inthe faces of other young men evidence of otherworldly visits, some poorhope that may have helped redeem even mud, shit, the decaying piecesof human meat. . . . It was the end of the world, it was total revolution

(though not quite in the way Walter Rathenau had announced): everyday thousands of the aristocracy new and old, still haloed in their ideasof right and wrong, went to the loud guillotine of Flanders, run day inand out, on and on, by no visible hands, certainly not those of the peo­ple-an English class was being decimated, the ones who'd volunteered
were dying for those who'd known something and hadn't, and despite itall, despite knowing, some of them, of the betrayal, while Europe diedmeanly in its own wastes, men loved. But the life-cry of that love haslong since hissed away into no more than this idle and bitchy faggotry.In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexual­
ity in high places is just a carnal afterthought now, and the real and onlyfucking is done on paper.



O\\].�
fail,h

t tne�

The Counterforce

-RICHARD M. NIXON



-



D D D D D D D

Bette Davis and Margaret Dumont are in the curly-Cuvillies drawing­
room of somebody's palatial home. From outside the window, at some
point, comes the sound of a kazoo, playing a tune of astounding taste­
lessness, probably "Who Dat Man?" from A Day at the Races (in more
ways than one). It is one of Groucho Marx's vulgar friends. The sound is
low, buzzing, and guttural. Bette Davis freezes, tosses her head, flicks
her cigarette. "What," she inquires, "is that?" Margaret Dumont smiles,
throws out her chest, looks down her nose. "Well it sounds," she replies,
"like a kazoo."

For all Slothrop knows, it was a kazoo. By the time he's awake, the
racket has faded in the morning. Whatever it was, it woke him up.
What it was, or is, is Pirate Prentice, in a more or less hijacked P-47, on
route to Berlin. His orders are terse and clear, like those of the others,

agents of the Pope, Pope got religion, go out 'n' find that minnesinger,
he's a good guy after all. . . .

Well, it's an older Jug, one with a greenhouse canopy. The barred
field of sight gives Pirate twinges of memory in his neck muscles. The
plane seems permanently out of trim to him, though he still fiddles now
and then with different tabs. Right now he's trying the War Emergency
Power to see how it works, even though there seems to be no War, no

Emergency, keeping an eye on the panel, where RPMs, manifold pres­
sure, and cylinder-head temperature are all nudging their red lines. He
eases it down and flies on, and presently is trying a slow roll over Celle,
then a loop over Brunswick, then, what the hell, an Immelmann over
Magdeburg. On his back, molars aching in a grin, he starts his roll a hair
too slow, just this side of one-thirty, and nearly stalls it, jolts over a set
of surprise points-finish it as an ordinary loop or go for the Immel­
mann?-already reaching for ailerons, forget the damn rudder, a spin
isn't worth worrying about . . . but at the last second does give the

pedal just a touch anyway, a minor compromise (I'm nearly forty, good
God, is it happening to me too?) and rolls himself upright again. It had
to be the Immelmann.

Oh I'm the Eagle of Tooting,
Bombing and shooting,
And nobodee can bring me down!
Old Kaiser Bill, you're over the hill,



Cause I'm comin' into your home town!
Tell all the Irauleins and mademoiselles
To keep a light in the window for me . .
Cause I'm the Eagle of Tooting, just rooty-toot-tooting.And flyin' on to victo-ree!

By now, Osbie Feel ought to be in Marseilles, already trying to con­tact Blodgett Waxwing. Webley Silvernail is on route to Zurich. Katjewill be going to Nordhausen . . . Katje. . . .
No, no, she hasn't told him everything she's been up to. It's none ofhis business. However much she told him, there'd always be the bit of

mystery to her. Because of what he is, because of directions he can't
move in. But how is it both of them kept from vanishing from eachother, into the paper cities and afternoons of this strange peace, and thecoming Austerity? Could it be there's something about ad hoc arrange­ments, like the present mission, that must bring you in touch with the
people you need to be with? that more formal adventures tend, by theirnature, to separation, to loneliness? Ah, Prentice. . . . What's this, a
runaway prop? no, no, check the fuel-pressure-here's the gauge needlewobbling, rather low, tank's run dry-

Little in-flight annoyance for Pirate here, nothing serious. . . . Out ofhis earphones now and then, ghost-voices will challenge or reprimandhim: air traffic people down in their own kingdom, one more overlay onthe Zone, antennas strung in the wilderness like redoubts, radiatinghalf-spheres of influence, defining invisible corridors-in-the-sky that arereal only for them. The Thunderbolt is painted Kelly green. Hard tomiss. Pirate's idea. Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if
you can.

Gray was for the War. So, it seems, was Pirate's odd talent for livingthe fantasies of others. Since V-E Day, nothing. But it's not the end ofhis psychic difficulties. He is still being "haunted," in the same marginaland uncertain way, by Katje's ancestor Frans van der Groov, dodo killerand soldier of fortune. The man never quite arrives, nor quite leaves. Pi­rate is taking it personally. He is the Dutchman's compatible host, de­spite himself. What does Frans see in him? Has it to do-of course itdoes-with the Firm?
He has warped a skein of his dreams into Pirate's own, hereticaldreams, exegeses of windmills that turned in shadow at the edges ofdark fields, each arm pointing at a spot on the rim of a giant wheel thatturned through the sky, stop and go, always exactly with the spinningcross: "wind" was a middle term, a convention to express what really

wn

�r�
fe

ur
ln�!
ilie

I two



moved the cross . . . and this applied to all wind, everywhere on Earth,
shrieking between the confectionery pink and yellow mountains of
Mauritius or stirring the tulips at home, red cups in the rain filling bead

by clear bead with water, each wind had its own cross-in-motion, mate­

rially there or implied, each cross a unique mandala, bringing opposites
together in the spin (and tell me now, Frans, what's this wind I'm in,
this 25,ooo-foot wind? What mill's that, grinding there below? What
does it grind, Frans, who tends the stone?).

Far beneath the belly of the Thunderbolt, brushed on the green
countryside, pass the time-softened outlines of ancient earthworks, vil­

lages abandoned during the Great Dying, fields behind cottages whose
dwellers were scythed down without mercy by the northward march of
black plague. Behind a scrim, cold as sheets over furniture in a forbid­
den wing of the house, a soprano voice sings notes that never arrange
themselves into a melody, that fall apart in the same way as dead pro­
teins. . . .

"It's as clear as the air," rants Gustav the composer, "if you weren't

an old fool you'd see it-I know, I know, there's an Old Fools' Benevo­
lent Association, you all know each other, you vote censures against the
most troublesome under-cos and my name's at the head of the list. Do

you think I care? You're all on a different frequency. There's no way
you'll get interference from us. We're too far separated. We have our
own problems."

Cryptozoa of many kinds scurry through crumbs, pubic hairs, wine­

splashes, tobacco ash and shreds, a litter of dram cocaine vials, each
with a red Bakelite top bearing the seal of Merck of Darmstadt. The

bugs' atmosphere ends about an inch from the floor, an ideal humidity,
darkness, stability of temperature. Nobody bothers them. There is an

unspoken agreement about not stomping on bugs in Sauro's place.
"You're caught in tonality," screams Gustav. "Trapped. Tonality is a

game. All of them are. You're too old. You'll
never move beyond the

game, to the Row. The Row is enlightenment."
"The Row is a game too." Saure sits grinning with an ivory spoon,

shoveling incredible piles of cocaine into his nose, going through his
whole repertoire: arm straight out swinging in in a giant curve zoom

precisely to the nostril he's aiming at, then flicking in the lot from two
feet away without losing a crystal . . . then a whole bunch gets tossed

up in the air like a piece of popcorn and nose-gobbled ngkok on target,
inside where it's smooth as a J0 block, not a cilium in sight there since
the Liebknecht funeral, if not before ... hand-to-hand shifts of spoon
two or three times, faster than ivory ever moved in air . . . rails disap-

621



pearing in a wink without benefit of a tube to guide them. "Sound is a
game, if you're capable of moving that far, you adenoidal closet-vision­
ary. That's why I listen to Spohr, Rossini, Spontini, I'm choosing mygame, one full of light and kindness. You're stuck with that stratospherestuff and rationalize its dullness away by calling it 'enlightenment.' Youdon't know what enlightenment is, Kerl, you're blinder than I am."

Slothrop moseys down the trail to a mountain stream where he's lefthis harp to soak all night, wedged between a couple of rocks in a quietpool.
"Your 'light and kindness' are the jigging of the doomed," sez Gustav."You can smell mortality in everyone of those bouncy little tunes."Surly, he decapitates a vial of cocaine with his teeth, and spits the reddebris in among the shimmering bugs.
Through the flowing water, the holes of the old Hohner Slothropfound are warped one by one, squares being bent like notes, a visualblues being played by the clear stream. There are harpmen and dulci­mer players in all the rivers, wherever water moves. Like that Rilke

prophesied,

And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say: I flow.
To the rushing water speak: I am.

It is still possible, even this far out of it, to find and make audible the
spirits of lost harpmen. Whacking the water out of his harmonica, reedssinging against his leg, picking up the single blues at bar 1 of this morn­ing's segment, Slothrop, just suckin' on his harp, is closer to being a spir­itual medium than he's been yet, and he doesn't even know it.The harp didn't show up right away. His first days in these mountains,he came across a set of bagpipes, left behind in April by some Highlandunit. Slothrop has a knack for doping things out. The Imperial instru­ment was a cinch. In a week he mastered that dreamy tune Dick Powell

sang in the movies, "In the Shadows Let Me Come and Sing to You,"and spent most of his time playing that, WHANGdediddle de-dee, �WHANG de dum-de-doooooo . . . over and over, on the bagpipes. Byand by he began to notice that offerings of food were being left near thelean-to he'd put up. Mangel-wurzels, a basket of cherries, even freshfish. He never saw who was leaving them. Either he was supposed to bea bagpiper's ghost, or just purely sound itself, and he knew enoughabout solitudes and night-voices to figure what was going on. He quitplaying the bagpipes, and next day he found the harp. It happens to be �no622



the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ball­

room, but that's too long ago for him to remember.
He's kept alone. If others have seen him or his fire, they haven't tried

to approach. He's letting hair and beard grow, wearing a dungaree shirt
and trousers Bodine liberated for him from the laundry of the fohn E.
Badass. But he likes to spend whole days naked, ants crawling up his

legs, butterflies lighting on his shoulders, watching the life on the
moun­

tain, getting to know shrikes and capercaillie, badgers and marmots.

Any number of directions he ought to be moving in, but he'd rather stay
right here for now. Everyplace he's been, Cuxhaven, Berlin, Nice,

Zu­

rich, must be watched now. He could still make a try at finding
Springer, or Blodgett Waxwing. Why does he have this obsession with

getting papers? What th' fuck are papers, anyhow? He could try one of
the Baltic ports, wait around for Frau Gnahb to put in, and get over

to

that Denmark or that Sweden. DPs, offices burned, records lost forever

-papers might not mean so much in Europe . . . waitaminute, so
much as where, Slothrop? Huh? America? Shit. C'mon-

Yup, still thinking there's a way to get back. He's been changing,
sure, changing, plucking the albatross of self now and then, idly, half­
conscious as picking his nose-but the one ghost-feather his fingers al­

ways brush by is America. Poor asshole, he can't let her go. She's whis­

pered love me too often to him in his sleep, vamped insatiably his
wak­

ing attention with come-hitherings, incredible promises. One day-he
can see a day-he might be able finally to say sorry, sure and leave her
... but not just yet. One more try, one more chance, one more deal,
one more transfer to a hopeful line. Maybe it's just pride. What if
there's no place for him in her stable any more? If she has turned him

out, she'll never explain. Her "stallions" have no rights. She is immune
to their small, stupid questions. She is exactly the Amazon Bitch your
fantasies have called her to be.

Then there's Jamf, the coupling of "[amf" and ''I'' in the primal
dream. Who can he go to with it? it will not bear that much looking
into, will it? If he gets too close, there will be revenge. They might warn
him first, They might not.

Omens grow clearer, more specific. He watches flights of birds and

patterns in the ashes of his fire, he reads the guts of trout he's caught
and cleaned, scraps of lost paper, graffiti on the broken walls where fac­

ing has been shot away to reveal the brick underneath-broken
in spe­

cific shapes that may also be read....
One night, on the wall of a public shithouse stinking and ripe with ty­

phoid, he finds among initials, dates, hasty pictures of penises and

623

om



mouths open to receive them, Werewolf stencils of the dark man withthe high shoulders and the Homburg hat, an official slogan: WILLST DUV -2, DANN ARBEITE. If you want the V -2, then work. Good Evening Ty­rone Slothrop ... no, no, wait, it's O.K., over on the other wall they'vealso painted WILLST DU V-4, DANN ARBEITE. Lucky. The brimmingvoices recede, the joke clarifies, he is only back with Goebbels and theman's inability to let a good thing be. But it had taken an effort to walkaround and look at that other wall. Anything could've been back there.It was dusk. Plowed fields, power lines, ditches and distant windbreakswent for miles. He felt brave and in control. But then another messagecaught his eye:
ROCKETMAN WAS HERE

sign:

His first thought was that he'd written it himself and forgot. Odd thatthat should've been his first thought, but it was. Might be he was start­ing to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Com­bination against who he was right then. In its sluggish coma, the alba­tross stirred.
Past Slothrops, say averaging one a day, ten thousand of them, somemore powerful than others, had been going over every sundown to thefurious host. They were the fifth-columnists, well inside his head, wait­ing the moment to deliver him to the four other divisions outside, clos­ing in....
So, next to the other graffiti, with a piece of rock, he scratches this

Slothrop besieged. Only after he'd left it half a dozen more places didit dawn on him that what he was really drawing was the A4 rocket, seenfrom below. By which time he had become tuned to other fourfold ex­
pressions-variations on Frans van der Croov's cosmic windmill-swas­tikas, gymnastic symbols FFFF in a circle symmetrically upside downand backward, Frisch Fromm Frolich Frei over neat doorways in quietstreets, and crossroads, where you can sit and listen in to traffic from theOther Side, hearing about the future (no serial time over there: eventsare all there in the same eternal moment and so certain messages don'talways "make sense" back here: they lack historical structure, theysound fanciful, or insane).

The sand-colored churchtops rear up on Slothrop's horizons, apsesout to four sides like rocket fins guiding the streamlined spires ... chis-
624

j
�rlae



eled in the sandstone he finds waiting the mark of consecration, a
cross

in a circle. At last, lying one afternoon spread-eagled at his ease
in the

sun, at the edge of one of the ancient Plague towns he
becomes a cross

himself, a crossroads, a living intersection where the judges have
come

to set up a gibbet for a common criminal who is to
be hanged at noon.

Black hounds and fanged little hunters slick as weasels, dogs whose

breeds have been lost for 700 years, chase a female in heat as
the spec­

tators gather, it's the fourth hanging this spring and not
much spectacle

here except that this one, dreaming at the last instant
of who can say

what lifted smock, what fat-haunched gnadige Frau Death may have

come sashaying in as, gets an erection, a tremendous darkpurple
swell­

ing, and just as his neck breaks, he actually
comes in his ragged loin­

wrapping creamy as the skin of a saint
under the purple cloak of Lent,

and one drop of sperm succeeds in rolling, dripping hair
to hair down

the dead leg, all the way down, off the edge of the
crusted bare foot,

drips to earth at the exact center of the
crossroad where, in the work­

ings of the night, it changes into a mandrake
root. Next Friday, at dawn,

the Magician, his own moving Heiligenschein rippling
infrared to ultra­

violet in spectral rings around his shadow over the dewy grass,
comes

with his dog, a coal-black dog who hasn't been fed for a few days.
The

Magician digs carefully all around the precious root till
it's held only by

the finest root-hairs-ties it to the tail of his black dog, stops his own

ears with wax then comes out with a piece of bread to lure the unfed

dog rrrowf! dog lunges for bread, root is torn up
and lets loose its pierc­

ing and fatal scream. The dog drops dead before he's halfway
to break­

fast, his holylight freezes and fades in the million dewdrops. Magician
takes the root tenderly home, dresses it in a little white outfit and

leaves

money with it overnight: in the morning the cash has multiplied
tenfold.

A delegate from the Committee on Idiopathic Archetypes
comes to

visit. "Inflation?" the Magician tries to cover up with some flowing
hand-moves.

"

'Capital'? Never heard of that." "No, no," replies the vis­

itor, "not at the moment. We're trying to think ahead. We'd
like very

much to hear about the basic structure of this. How bad was the

scream, for instance?" "Had m'ears plugged up, couldn't hear it."
The

delegate flashes a fraternal business smile. "Can't say
as I blame

you....
"

Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slo­

throp? He's sat in Saure Bummer's kitchen, the air streaming
with kif

moires, reading soup recipes and finding in every bone and cabbage
leaf

paraphrases of himself . . . news flashes, names of
wheelhorses that will

pay him off enough for a certain getaway. . . . He
used to pick and

625



shovel at the spring roads of Berkshire, April afternoons he's lost,"Chapter 81 work," they called it, following the scraper that clears thewinter's crystal attack-from-within, its white necropoli zing ... pickingup rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex wad­ded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers,broken glass, pieces of automobile, days when in superstition and frighthe could make it all fit, seeing clearly in each an entry in a record, a his­
tory: his own, his winter's, his country's . . . instructing him, dunce anddrifter, in ways deeper than he can explain, have been faces of childrenout the train windows, two bars of dance music somewhere, in someother street at night, needles and branches of a pine tree shaken clearand luminous against night clouds, one circuit diagram out of hundredsin a smudged yellowing sheaf, laughter out of a cornfield in the earlymorning as he was walking to school, the idling of a motorcycle at onedusk-heavy hour of the summer ... and now, in the Zone, later in theday he became a crossroad, after a heavy rain he doesn't recall, Slothropsees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of

pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fillsand he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . .

D D D D D D D

Double-declutchingly, heel-and-toe, away goes Roger Mexico. Downthe summer Autobahn, expansion joints booming rhythmic under hiswheels, he highballs a pre-Hitler Horch 870B through the burnt-purplerolling of the Liineburg Heath. Over the windscreen mild winds blowdown on him, smelling of junipers. Heidschnucken sheep out there restas still as fallen clouds. The bogs and broom go speeding by. Overheadthe sky is busy, streaming, a living plasma.The Horch, army-green with one discreet daffodil painted halfway upits bonnet, was lurking inside a lorry at the Elbeward edge of the Bri­gade pool at Hamburg, shadowed except for its headlamps, stalked eyesof a friendly alien smiling at Roger . Welcome there, Earthman. Onceunder way, he discovered the floor strewn with rolling unlabeled glassjars of what seems to be baby food, weird unhealthy-colored stuff nohuman baby could possibly eat and survive, green marbled with pink,vomit-beige with magenta inclusions, all impossible to identify, eachcap adorned with a smiling, fat, cherubic baby, seething under thebright glass with horrible botulism toxins 'n' ptomaines ... now andthen a new jar will be produced, spontaneously, under the seat, and roll
626



he'� �
out, against all laws of acceleration, among the pedals for his

feet to get
cleM' confused by. He knows he ought to look back underneath there to

find

out what's going on, but can't quite bring himself to.
Bottles roll clanking on the floor, under the bonnet a hung-up tappet

or two chatters its story of discomfort. Wild mustard whips past down
the center of the Autobahn, perfectly two-tone, just yellow and green, a
fateful river seen only by the two kinds of rippling light. Roger sings to a

girl in Cuxhaven who still carries Jessica's name:

I dream that I have found us both again,
With spring so many strangers' lives away,
And we, so free,
Out walking by the sea,
With someone else's paper words to say.

They took us at the gates of green return,
Too lost by then to stop, and ask them why­
Do children meet again?
Does any trace remain,

Along the superhighways of July?

,�

aert

Driving now suddenly into such a bright gold bearding of slope
and field

that he nearly forgets to steer around the banked curve. . . .
A week before she left, she came out to "The White Visitation" for

the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a

loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables lay rusting across
the sod­

den meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth-tendons that sang
in

the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant

wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old,
in hard

twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants

crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted
ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs. Jessica has cut fringes
since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety-"It
looks utterly horrible, you don't have to say it.

"It's utterly swoony," sez Roger, "I love it."
"You' re making fun."
"Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God's sake?"
While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the

wall of Death to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given
up on, creeps over the face of the

Zone. Roger doesn't want to give him

up: Roger wants to do what's right. "I just can't leave the poor twit
out

there, can I? They're trying to destroy him-"



But, "Roger," she'd smile, "it's spring. We're at peace."No, we're not. It's another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E.planted. Now gentlemen as you've seen from the studies our optimumtime is 8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools lettingout, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal require­ments beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months' grace toget our Ruhr interests back on their feet- no, he sees only the sameflows of power, the same impoverishments he's been thrashing aroundin since '39. His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when sheought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that willshow either of them any hope of escape. There's something still on,don't call it a "war" if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate's
gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were alot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . butTheir enterprise goes on.

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is thatJessica believes Them. "The War" was the condition she needed forbeing with Roger. "Peace" allows her to leave him. His resources, nextto Theirs, are too meager. He has no words, no technically splendid em­brace, no screaming fit that can ever hold her. Old Beaver, not surpris­ingly, will be doing air-defense liaison over there, so they'll be togetherin romantic Cuxhaven. Ta-ta mad Roger, it's been grand, a wartimefling, when we came it was utterly incendiary, your arms open wide as aFortress's wings, we had our military secrets, we fooled the fat old colo­nels right and left but stand-down time must come to all, yikes! I mustrun sweet Roger really it's been dreamy....He would fall at her knees smelling of glycerine and rose-water, hewould lick sand and salt from her A TS brogans, offer her his freedom,his next 50 years' pay from a good steady job, his poor throbbing brain.But it's too late. We're at Peace. The paranoia, the danger, the tunelesswhistling of busy Death next door, are all put to sleep, back in the War,back with her Roger Mexico Years. The day the rockets stopped falling,it began to end for Roger and Jessica. As it grew clear, day after safeday, that no more would fall ever again, the new world crept into andover her like spring-not so much the changes she felt in air and light,in the crowds at Woolworth's, as a bad cinema spring, full of paperleaves and cotton-wool blossoms and phony lighting . . . no, neveragain will she stand at their kitchen sink with a china cup squeaking inher fingers, its small crying-child sound defenseless, meekly resonatingBLOWN OUT OF ATTENTION AS THE ROCKET FELL smashingto a clatter of points white and blue across the floor.
628

tu

nit



Those death-rockets now are in the past. This time she'll be on the

the�J firing end, she and Jeremy-isn't that how it was always
meant to be?

firing them out to sea: no death, only the spectacle,
fire and roar, the ex­

citement without the killing, isn't that what she prayed for? back in the

fading house, derequisitioned now, occupied again by
human extensions

of ball-fringe, dog pictures, Victorian chairs, secret piles of
News of the

World in the upstairs closet.
She's meant to go. The orders come from higher than she can

reach.

Her future is with the World's own, and Roger's only with this strange
version of the War he still carries with him. He can't move, poor dear, it

won't let him go. Still passive as he'd been under the
rockets. Roger the

victim. Jeremy the firer. "The War's my mother," he
said the first day,

and Jessica has wondered what ladies in black appeared
in his dreams,

what ash-white smiles, what shears to come snapping through the room,

through their winter ... so much of him she never got
to know ... so

much unfit for Peace. Already she's beginning to think of their time as a

chain of explosions, craziness ganged to the rhythms of the
War. Now

he wants to go rescue Slothrop, another rocket-creature,
a vampire

whose sex life actually fed on the terror of that Rocket Blitz-ugh,

creepy, creepy. They ought to lock him up, not set
him free. Roger must

care more about Slothrop than about her, they're two of a kind, aren't

they, well-she hopes they'll be happy together. They
can sit and drink

beer, tell rocket stories, scribble equations for each other.
How jolly. At

least she won't be leaving him in a vacuum. He won't be lonely, he'll

have something to occupy the time. . . .
She has wandered away from him, down the beach. The sun

is so

bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are
drawn sharp

and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking. Her head, as always,
is

bent forward, away, the bare nape he's never stopped loving, will
never

see again, unprotected as her beauty, her innocence of how
forever in

peril it moves through the World. She may know a little, may
think of

herself, face and body, as "pretty" . . . but he could never tell her all
the rest, how many other living things, birds, nights smelling of grass
and rain, sunlit moments of simple peace, also gather in what she is to
him. Was. He is losing more than single Jessica: he's losing a full range
of life, of being for the first time at ease in the Creation. Going back

to

winter now, drawing back into his single envelope. The effort it takes to
extend any further is more than he

can make alone.

He hadn't thought he'd cry when she left. But he cried. Snot by the
cubic yard, eyes like red carnations. Presently, every time his

left foot

hit the ground walking he'd get a jolt of pain through half his skull. Ah,



this must be what they mean by the "pain of separation!" Pointsmankept showing up with armloads of work. Roger found himself unable to
forget Jessica, and caring less about Slothrop.

But one day Milton Gloaming popped in to deliver him from his un­
moving. Gloaming was just back from a jaunt through the Zone. He'dfound himself on a task force with one Josef Schleim, a defector of sec­
ondary brilliance, who had once worked for the IG out of Dr. Reith­
inger's office, YOWl-the Statistical Department of NW7. There,Schleim had been assigned to the American desk, gathering for the IGeconomic intelligence, through subsidiaries and licensees like
Chemnyco, General Aniline and Film, Ansco, Winthrop. In '36 he cameto England to work for Imperial Chemicals, in a status that was never tobe free from ambiguities. He'd heard of Slothrop, yes indeed ... re­called him from the old days. When Lyle Bland went out on his lasttransmural journey, there'd been Green Reports flapping through theIG offices for weeks, Geheime Kommandosache, rumors coupling anduncoupling like coal-tar molecules under pressure, all to do with who

was likely to take over the Slothrop surveillance, now that Bland was
gone.

This was toward the beginning of the great struggle for the IG's intel­ligence machinery. The economic department of the foreign office andthe foreign department of the economic office were both after it. So
were the military, in particular the Wehrwirtschaftstab, a section of theGeneral Staff that maintained OKW's liaison with industry. The IG'sown liaison with OKW was handled by Vermittlungsstelle W, underDrs. Dieckmann and Gorr. The picture was further confused by theusual duplicate Nazi Party offices, Abwehr-Organizations, set upthroughout German industry after 1933. The Nazis' watchdog over theIG was called "Abteilung A" and was set up in the same office buildingas-in fact, it appeared perfectly congruent with-the IG's own Armyliaison group, Yermittlungsstelle W. But Technology, alas, braid­crowned and gold-thighed maiden, always comes up for grabs like this.Most likely the bitching and bickering of Army vs. Party was whatfinally drove Schleim over the hill, more than any moral feelings aboutHitler. In any case, he remembers the Slothrop surveillance being as­signed to a newly created "Sparte IY" under Vermittlungsstelle W.Sparte I was handling nitrogen and gasoline, II dyes, chemicals, bunarubber, pharmaceuticals, III film and fibers. IY handled Slothrop andnothing else, except-Schleim had heard tell-one or two miscellaneous

patents acquired through some dealings with IG Chemie in Switzer-
630



a!\\�[:
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out O�

ng �r�
mu��

o 00 �j�
nat m�:

land. An analgesic whose name he couldn't recall, and a new plastic,
some name like Mipolam . . . "Polimex," or something. . . .

"Sounds like that would've come under Sparte II," was Gloaming's

only comment at the time.
"A few directors were upset," Schleim agreed. "Ter Meer was a

Draufganger-he and Horlein both, go-ahead fellows. They might
have

got it back."
"Did the Party assign an Abwehr man to this Sparte IV?"

"They must have, but I don't know if he was SD or SS.
There were so

many of them around. I can
remember some sort of rather thin chap

with thick eyeglasses coming out of the office there once or twice. But

he wore civilian clothes. Couldn't tell you his name."

Well now what'n the bloody 'ell....
"Surveillance?" Roger is fidgeting heavily, with his hair, his necktie,

ears, nose, knuckles, "IG Farben had Slothrop under surveillance? Be­
fore the War? What for, Gloaming."

"Odd, isn't it?" Cheerio baing out the door without another word,

leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning
to grow,

the leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery
of

his brain. IG Farben, eh? Mr. Pointsman has been chumming, almost

exclusively these days, with upper echelon from ICI. ICI has
cartel ar­

rangements with Farben. The bastard. Why, he must have
known about

Slothrop all along. The Jamf business was only a front for . . .
well say

what the hell is going on here?

Halfway up to London (Pointsman has repossessed the Jaguar,
so

Roger's on a motorcycle from the PISCES pool, which
consists now

only of the cycle and one Morris with virtually no clutch) it
occurs to

him that Gloaming was sent around deliberately by Pointsman, as some
obscure tactic in this Nayland Smith campaign he seems to be into

(Pointsman owns a matched set of all the books in Sax Rohmer's great
Manichaean saga, and is apt these days to pop in at any time, usually
while Roger is sleeping or trying to take a quiet shit, and actually

stand

there, in front of the toilet, reading aloud a pertinent text). Nothing is

beyond Pointsman, he's worse than old Pudding was, no shame at
all.

He would use anyone-Gloaming, Katje Borgesius, Pirate Prentice, no
one is (jessica) exempt from his (Jessica?) Machiavellian-

[essica, Oh. Yes ofcourseofcourse Mexico you fucking idiot ... no
wonder the 137th gave him the runaround. No wonder her orders came
from Too High. He had even, lamb frolicking about the spit, asked
Pointsman to see what he could do.... Fool. Fool.



He arrives at Twelfth House on Callaho Mews in a homicidal state of
mind. Bicycle thieves run down the back streets, old pros wheelingthem three abreast at a good pace. Young men with natty mustaches
preen in the windows. Children loot the dustbins. Courtyard corners aredrifted with official papers, the shed skin of a Beast at large. A tree has
inexplicably withered in the street to a shingly black corpse. A fly lands
belly-up on the front fender of Roger's motorcycle, thrashes ten sec­
onds, folds its veined and sensitive wings, and dies. Quick as that. First
one Roger has ever seen. P-47s fly over in squadron box formations, four
checkmarks apiece RedWhiteBlueYellow on the unamended form of
the whitish sky, squadron after squadron: it is either some military re­view, or another war. A plasterer is busy around the corner, smoothingover a bomb-scarred wall, plaster heaped on his hawk luscious as cream
cheese, using an unfamiliar trowel inherited from a dead friend, still,these first days, digging holes like an apprentice, the shiny knife-edgenot yet broken to his hand, the curl of it a bit more than his own
strength could have ever brought it to ... Henry was a larger bloke.
. . . The fly, who was not dead, unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool
somebody else.

All right Pointsman stomping into Twelfth House, rattling the cork­boards down the seven hallways and flights, receptionists making longarms for the telephone dammit now where are you-Not in his office. But Ceza Bozsavolgyi is, and tries to give Roger ahard time. "You are rna-king a spec-tacle of your-self, young man.""Shurrup you Transylvanian twit," snarls Roger, "I'm looking for theboss, see, one funny move out of you and it's your last taste of O-nega­tive, Jackson, those fangs won't even be able to gum oatmeal when I'm
through wiv you-" Alarmed Rozsavolgyi, retreating around the watercooler, tries to pick up a swivel chair to defend himself with. The seatfalls off, and Rozsavolgyi is left with only the base, which happens, em­barra ingly, to be shaped like a cross.

"Where is he," Mexican standoff, Roger gritting his teeth do not suc­cumb to hysteria, it is a counter-productive luxury you cannot, in yourpresent great vulnerability, afford. . . . "Come on you sod, tell me oryou'll never see the inside of a coffin again-"In runs a short but spunky secretary, bit of a chubbette here, and
commences belting Roger in the shins with the excess-profits tax recordsfrom 1940 to '44 of an English steel firm which happened to share a pat­ent with Vereinigte Stahlwerke for an alloy used in the liquid-oxygencouplings for the line running aft to the S-Cerat in A4 number 00000.But Roger's shins are not set up for this kind of information. The

632



e,t

roJ/,

secretary's glasses fall off. "Miss Miiller-Hochleben," reading her name­

tag, "you look beastly without your glasses. Put ssem back on, at
vunce!" this comic Nazi routine being inspired by her surname.

"I can't find them," German accent all right, "I don't see too well."
"Well, we'll see if we can't help you here-ah! what's this? Miss Miil-

ler-Hochleben!"

"Ja....
"

"What do they look like, these eyeglasses?"
"They are white-"
"With clever little rhinestones all around the rims, Fraulein? eh?"

"[a, ja, und mit-"
"And running down all the earpieces too, a-and feathers?"
"Ostrich feathers....

"

"Male ostrich feathers, dyed a stunning peacock blue, sprouting off
the edges?"

"That is my eyeglasses, ja," sez the groping secretary, "where are

they, please?"
"Right here!" bringing his foot down CRUNCH, smashing them to

bright arctic gatherings all over Pointsman's rug.
"I-say," offers Rozsavolgyi from a far corner: the one corner of the

room, by the way, which is not brightly lit, yes kind of an optic anomaly
here, just a straight, square room, no odd-shaped polyhedrons in
Twelfth House . . . and still, this strange, unaccountable prism of
shadow in the corner . . . more than one visitor has popped in to find
Mr. Pointsman not at his desk where he ought to be but standing in the
shadow-comer-most disturbingly facing into it.... Rozsavolgyi is not
himself that fond of the Corner, he's tried it a few times but only came
out shaking his head: "Mis-ter Pointsman, l-don't like it in there, at all.
What poss-ible kind, of a thrill can an-yone get, from such an unwhole­
some experience. Eh?" raising one crookedly wistful eyebrow. Points­
man had only looked apologetic, not for himself but to something for
Hozsavolgyi, and said gently, "This is one spot in the room where I feel
alive," well bet your ass one or two memos went up toward Ministerial
level over that one. If they reached the Minister himself, it was prob­
ably as office entertainment. "Oh yes, yes," shaking his wise old head of
sheep's wool, high, almost Slavic cheekbones crinkling his eyes up into
an inattentive but polite laughter, "yes Pointsman's famous Corner, yes
... wouldn't be surprised if it was haunted, eh?" Reflex laughs from
the underlings present, though only grim smiles from the overlings.
"Get the S.P.R. in, to have a look," giggles someone with a cigar. 'The
poor bloke will think he's back in the War again." "Hear, hear," and,, n�



"That's a good one, all right," ring through the layering smoke. Practical
jokes are all the rage among these particular underlings, a kind of class
tradition.

"You say what," Roger has been screaming for a while.
"l-sau," sez Bozsavolgyi, again.
"You say, 'I say'? Is that it? Then you should have said, 'I say, "Isay."

, "

"I did."
"No, no-you said, 'I say,' once, is what you-"
"A-hal But I said it again. I-said it ... twice."
"But that was after I asked you the question-you can't tell me the

two 'I say's were both part of the same statement," unless, "that's ask­
ing me to be unreasonably," unless it's really true that, "credulous, and
around you that's a form of," that we're the same person, and that thewhole exchange was ONE SINGLE THOUGHT yaaaggghhh and that
means, "insanity, Rozsavolgyi->-"

"My glasses," snivels Fraulein Mi.iller-Hochleben, now crawlingaround the room, Mexico scattering the glass splinters with his shoe sothat now and then the unfortunate girl will cut a hand or a knee, begin­ning to trail dark little feathers of blood for inches at a time, eventually-assuming she were to last long enough-dotting in Pointsrnan's ruglike the train of a Beardsley gown.
"You're doing fine, Miss Miiller-Hochlebenl" cries Roger encourag­ingly, "and as for you, you-" but is stopped on noticing how Hozsavol­

gyi now is nearly invisible in the shadow, and how the whites of his eyesare actually glowing white, jittering around in the air, winking-out-com­ing-back ... it is costing Hozsavolgyi an effort to stay in this shadow­
corner. It is not, at all, his sort of place. For one thing, the rest of the
room seems to be at more of a distance, as through the view-finder on a
camera. And the walls-they don't appear to be ... well, solid, actu­
ally. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standingpiece of silk or nylon, the color watery gray but now and then with a
surprise island in the flow, some color absolutely foreign to this room:saffron spindles, palm-green ovals, magenta firths running comblike intojagged comicbook-orange chunks of island as the wounded fighter-planecircles, jettisons the tanks, then the silver canopy, sets the flaps to justabove a stall, wheels up as the blue (suddenly, such a violent blue!) , Wrushes in just before impact throttle closed uhhnnhhl oh shit the reef,we're going to smash up on the-oh. Oh, there's no reef? We-we're Of)

safe? We are! Mangoes, I see mangoes on that tree over there! a-and �
there's a girl-there's a lotta girls! Lookit, they're all gorgeous, their tits �

634



·

point straight out, and they're all swingin' those grass skirts, playin' uku­
leles and singing (though why are the voices so hard and tough, so na­

sally like the voices of an American chorus line?)-

White man welcome ta Puke-a-hook-a-look-i I-i-i-island!

'I £\ One taste 0' my pa-paya and y'll never wanna go a-waaaay!
Moon like a yel-low ba-na-na,
Hangin' over, my ca-ba-na,
And lotsa hula, hula games to play-
Oh the stars are fallin' over Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island,
And the lava down the mountain's runnin' scrump-shus as a

cherry pie-
Even Sweet Leilani in the Little Grass Shack

Loves a coconut monkey and a missionary snack,
Looky-looky, sugar cookie, you're on Puke-a-hook-a-Iook-i

I-i-i-island!

O-boy, o-boy-go-ing to nail me, one, of those lit-tIe is-land love-lies,
spend, the rest . . . of my life, eat-ing pa-pay-as, fra-grant as the cunt,
of young paradise-

When paradise was young. The pilot is turning to Rozsavolgyi, who is
still strapped in safety harness behind him. The face is covered with hel­
met, goggles that reflect too much light, oxygen mask-a face of metal,
leather, isinglass. But now the pilot is raising the goggles, slowly, and
whose eyes are these, so familiar, smiling hello, I know you, don't you
know me? Don't you really know me?

Hozsavolgyi screams and backs out of the corner, shivering, blinded
now in the overhead lights. Fraulein Miiller-Hochleben is crawling
around and around in the same circle, faster and faster, nearly a blur,
croaking hysterically. Both have reached the exact level Roger's subtle
psychological campaign here was intended to work them up to. Quietly
but firmly: "Right. Now for the last time, where is Mr. Pointsman?"

"Mossmoon's office," they reply, in unison.
Mossmoon's office is a roller-skate ride away from Whitehall, and

guarded by room after room of sentinel girls, each of them wearing a
frock of a radically different color from the others (and this goes on for a
while, so you can imagine what 3-sigma colors these are to begin with, if
that many can be so "radically different," you know, like that-oh, col­
ors such as lizard, evening star, pale Atlantis to name a few), and whom
Roger romances, bribes, threatens, double-talks and (sigh) yes punches
his way through till finally "Mossmoon," pounding on this gigantic oak



door, carved like the stone doorways of certain temples, "Pointsman,the jig's up! In the name of whatever marginal decency enables you to
get through the day without being shot dead by the odd armed stranger,
open this door." This is quite a long speech, and the door actually openshalfway through, but Roger finishes it up anyhow. He's looking into a
room of incandescent lemon-lime subdued drastically, almost to the
milky point of absinthe-and-water, a room warmer than this tableful of
faces really deserves, but perhaps it's Roger's entrance that deepens thecolor a bit now as he runs and jumps up on the polished table, over the
polished head of a director of a steel company, skidding 20 feet downthe waxed surface to confront the man at the end, who sits with a debo­
nair (well, snotty) smile on his face. "Mossmoon, I'm on to you." Has heactually come inside, in among the hoods, eye-slits, gold paraphernalia,the incense and the thighbone scepter?

"That's not Mossmoon," Mr. Pointsman clearing his throat as he
speaks, "Mexico do come down off the table won't you . . . gentlemen,one of myoId PISCES colleagues, brilliant but rather unstable, as youmay've noted-oh, Mexico, really-"

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busypissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon onthese poker-faced men themselves, who, although executive material all
right, men of hair-trigger minds, are still not quite willing to admit thatthis is happening, you know, in any world that really touches, at too
many points, the one they're accustomed to ... and actually the fall ofwarm piss is quite pleasant as it sweeps by, across ten-guinea cravats,creative-looking little beards, up into a liver-spotted nostril, across a
pair of Army-issue steel-rim eyeglasses, slashing up and down starchedfronts, Phi Beta Kappa keys, Legions of Honour, Orders of Lenin, IronCrosses, V.C.s, retirement watchchains, Dewey-for-President lapel pins,half-exposed service revolvers, and even a sawed-off shotgun under theshoulder there. . . .

"Pointsman," the cock, stubborn, annoyed, bucks like an airship
among purple clouds (very dense purple, as pile velvet that color) atnightfall when the sea-breeze promises a difficult landing, "I've saved
you for last. But-goodness, I don't seem to have any urine left, here.Not even a drop. I'm so sorry. Nothing left for you at all. Do you under­stand? If it means giving my life," the words have just come out, andmaybe Roger's exaggerating, but maybe not, "there will be nothing any­where for you. What you get, I'll take. If you go higher in this, I'll comeand get you, and take you back down. Wherever you go. Even should
you find a spare moment of rest, with an understanding woman in a



OW �I

quiet room, I'll be at the window. I'll always be just outside. You
will

never cancel me. If you come out, I'll go in, and the room will be defiled

for you, haunted, and you'll have to find another. If you stay inside I'll
come in anyway-I'll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last.
You'll have the last room, Pointsman, and you'll have to live in it the
rest of your scum, prostituted life."

Pointsman won't look at him. Won't meet his eyes. That's what Roger
wanted. The security police show up as an anticlimax, although aficio­
nados of the chase scene, those who cannot look at the Taj Mahal, the
Uffizi, the Statue of Liberty without thinking chase scene, chase scene,
wow yeah Douglas Fairbanks scampering across that moon minaret
there-these enthusiasts may find interest in the following:

Roger dives under the table to button his fly and the zealous flatties
leap at each other over the top of the table, colliding and cursing, but

Roger has gone scuttling down the horsehide, hobnailed, pinstriped,
Morn's-argyle-socked sublevel of these conspirators above, a precarious
passage, anyone foot could kick untelegraphed and wipe him out-till
he arrives back at the bald steel-magnate, reaches up, grabs him by the
necktie or the cock, whichever it's easiest to get a hold on, and drags the
man down under the table.

"Right. Now, we're going to get out of here, and you're my hostage,
get it?" He emerges dragging the livid executive by his necktie or cock,
pulling him like a child's sleigh strangling and apoplectic out the door,
past the modally unusual rainbow of sentinel-ladies now intimidated­

looking at least, sirens already wailing in the street MANIAC ASSAULTS OIL
PARLEY Ousted After --ing on Conferees and he's out of the elevator

by now running down a back corridor to a central-heating complex
zoom! over the heads of a couple of black custodians who are passing
back and forth a cigarette rolled from some West African narcotic herb,
stuffs his hostage into a gigantic furnace which is banked for the spring
(too bad), and flees out the back way down an aisle of plane trees into a
small park, over a fence, zippety zop, fastfoot Roger and the London

cops.
There's nothing back at "The White Visitation" he really needs.

Nothing he can't let go. Clothes on his back and the pool motorcycle, a
pocket full of spare change and anger unlimited, what more does a 30-
year-old innocent need to make his way in the city? "I'm fucking Dick
Whittington!" it occurs to him zooming down Kings Road, "I've come
to London! I'm your Lord Mayor....

"

Pirate is at home, and apparently expecting Roger. Pieces of his faith­
ful Mendoza lie about the refectory table, shining with oil or bluing,

cro�1

arr�:



- ==-----:!o '

-_

/
�

-

:",.

wads, patches, rods.ibottles occupy his hands, but his eyes are on Roger.
"No," cutting into a denunciation of Pointsman when Milton Gloam­

ing's name comes up, "it's a minor item, but stop right there. Pointsman
didn't send him. We sent him."

"We."
"You're a novice paranoid, Roger," first time Prentice has ever used

his Christian name and it touches Roger enough to check his tirade. "Of
course a well-developed They-system is necessary-but it's only half the
story. For every They there ought to be a We. In our case there is.
Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a We-system
as a They-system-"

"Wait, wait, first where's the Haig and Haig, be a gracious host, sec­
ond what is a 'They-system,' I don't pull Chebychev's Theorem on you,
do I?"

"I mean what They and Their hired psychiatrists call 'delusional sys­
tems.' Needless to say, 'delusions' are always officially defined. We don't
have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of
expediency. It's the system that matters. How the data arrange them­
selves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart. Your idea that
Pointsman sent Gloaming takes a wrong fork. Without any contrary set
of delusions-delusions about ourselves, which I'm calling aWe-system-the Gloaming idea might have been all right-"

"Delusions about ourselves?"
"Not real ones."
"But officially defined."
"Out of expediency, yes."
"Well, you're playing Their game, then."
"Don't let it bother you. You'll find you can operate quite well.

Seeing as we haven't won yet, it isn't really much of a problem."
Roger is totally confused. At this point, in wanders who but Milton

Gloaming with a black man Roger recognizes now as one of the two
herb-smokers in the furnace room under Clive Mossmoon's office. His
name is Jan Otyiyumbu, and he's a Schwarzkommando liaison man.
One of Blodgett Waxwing's apache lieutenants shows up with his girl,who's not walking so much as dancing, very fluid and slow, a dance in
which Osbie Feel, popping out of the kitchen now with his shirt off (and
a Porky Pig tattoo on his stomach? How long has Feel had that?) cor­
rectly identifies the influence of heroin.

It's a little bewildering-if this is a "We-system," why isn't it at least
thoughtful enough to interlock in a reasonable way, like They-systemsdo?

"T

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"That's exactly it," Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky
into a wide,

alarming grin, "They 're the rational ones. We piss on
Their rational ar­

rangements. Don't we ... Mexico?"

"Hoorah!" cry the others. Well taken, Osbie.

Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck sits by the window, cleaning a Sten.
Out­

side, blowing over its dorsal and summer stillness, London today
can

feel advance chills of Austerity. There isn't a word in Sir Stephen's head

right now. He is completely involved with the weapon.
He no longer

thinks about his wife, Nora, although she's out there, in some room, still
surrounded by her planetary psychics, and aimed herself now

toward a

peculiar fate. In recent weeks, in true messianic style,
it has come clear

to her that her real identity is, literally, the Force of Gravity. I am Grav­

ity, I am That against which the
Rocket must struggle, to which the pre­

historic wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of His­

tory.... Her wheeling freaks, her seers, teleporters,
astral travelers

and tragic human interfaces all know of her visitation,
but none see any

way for her to turn. She
must prove herself now-find deeper forms of

renunciation, deeper than Sabbatai Zvi's apostasy before the
Sublime

Porte. It is a situation not without its chances for a good practical joke
now and then-poor Nora will be suckered into seances that

wouldn't

fool your great-aunt, visits from the
likes of Ronald Cherrycoke in a

Jesus Christ getup, whistling down the wires
into a hidden ultraviolet

baby spot where he will start fluorescing in most questionable taste,

blithering odd bits of Gospel together, reaching down
from his crucified

altitudes to actually cop feels of Nora's girdled behind . . . highly
offended, she will flee into hallways full of clammy invisible hands-pol­

tergeists will back toilets up on her, ladylike turds
will bob at her virgin

vertex, and screaming ugh, ass dripping, girdle around her knees,
she

will go staggering into her own drawing-room
to find no refuge even

there, no, someone will have caused to materialize for her a
lesbian ele­

phant soixante-neuf, slimy trunks pistoning symmetrically
in and out of

juicy elephant vulvas, and when she turns to escape
this horrid exhibi­

tion she'll find some playful ghost has latched the door behind her, and
another's just about to sock her in the face with a cold

Yorkshire pud­
ding....

In Pirate's maisonette, everyone is singing now a counterforce travel­

ing song, with Thomas Gwenhidwy, who has
not fallen to the dialectic

curse of Pointsman's Book after all, accompanying on what seems to be

a rosewood crwth:

They've been sleeping on your shoulder,
They've been crying in your beer,

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These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don't seem to put out �ow,an'
"Ahh,any heat at all. Confiscated weapons and ammo lie around half-crated

or piled loose inside the C-Company perimeter. For days the U.S. Army �a�and \
has been out sweeping Thuringia, busting into houses in the middle of �anrbar
the night. A certain lycanthropophobia or fear of Werewolves occupies ate1r ree
minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won't be enough ��·nalrsifood or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward the end of the War, for I Tneeol
example, all went to make alcohol for the rockets. But there are still
small-arms aplenty, and ammunition to fit them. Where you cannot
feed, you take away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmlylinked in the governmental mind for as long as either has been around.

On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and then, bright as ie�yo
dittany in July at the Zippo's ceremonial touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a I unes,ge
replacement here in the 89th Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, just don
sits huddling nearly on top of the fire, shivering and watching the divi- a crool
sional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles a cluster of rocket - indudi
noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all in black and olive-drab, but here y

640

And They've sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn't care

for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise.
But I'm telling you today,
That it ain't the only way,
And there's shit you won't be eating any more­
They've been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn't a resistance, it's a war.

"It's a war," Roger sings, driving into Cuxhaven, wondering offhand
how Jessica has cut her hair for Jeremy, and how that insufferable prig
would look with a thrust chamber wrapped around his head, "it's a
war.

Light one up before you mosey out that door,
Once you cuddled 'em and kissed 'em,
But we're bringin' down Their system,
And it isn't a resistance, it's a war. ...

D D D D D D D

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which now looks like something even stranger than that, which
Eddie

will think of in a minute.

Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero's favorite pastimes.
Not the kind of

shiver normal people get, the goose-on-the-grave passover and gone,
but

shivering that doesn't stop. Very hard to get used to at
first. Eddie is a

connoisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way, to read

them, like Saure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos Thanatz
reads whip­

scars. But the gift isn't limited just to Eddie's own shivers, oh no, they're
other peoples' shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they

come in

all together in groups (lately he's been growing in his brain a
kind of dis­

criminator circuit, learning how to separate them out). Least interesting

o�ana of these shivers are the ones with a perfectly steady frequency,
no varia-

�e�ri� tion to them at all. The
next-to-least interesting are the frequency-mod-

"11'1; ulated kind, now faster now slower depending
on information put in at

the other end, wherever that might be. Then you have the irregular
waveforms that change both in frequency and in amplitude. They

have

to be Fourier-analyzed into their harmonics, which is a
little tougher.

There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies,
certain power­

levels-you have to be pretty good to get the hang of
these.

"Hey Pensiero." It is Eddie's Sergeant,
Howard ("Slow") Lerner.

"Getcher ass offa dat fire."

"Aww, Sarge," chatters Eddie, "c'mon. I wuz just tryin'
ta get

wawm."

"No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One 0' th' koinels wants his hair cut, right
now, an' yer it!"

"Ahh, youse guys," mutters Pensiero, crawling over
to his sleeping

bag and looking through his pack for comb
and scissors. He is the com­

pany barber. His haircuts, which
take hours and often days, are immedi­

ately recognizable throughout the Zone, revealing
as they do the hair­

by-hair singlemindedness of the "benny"
habitue.

The colonel is sitting, waiting, under an electric bulb.
The bulb is re­

ceiving its power from another enlisted man,
who sits back in the shad­

ows hand-pedaling the twin generator cranks. It is
Eddie's friend Pri­

vate Paddy ("Electro") McGonigle, an Irish lad
from New Jersey, one of

those million virtuous and adjusted city poor you know from the
mov­

ies-you've seen them dancing, singing, hanging
out the washing on the

lines, getting drunk at wakes, worrying about
their children going bad, I

just don't know any more Faather,
he's a good b'y but he's runnin' with

a crool crowd, on through every wretched Hollywood lie down
to and

including this year's big hit, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
With his crank

here young Paddy is practicing another form of
Eddie's gift, though he's

641



transmitting not receiving. The bulb appears to burn steadily, but this is
really a succession of electric peaks and valleys, passing by at a speed
that depends on how fast Paddy is cranking. It's only that the wire in­
side the bulb unbrightens slow enough before the next peak shows up
that fools us into seeing a steady light. It's really a train of imperceptible
light and dark. Usually imperceptible. The message is never conscious
on Paddy's part. It is sent by muscles and skeleton, by that circuit of his
body which has learned to work as a source of electrical power.

Right now Eddie Pensiero is shivering and not paying much attention
to that light bulb. His own message is interesting enough. Somebody
close by, out in the night, is playing a blues on a mouth harp. "Whut's
dat?" Eddie wants to know, standing under the white light behind the
silent colonel in his dress uniform, "hey, McGonigle-you hear
sump'n?"

"Yeah," jeers Paddy from behind the generator, "I hear yer dis­
chodge, Hyin' away, wit' big wings comin' outa th' ass end. Dat's whut I
hear! Yuk, yuk!"

"Aw, it's th' bunk!" replies Eddie Pensiero. "Y-you don't hear no dis­
chodge, ya big dumbheaded Mick."

"Hey, Pensiero, ya know whut a Eye-talian submarine sounds like, on
dat new sonar? Huh?"

"Vh . . . whut?"

"Pinnnggguinea-guinea-guinea wopwopwop] Dat's whut! Yuk, yuk,
yuk!"

"Fuck youse," sez Eddie, and commences combing the colonel's sil­
ver-black hair.

The moment the comb contacts his head, the colonel begins to speak.
"Ordinarily, we'd spend no more than 24 hours on a house-to-house
sweep. Sundown to sundown, house to house. There's a quality of black
and gold to either end of it, that way, silhouettes, shaken skies pure as a focenave
cyclorama. But these sunsets, out here, I don't know. Do you suppose t tffiotlon,
something has exploded somewhere? Really-somewhere in the East? �ffuat. n
Another Krakatoa? Another name at least that exotic . . . the colors are IOu, , , ,
so different now. Volcanic ash, or any finely-divided substance, sus- ")did
pended in the atmosphere, can diffract the colors strangely. Did you Qownwar
know that, son? Hard to believe, isn't it? Rather a long taper if you m�roddon't mind, and just short of combable on top. Yes, Private, the colors � inilieai
change, and how! The question is, are they changing according to some- lUo�tanc
thing? Is the sun's everyday spectrum being modulated? Not at random, one-ev
but systematically, by this unknown debris in the prevailing winds? Is a city bthere information for us? Deep questions, and disturbing ones. chicken

"Wh,
nave a 1

Cnicago.
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Wilconsi

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Mlo



enbon

elxx!r

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"Where are you from, son? I'm from Kenosha,
Wisconsin. My folks

have a little farm back there. Snowfields and fenceposts all the way to

Chicago. The snow covers the old cars up on blocks in
the yards . . .

big white bundles . . . it looks like Graves Registration
back there in

Wisconsin.

"Heh, heh. . . ."

"Hey Pensiero," calls Paddy McGonigle, "ya still hearin' dat
sound?"

"Yeah uh I t'ink it's a mouth-organ," Pensiero busily combing up sin-

gle hairs, cutting each one a slightly different length, going
back again

and again to touch up here and there . . . God is who
knows their num­

ber. Atropos is who severs them to different lengths. So, God
under the

aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned,
is in possession of Eddie

Pensiero tonight.
"I got your mouth organ," jeers Paddy, "right

here! Look! A wop

clarinet!
"

Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind of
modulated

frequency. Assume a state of grace in which all hairs
were once distrib­

uted perfectly even, a time of innocence when they
fell perfectly

straight, all over the colonel's head. Winds of the day, gestures
of dis­

traction, sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls at the edge
of

sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have
since written on that

perfect grating. Passing through it tonight, restructuring it,
Eddie Pensi­

ero is an agent of History. Along with the reworking of
the colonel's

head runs the shiver-borne blues-long runs in number 2 and 3 hole

correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep
reaches of hair,

birch trunks in a very humid summer night, approaches to a stone
house

in a wooded park, stags paralyzed beside the high flagged
walks. . . .

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands-you suck a clear note, on pitch,
and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face. Muscles

of your

face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any
emotion, all your life. Where you send the pure

note is partly a function

of that. There's that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual angle bothers

you....

"I didn't know where I was," relates the colonel. "I kept climbing
downward, along these big sheared chunks of concrete. Black

reinforc­

ing rod poking out . . . black rust. There were
touches of royal purple

in the air, not bright enough to blur out over their edges, or change
the

substance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, one by
one-ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you're
a city boy. There's a lot to learn, out on the farm.

Teaches you what a

chicken fetus looks like, so that if you happen to be climbing around a

643



concrete mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the sky re­
produced in purple, you'll know what they look like-that's a heap bet­
ter than the city, son, there you just move from crisis to crisis, each one
brand-new, nothing to couple it back onto....

"

Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous ruin, his hair
at the moment looking very odd-brushed forward from one occipital
spot, forward and up in great long points, forming a black sunflower or
sunbonnet around his face, in which the prominent feature is the colo­
nel's long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for him out of crevices
among the debris, sort of fast happy lunge out and back in, thin pincer
arms, nothing personal, just thought I'd grab a little night air, ha, hal
When they miss the colonel-as they always seem to do-why they just
zip back in with a gambler's ho-hum, well, maybe next time. . . .

Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be captured and cre­
mated by dacoits! Oh Jesus there they are now, unthinkable Animals
running low in the light from the G-5 version of the city, red and yellow
turbans, scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a '37 Ford,
same undirected eyes, same exemption from the Karmic Hammer-

A '37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C'mon quit fooling. They'll all
end up in junkyards same as th' rest!

Oh, will they, Skippy? Why are there so many on the roads, then?
W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th' War, I mean there's no

new cars being built right now so we all have to keep our Old Reliable
in tiptop shape cause there's not too many mechanics left here on the
home front, a-and we shouldn't hoard gas, and we should keep that A­
sticker prominently displayed in the lower right-

Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your senseless and
retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the points. Here is where the
paths divided. See the man back there. He is wearing a white hood. His
shoes are brown. He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it
because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice man. He is the
pointsman. He is called that because he throws the lever that changes
the points. And we go to Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or "Der
Leid-Stadt," that's what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem
about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. But we will
not read it, because we are going to Happyville. The pointsman has
made sure we'll go there. He hardly has to work at all. The lever is very
smooth, and easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you knew
where it was. But look what a lot of work he has done, with just one lit­
tle push. He has sent us all the way to Happyville, instead of to Pain

644

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City. That is because he knows just where the points
and the lever are.

He is the only kind of man who puts in very little
work and makes big

things happen, all over the world. He could have
sent you on the right

trip back there, Skippy. You can have your fantasy
if you want, you

probably don't deserve anything better, but Mister
Information tonight

is in a kind mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by re­

minding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that
dacoit-faced auto still on the

roads? You said "the War," just as you rattled over the points onto
the

wrong track. The War was the
set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the

truth is that the War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only
one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one, rather surreal­

istic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying ta­

pers off now and then, but the
War is still killing lots and lots of people.

Only right now it is killing them in more
subtle ways. Often in ways that

are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to
trace. But the right

people are dying, just as they do when
armies fight. The ones who stand

up, in Basic, in the middle
of the machine-gun pattern. The ones who

do not have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show a
mo­

ment's weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones the War
cannot use,

and so they die. The right ones survive. The others,
it's said, even know

they have a short life expectancy. But they persist
in acting the way

they do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn't it
be nice if we could eliminate

them completely? Then no one would have to
be killed in the War.

That would be fun, wouldn't it, Skippy?
Jeepers, it sure would, Mister

Information! Wow, I-I can't wait to see

Happyville!
Happily, he doesn't have to wait at all.

One of the dacoits comes

leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk
cord strung buzzing tight be­

tween his fists, eager let's-get-to-it grin, and just at
the same moment a

pair of arms comes pincering up out
of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers

the colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on
his ass, and

sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering oh shit,
which even

dacoits do too.

"You are under the mountain," a voice announces. Stony
cave-acous­

tics in here. "Please remember from this point on to obey all pertinent

regulations.
"

His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic
with rolling head­

lamp eyes. It is shaped something like a
crab. "That's Cancer in Latin,"

sez the robot, "and in Kenosha, too!" It will prove
to be addicted to

o Pain one-liners
that never quite come off for anyone but it.



and squashable out on the bare boards, rushing, reliving the terror of
some sudden blast of current out of nowhere and high overhead the
lambent, all-seeing Bulb. In their innocence, the Baby Bulbs don't know
what to make of this roach's abreaction-they feel his fright, but don't
know what it is. They just want to be his friend. He's interesting and has
good moves. Everybody's excited except for Byron, who considers the
other Bulb Babies a bunch of saps. It is a constant struggle to tum their
thoughts on anything meaningful. Hi there Babies, I'm Byron-the-Bulb!
Here to sing a little song to you, that goes-

Light-up, and-shine, you-in-cande-scent Bulb Ba-bies!
Looks-like ya got ra-bies
Just lay there foamin' and a-screamin' like a buncha

little demons,
I'm deliv'rin' unto you a king-dom of roa-ches,
And no-thin' ap-proaches
That joyful feelin' when-you're up-on the ceilin'
Lookin' down-night and day-on the king-dom you sur-vey,
They'll come out 'n' love ya till the break of dawn,
But they run like hell when that light comes on!
So shine on, Baby Bulbs, you're the wave of the fu-ture,
And I'm here to recruit ya,
In m'great crusade,
Just sing along Babies-come-on-and-join-the-big-pa-rade!

Trouble with Byron's he's an old, old soul, trapped inside the glass
prison of a Baby Bulb. He hates this place, lying on his back waiting to
get manufactured, nothing to listen to on the speakers but Charleston
music, now and then an address to the Nation, what kind of a setup's
that? Byron wants to get out of here and into it, needless to say he's
been developing all kinds of nervous ailments, Baby Bulb Diaper Rash,
which is a sort of corrosion on his screw threads, Bulb Baby Colic, a
tight spasm of high resistance someplace among the deep loops of tung­
sten wire, Bulb Baby Hyperventilation, where it actually feels like his
vacuum's been broken though there is no organic basis. . . .

When M-Day finally does roll around, you can bet Byron's elated. He
has passed the time hatching some really insane grandiose plans-he's
gonna organize all the Bulbs, see, get him a power base in Berlin, he's
already hep to the Strobing Tactic, all you do is develop the knack
(Yogic, almost) of shutting off and on at a rate close to the human brain's
alpha rhythm, and you can actually trigger an epileptic fit! True. Byron

648

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has had a vision against the rafters of his ward, of 20 million Bulbs,
all

over Europe, at a given synchronizing pulse arranged by one of
his

many agents in the Grid, all these Bulbs beginning to strobe together,
humans thrashing around the 20 million rooms like fish on the

beaches

of Perfect Energy- Attention, humans, this has been a warning to you.
N ext time, a few of us will explode. Ha-ha, Yes we'll unleash our Kami­
kaze squads! You've heard of the Kirghiz Light? well that's the ass

end

of a firefly compared to what we're gonna-oh, you haven't heard
of

the-oh, well, too bad. Cause a few Bulbs, say a million, a mere 5% of

our number, are more than willing to flame out in one grand burst in­

stead of patiently waiting out their design hours.... So Byron dreams
of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Bald­

win, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast. . . .
Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization,

a

human one, known as "Phoebus," the international light-bulb cartel,

headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE,
Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain,

which are in

turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric

Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and
determines the oper­

ationallives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Hol­

land (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any
time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combination).
Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a new­
born Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn't know yet that Byron is immortal. He starts out

his career at an all-girl opium den in Charlottenburg, almost within

sight of the statue of Wernher Siemens, burning up
in a sconce, one

among many bulbs witnessing the more languorous
forms of Republican

decadence. He gets to know all the bulbs in the place, Benito
the Bulb

over in the next sconce who's always planning an escape, Bernie down

the hall in the toilet, who has all kinds of urolagnia jokes to tell, his
mother Brenda in the kitchen who talks of hashish hush puppies, dildos

rigged to pump floods of paregoric orgasm to the capillaries
of the

womb, prayers to Astarte and Lilith, queen of
the night, reaches into

the true Night of the Other, cold and naked on linoleum
floors after

days without sleep, the dreams and tears become a natural
state. . . .

One by one, over the months, the other bulbs burn out, and
are gone.

The first few of these hit Byron hard. He's still a new arrival, still hasn't

accepted his immortality. But on through the burning
hours he starts to

learn about the transience of others: learns that loving them while

they're here becomes easier, and also more intense-to
love as if each



design-hour will be the last. Byron soon enough becomes a Permanent
Old-Timer. Others can recognize his immortality on sight, but it's never
discussed except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in
from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist's
study in Lyons who's supposed to know magic, another in Norway out­
side a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly
bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. If other Immortals are
out there, they remain silent. But it is a silence with much, perhaps, ev­
erything, in it.

After Love, then, Byron's next lesson is Silence.
As his burning lengthens toward 600 hours, the monitors in Switzer­

land begin to keep more of an eye on Byron. The Phoebus Surveillance
Room is located under a little-known Alp, a chilly room crammed full of
German electro hardware, glass, brass, ebonite, and silver, massive ter­
minal blocks shaggy with copper clips and screws, and a cadre of super­
clean white-robed watchers who wander meter to meter, light as snow­
devils, making sure that nothing's going wrong, that through no bulb
shall the mean operating life be extended. You can imagine what it
would do to the market if that started happening.

Byron passes Surveillance's red-line at 600 hours, and immediately, as
a matter of routine, he is checked out for filament resistance, burning
temperature, vacuum, power consumption. Everything's normal. Now
Byron is to be checked out every 50 hours hereafter. A soft chime will
go off in the monitoring station whenever it's time.

At 800 hours-another routine precaution-a Berlin agent is sent out
to the opium den to transfer Byron. She is wearing asbestos-lined kid
gloves and seven-inch spike heels, no not so she can fit in with the
crowd, but so that she can reach that sconce to unscrew Byron. The
other bulbs watch, in barely subdued terror. The word goes out along
the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos
looking down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan
Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses,
every bulb in Europe knows what's happened. They are silent with im­
potence, with surrender in the face of struggles they thought were all
myth. We can't help, this common thought humming through pastures
of sleeping sheep, down Autobahns and to the bitter ends of coaling
piers in the North, there's never been anything we could do. . . . Any­
one shows us the meanest hope of transcending and the Committee on
Incandescent Anomalies comes in and takes him away. Some do protest,
maybe, here and there, but it's only information, glow-modulated,
harmless, nothing close to the explosions in the faces of the powerful

650

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that Byron once envisioned, back there in his Baby ward,
in his inno­

cence.

He is taken to Neukolln, to a basement room, the home of a glass­
blower who is afraid of the night and who will keep Byron glowing and
on watch over all the flint bowls, the griffins and flower-ships, ibexes in

mid-leap, green spider-webs, somber ice-deities. This is one
of many so­

called "control points," where suspicious bulbs can be monitored easily.
In less than a fortnight, a gong sounds along the ice and stone corri­

dors of the Phoebus headquarters, and faces swivel over briefly from

their meters. Not too many gongs around here. Gongs are special. Byron
has passed 1000 hours, and the procedure now is standard:

the Commit­

tee on Incandescent Anomalies sends a hit man to Berlin.

But here something odd happens. Yes, damned odd. The plan is
to

smash up Byron and send him back right there in the shop
to cullet and

batch-salvage the tungsten, of course-and let
him be reincarnated in

the glassblower's next project (a balloon setting out on a journey
from

the top of a white skyscraper). This wouldn't
be too bad a deal for

Byron-he knows as well as Phoebus does how many
hours he has on

him. Here in the shop he's watched enough glass being melted back
into

the structureless pool from which all glass forms spring and re-spring,
and wouldn't mind going through it himself. But he is trapped on

the

Karmic wheel. The glowing orange batch is a taunt, a cruelty.
There's

no escape for Byron, he's doomed to an infinite regress
of sockets and

bulbsnatchers. In zips young Hansel Geschwindig, a
Weimar street ur­

chin-twirls Byron out of the ceiling into a careful pocket
and Gess­

sschhhhwindig! out the door again. Darkness invades
the dreams of the

glassblower. Of all the unpleasantries his dreams grab in
out of the night

air, an extinguished light is the worst. Light, in his dreams,
was always

hope: the basic, mortal hope. As the contacts break helically away, hope
turns to darkness, and the glassblower wakes sharply tonight crying,
"Who? Who?"

Phoebus isn't exactly thrown into a frenzy. It's happened
before.

There is still a procedure to follow. It means more overtime
for some

employees, so there's that vague, full-boweled pleasure
at the windfall,

along with an equally vague excitement at the
break in routine. You

want high emotion, forget Phoebus. Their
stonefaced search parties

move out into the streets. They know more or less where in the city to

look. They are assuming that no one among their
consumers knows of

Byron's immortality. So the data for
Non-immortal Bulbsnatchings

ought to apply also to Byron. And the data happen
to hump up in poor

sections, Jewish sections, drug, homosexual, prostitute, and magic
sec-

651



tions of the capital. Here are the most logical bulbsnatchers, in terms of
what the crime is. Look at all the propaganda. It's a moral crime. Phoe­
bus discovered-one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time
-that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisi­
ble hands, is a most powerful weapon. In America, Lyle Bland and his
psychologists had figures, expert testimony and money (money in the
Puritan sense-an outward and visible O.K. on their intentions) enough
to tip the Discovery of Guilt at the cusp between scientific theory and
fact. Growth rates in later years were to bear Bland out (actually what
bore Bland out was an honorary pallbearer sextet of all the senior mem­
bers of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus and Short, plus Lyle, Jr., who
was sneezing. Buddy at the last minute decided to go see Dracula. He
was better off). Of all the legacies Bland left around, the Bulbsnatching
Heresy was perhaps his grandest. It doesn't just mean that somebody
isn't buying a bulb. It also means that same somebody is not putting any
power in that socket! It is a sin both against Phoebus and against the
Grid. Neither one is about to let that get out of hand.

So, out go the Phoebus flatfoots, looking for the snatched Byron. But
the urchin has already left town, gone to Hamburg, traded Byron to a
Reeperbahn prostitute so he can shoot up some morphine-the young
woman's customer tonight is a cost-accountant who likes to have light
bulbs screwed into his asshole, and this john has also brought a little
hashish to smoke, so by the time he leaves he's forgotten about Byron
still there in his asshole-doesn't ever, in fact, find out, because when
he finally gets around to sitting down (having stood up in trolleys all the
way home) it's on his own home toilet and plop! there goes Byron in the
water and flusssshhhh! away down the waste lines to the Elbe estuary.
He is just round enough to get through smoothly all the way. For dayshe floats over the North Sea, till he reaches Helgoland, that red-and­
white Napoleon pastry tipped in the sea. He stays there for a while at a
hotel between the Hengst and the Monch, till being brought back one
day to the mainland by a very old priest who's been put hep to Byron's
immortality in the course of a routine dream about the taste of a certain
1911 Hochheimer ... suddenly here's the great Berlin Eispalast, a
booming, dim iron-trussed cavern, the smell of women in the blue shad­
ows-perfumes, leathers, fur skating-costumes, ice-dust in the air,
flashing legs, jutting haunches, desire in grippelike flashes, helplessnessat the end of a crack-the-whip, rocketing through beams of sunlightchoked with the powdered ice, and a voice in the blurred mirror under­
foot saying, "Find the one who has performed this miracle. He is a saint.
Expose him. Expedite his canonization.... " The name is on a list the

oldm
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Phoe-

old man presently draws up of about a thousand tourists who've
been in

and out of Helgoland since Byron was found on the beach. The priest
begins a search by train, footpath, and Hispano-Suiza, checking

out

each of the tourists on his list. But he gets no farther than Niimberg,
where his valise, with Byron wrapped inside in an alb, is ripped off by a
transsectite, a Lutheran named Mausmacher who likes to dress up

in

Roman regalia. This Mausmacher, not content with standing in front
of

his own mirror making papal crosses, thinks it will be a really bizarre
kick to go out to the Zeppelin field to a Nazi torchlight rally in full drag,
and walk around blessing people at random. Green torches flaring, red

swastikas, twinkling brasses and Father Mausmacher, checking out tits

'n' asses, waistlines 'n' baskets, humming a clerical little tune, some
Bach riff, smiling as he moves through the Sieg Heils and choruses

of

"Die Fahne Hoch." Unknown to him, Byron slides out of the stolen

vestments onto the ground. He is then walked past by several hundred
thousand boots and shoes, and not one so much as brushes him, natch.

He is scavenged next day (the field now deathempty, columned, pale,
streaked with long mudpuddles, morning clouds lengthening behind

the

gilded swastika and wreath) by a poor Jewish ragpicker,
and taken on,

on into another 15 years of preservation against chance and against
Phoebus. He will be screwed into mother (Mutter) after mother, as the

female threads of German light-bulb sockets are known, for some rea­

son that escapes everybody.
The cartel have already gone over to Contingency Plan B, which as­

sumes a seven-year statute of limitations, after which Byron
will be con­

sidered legally burned out. Meanwhile, the personnel taken
off of By­

ron's case are busy tracking a long-lived bulb that once occupied
a

socket on the porch of an army outpost in the Amazon jungle,
Beatriz

the Bulb, who has just been stolen, mysteriously, by an Indian raiding
party.

Through his years of survival, all these various
rescues of Byron hap­

pen as if by accident. Whenever he can, he tries to
instruct any bulbs

nearby in the evil nature of Phoebus, and in the
need for solidarity

against the cartel. He has come to see how
Bulb must move beyond its

role as conveyor of light-energy alone. Phoebus has
restricted Bulb to

this one identity. "But there are other frequencies, above
and below the

visible band. Bulb can give heat. Bulb can provide energy for plants to

grow, illegal plants, inside closets, for example.
Bulb can penetrate the

sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of
men." Some bulbs lis­

tened attentively-others thought of ways to fink to Phoebus. Some
of

the older anti-Byronists were able to fool with their parameters
in sys-



tematic ways that would show up on the ebonite meters under the Swiss
mountain: there were even a few self-immolations, hoping to draw the
hit men down.

Any talk of Bulb's transcendence, of course, was clear subversion.
Phoebus based everything on bulb efficiency-the ratio of the usable
power coming out, to the power put in. The Grid demanded that this
ratio stay as small as possible. That way they got to sell more juice. On
the other hand, low efficiency meant longer burning hours, and that cut
into bulb sales for Phoebus. In the beginning Phoebus tried increasing
filament resistance, reducing the hours of life on the sly and gradually­
till the Grid noticed a fall-off in revenues, and started screaming. The
two parties by and by reached an accord on a compromise bulb-life
figure that would bring in enough money for both of them, and to go
fifty-fifty on the costs of the antibulbsnatching campaign. Along with a
more subtle attack against those criminal souls who forswear bulbs en­
tirely and use candles. Phoebus's long-standing arrangement with the
Meat Cartel was to restrict the amount of tallow in circulation by keep­
ing more fat in meat to be sold regardless of cardiac problems that
might arise, and redirecting most of what was trimmed off into soap
production. Soap in those days was a booming concern. Among the con­
sumers, the Bland Institute had discovered deep feelings about shit.
Even at that, meat and soap were minor interlocks to Phoebus. More
important were items like tungsten. Another reason why Phoebus
couldn't cut down bulb life too far. Too many tungsten filaments would
eat into available stockpiles of the metal-China being the major world
source, this also brought in very delicate questions of Eastern policy­
and disturb the arrangement between General Electric and Krupp
about how much tungsten carbide would be produced, where and when
and what the prices would be. The guidelines settled on were $37-$90 a
pound in Germany, $200-$400 a pound in the U.S. This directly gov­
erned the production of machine tools, and thus all areas of light and
heavy industry. When the War came, some people thought it unpa­
triotic of GE to have given Germany an edge like that. But nobody with
any power. Don't worry.

Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern. He learns
how to make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes,
in factories and out in the streets. Each has something to tell him. The
pattern gathers in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon fila­
ment was known in Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the
more desperate Byron gets. Someday he wi1l know everything, and still
be as impotent as before. His youthful dreams of organizing all the

654

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bulbs in the world seem impossible now-the Grid is wide open, all

messages can be overheard, and there are more
than enough traitors out

on the line. Prophets traditionally don't last long-they are either killed

outright, or given an accident serious enough to make them stop
and

think, and most often they do pull back. But on Byron has been visited
an even better fate. He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the

truth and powerless to change anything. No longer will he seek to get
off the wheel. His anger and frustration will grow without limit,

and he

will find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . .

Laszlo Jamf walks away down the canal, where dogs are swimming
now, dogs in packs, dogs heads bobbing down the scummy canals

...

dogs' heads, chess knights, also may be found invisible
in the air over se­

cret airbases, in the thickest fogs, conditions of temperature, pressure
and humidity form Springer-shapes the tuned flyer can feel, the

radars

can see, the helpless passengers can almost glimpse, now and then,
out

the little window, as through sheets of vapor . . . it is the kind Dog, the

Dog no man ever conditioned, who is there for
us at beginnings and

ends, and journeys we have to take, helpless, but not quite unwilling
.

. . . The pleats in Jamf's suit go weaving away like iris leaves in a
back­

yard wind. The colonel is left alone in Happyville. The
steel city waits

him, the even cloud-light raising a white streak down each great build­

ing, all of them set up as modulations on the perfect grid
of the streets,

each tower cut off at a different height-and where is the Comb that

will move through this and restore the old perfect Cartesian harmony?
where are the great Shears from the sky that will readjust Happyville?

There is no need to bring in blood or violence here. But the colonel
does have his head tilted back now in what may truly be surrender: his
throat is open to the pain-radiance of the Bulb. Paddy McGonigle

is the

only other witness, and he, a one-man power system
with dreams of his

own, wants the colonel out of the way as much as anyone.
Eddie Pensi­

ero, with the blues flooding his shaking muscles, the down, mortal blues,
is holding his scissors in a way barbers aren't supposed

to. The points,

shuddering in the electric cone, are aiming downward.
Eddie Pensiero's

fist tightens around the steel loops his fingers have slid out
of. The colo­

nel, with a last tilt of his head, exposes his jugular, clearly impatient
with the-

655



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

She comes riding into town on a stolen bicycle: a white kerchief at her
crown, fluttering behind in points, a distinguished emissary from a
drained and captured land, herself full of ancient title, but nothing in
the way of usable power, not even a fantasy of it. She's wearing a lean
white dress, a tennis dress from prewar summers, falling now not in
knife-edge pleats but softer, more accidental, half-crisp, touches of blue
in its deeper folds, a dress for changes in the weather, a dress to be
flowed upon by shadows of leaves, by a crumble of brown and sun-yel­
low moving across it and on as she coasts preoccupied but without pri­
vate smiles, under the leafy trees that line the road of hard-packed dirt.
Her hair is wound, in braids, up on her head, which she holds not too
high nor what used to be called "gravely," but toward (say against) a
particular future, for the first time since the Casino Hermann Goering
. . . and she's not of our moment, our time, at all.

The outermost sentry peers from his rusty-boned cement ruin, and for
two full pedal-swings they are both, he and Katje, out in the daylight,
blending with packed earth, rust, blobbing perforations of sunlight cold
gold and slick as glass, the fresh wind in the trees. Hyperthyroidal Afri­
can eyes, their irises besieged as early cornflowers by the crowding
fields of white ... Ooga-booga! Gwine jump on dis drum hyah! Tell de
res' ob de trahb back in de village, yowzah!

So, DUMdumdumdum, DUMdumdumdum, O.K., but still there's no
room in her demeanor for even curiosity (of course weren't there going
to be drums, a chance for violence? A snake jumping off of a limb, a
very large presence ahead among the thousand bowing treetops, a
scream inside herself, a leap upward into primal terror, surrendering to
it and so-she has dreamt-regaining her soul, her long-lost self ... ).
Nor will she waste more than token glances now on the German lawns
rushing so deeply away into green hazes or hills, the pale limbs of mar­
ble balusters beside sanitarium walks that curve restlessly, in a fever, a
stifling, into thickets of penis-budded sprig and thorn so old, so without
comfort that eyes are drawn, seized by the tear-glands and dragged to
find, to find at all cost, the path that has disappeared so suddenly . . . or
to look behind to hold on to some trace of the spa, a corner of the Spru­
delhof, the highest peak of the white-sugar bandstand, something to
counteract Pan's whisper inside the dark grove Come in . . . forgetthem. Come in here.... No. Not Katje. She has been into the groves

656

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and thickets. She has danced naked and spread her cunt to the horns of

grove-dwelling beasts. She has felt the moon in the
soles of her feet,

taken its tides with the surfaces of her brain. Pan was a lousy lover.

Today, in public, they have no more than nervous glances
for each

other.
What does happen now, and this is quite alarming, is that out

of no­

where suddenly appear a full dancing-chorus of Herero
men. They are

dressed in white sailor suits designed to show off asses, crotches, slim

waists and shapely pectorals, and they are carrying a girl all in
silver

lame, a loud brassy dame after the style of Diamond Lil or
Texas Gui­

nan. As they set her down, everyone begins to dance and sing:

Pa-ra-nooooiiiia, Pa-ra-noia!

Ain't it grand ta see, that good-time face, again!
Pa-ra-noi-ya, boy oh boy, yer
Just a bit of you-know-what
From way back when!

Even Coya, couldn't draw ya,
Not the way you looked, just kickin' in that

door­

Call a lawyer, Paranoia,
Lemme will my ass to you,

for-ever-more!

Then Andreas and Pavel come out in tap shoes (liberated from a

rather insolent ENSA show that came through in July) to do one of

those staccato tap-and-sing numbers:

Pa- ra- noi- (clippety-clippety-clippety cl[ya,]op!)
Pa- ra- noi- (shufHestomp! shufHestomp! shufHestomp!

[and] cl[ya,]op! clickety cl[Ain't]ick) it grand (clop)
ta (clop) see (clippyclop) yer good-time face again!

etc.

Well, Katje realizes long before the first 8 bars of all
this that the brazen

blonde bombshell is none other than herself: she is doing a dance rou­

tine with these black sailors-ashore. Having gathered also that she is the

allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a
little wacky but pure

heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity
of this music a bit

distressing. What she had in mind was more of
an Isadora Duncan rou­

tine, classical and full of gauzes, and-well, white.
What Pirate Prentice

briefed her on was folklore, politics, Zonal strategies-but not black­

ness. When that was what she most needed to know
about. How can

she pass now through so much blackness
to redeem herself? How can



-�--

/
�-'-

"

she expect to find Slothrop? among such blackness (subvocalizing the
word as an old man might speak the name of a base public figure, letting
it gutter out into real blackness: into being spoken no more). There is
that stubborn, repressive heat to her thoughts. It is none of your heavy
racist skin-prickling, no, but a feeling of one more burden, along with
the scarcity of food in the Zone, the chicken-coop, cave or basement
lodgings at sunfall, the armed-occupation phobias and skulkings as bad
as Holland last year, comfortable in here at least, lotos-snuggly, but dis­
astrous out in the World of Reality she still believes in and will never
give up hoping to rejoin someday. All that's not bad enough, no, now
she must also endure blackness. Her ignorance of it must see her
through.

With Andreas she is charming, she radiates that sensuality peculiar to
women who are concerned with an absent lover's safety. But then she
must see Enzian. Their first meeting. Each in a way has been loved by
Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some way of making it bearable,
just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one. . . .

"Oberst. I am happy-" her voice breaks. Genuinely. Her head in­
clines across his desk no longer than is necessary to thank, to declare her
passivity. The hell she's happy.

He nods, angles his beard at a chair. This, then, is the Golden Bitch of
Blicero's last letters from Holland. Enzian formed no image of her then,
too taken up, too gagged with sorrow at what was happening to Weiss­
mann. She seemed then only one of the expected forms of horror that
must be populating his world. But, ethnic when he least wants to be,
Enzian came after a while to think of her as the great Kalahari rock
painting of the White Woman, white from the waist down, carrying
bow and arrows, trailed by her black handmaiden through an erratic
space, stone and deep, figures of all sizes moving to and fro. . . .

But here is the true Golden Bitch. He's surprised at how young and
slender she is-a paleness as of having begun to leak away from this
world, likely to vanish entirely at any too-reckless grab. She knows her
own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it.
You must want her, but never indicate it-not by eyes or move-or she
will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert,
and you'll never have the chance again.

"You must have seen him more recently than I." He speaks quietly.
She is surprised at his politeness. Disappointed: she was expecting more
force. Her lip has begun to lift. "How did he seem?"

"Alone." Her brusque and sideways nod. Gazing back at him with
658

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the best neutrality she can be sure of in the circs. She means,
You were

not with him, when he needed you.
"He was always alone."
She understands then that it isn't timidity, she was wrong. It is de­

cency. The man wants to be
decent. He leaves himself open. (So does

she, but only because everything that might hurt has long
been numbed

out. There's small risk for Katje.) But Enzian risks what former lovers

risk whenever the Beloved is present, in fact or in word: deepest possi­
bilities for shame, for sense of loss renewed, for humiliation and

mock­

ery. Shall she mock?
Has he made that too easy-and then, turning,

counted on her for fair play? Can she be as honest as he, without risking
too much? "He was dying," she tells him, "he looked very old. I

don't

even know if he left Holland alive."

"He-" and this hesitation may be (a) in consideration of her feelings,
or (b) for reasons of Schwarzkommando security,

or (c) both of the

above . . . but then, hell, the Principle of Maximizing Risk takes over

again: "he got as far as the Liineberg
Heath. If you didn't know, you

ought to."
"You've been looking for him."
"Yes. So has Slothrop been, though I don't think Slothrop

knows

that."

"Slothrop and 1-" she looks around the room,
her eyes skitter off

metal surfaces, papers, facets of salt, cannot come to
rest anywhere. As

if making a desperate surprise confession: "Everything
is so remote

now. I don't really know why they sent me out here. I
don't know any

more who Slothrop really was. There's a failure in the light.
I can't see.

It's all going away from me. . . ."
It isn't yet time to touch her, but Enzian

reaches out gives a friendly

chin-up tap on the back of her hand, a military
now-see-here. "There

are things to hold to. None of it may look real,
but some of it is. Really."

"Really." They both start laughing. Hers is weary-European,
slow,

head-shaking. Once she would have been assessing
as she laughed,

speaking of edges, deeps, profit and loss, H
-hours and points of no re­

turn-she would have been laughing politically, in response to a power­

predicament, because there might be nothing else to
do. But now she's

only laughing. As she once laughed with Slothrop,
back at the Casino

Hermann Goering.
So she's only been talking with Enzian about a

common friend. Is this

how the Vacuum feels?

"Slothrop and I" didn't work too well. Should
she have said "Blicero

and I"? What would that have got her into with the African?



"Blicero and I," he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheek­
bones, cigarette smoldering in his curled right hand, "we were only
close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not.
Around here, I play an omniscient. I'd say don't give me away, but it
wouldn't matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot su­
preme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they
don't trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as
yarns to be spun-the truth wouldn't change either their distrust or my
Unlimited Access. They'd only be passing a story along, another story.
But the truth must mean something to you.

"The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with =mpire, po­
etry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me
once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insuffer­
able ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd
turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?"

He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of prob­
lems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones,
the perilous infancy of his nation?

"What can Blicero matter to you?" is what she finally asks.
He doesn't have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming

of a Questioner. "At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An obser­
vation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the
webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for
distributing food and medicine. . . . We would gaze down on staff­
rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say-"

"All this will I give you, if you will but-"
"Negative. Wrong story. I would say: This is what I have become. An

estranged figure at a certain elevation and distance . . ." who looks out
over the Raketen-Stadt in the amber evenings, with washed and darken­
ing cloud sheets behind him-"who has lost everything else but this
vantage. There is no heart, anywhere now, no human heart left in which
I exist. Do you know what that feels like?"

He is a lion, this man, ego-mad-but despite everything, Katje likeshim. "But if he were still alive-"
"No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He

was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slen­der white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old-the last heart
in which I might have been granted some being-was changing, toad to
prince, prince to fabulous monster. . . . 'If he is alive,' he may have
changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him
in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has

660

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transcended. Even if he's only dead. He's gone beyond his pain,
his sin

-driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis
and control,

further than-" well, he was about to say "we" but ''I'' seems
better

after all, "I haven't transcended. I've only been elevated. That
must be

as empty as things get: it's worse than being told you
won't have to die

by someone you can't believe in....
"Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear

albatross 1

cannot let go."
"And me?" She gathers that he expects her to sound like a

woman of

the 1940s. "And me," indeed. But she can
think of no other way offhand

to help him, to allow him a moment of
comfort. . . .

"You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest
of all." She looks up to see

exactly how his face will be mocking her.
She is stunned to see tears in­

stead running, running over his cheeks. "You
've only been set free,

"

his

voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing
forward a mo­

ment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again
for a try at her own gay

waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is he about to go goofy
on her too?

What she needs right now in her life, from some man
in her life, is sta­

bility, mental health and strength of
character. Not this. "I told Slothrop

he was free, too. 1 tell anybody who might listen. 1 will tell
them as 1 tell

you: you are free. You
are free. You are free. . . ."

"How can my story be sadder that
that?" Shameless girl, she isn't hu­

moring him, she's actually flirting with
him now, any technique her

crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood
ever taught her, to keep

from having to move into his blackness.
Understand it isn't his black­

ness, but her own-an inadmissible
darkness she is making believe for

the moment is Enzian's, something beyond even the center of
Pan's

grove, something not pastoral at all, but
of the city, a set of ways in

which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down,
rectified or

bled to ground and come out very like the malignant
dead: the Qlippoth

that Weissmann has "transcended," souls whose journey
across was so

bad that they lost all their kindness back in the
blue lightning (the long

sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers
and jokers,

making unintelligible honks in the emptiness,
sinewed and stripped thin

as rats-a city-darkness that is her own, a textured
darkness in which

flows go in all directions,
and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But

as

time passes things get louder there. It
is shaking itself into her con­

sciousness.

"Flirt if you want," Enzian now just
as smooth as that Cary Grant,

"but expect to be taken seriously." Oh,
ho. Here's whatcha came for,

folks.
661



-_

/
/ -

,�

Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German ar­
chives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her,
really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will con­
tinue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose out­
comes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the ware­
house districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds
grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them.

"I don't know what to do." She gets up in a long, long shrug and be­
gins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who
thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms
often touch.

"You don't have to come into this any further than locating Slo­
throp," he finally gets around to telling her. "All you have to do is tag
along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with
the rest?"

"Because 1 feel," her voice, perhaps by design, very small, "that 'the
rest' is exactly what 1 ought to be doing. 1 don't want to get away with
some shallow win. 1 don't just want to-I don't know, pay him back for
the octopus, or something. Don't 1 have to know why he's out here,
what 1 did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can
1 get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn't 1 be going all the wayin?"

Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her.
That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because,
often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be. . . .
So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair­like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still . . . will it fail. . . . But of
true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is noth­
ing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this
with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream.... I
am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies!
"You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you

want to make it for yourself, still you're always going to come through.You're free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usuallyit's given as a reward. 1 won't ask for what. I'm sorry, but you seem re­
ally not to know. That's why your story is saddest of all."

"Reward-" she's getting mad. "It's a life-sentence. If you call that a
reward, then what are you calling me?"

"Nothing political."
"You black bastard."

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"Exactly." He has allowed her to speak the truth.
A clock chimes in

the stone corner. "We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just
before the end. You don't have to-"

"Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will."

He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways
and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward

like mischievous

Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad
and itching now to

get away from court.
Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out

to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-Ia-Ia, off
to

listen to the end of a man we both loved and we're strangers
at the

films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings.
Far away in another corridor

a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just be­

fore snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle,
an innocent and

kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring,

cigarette smoke, washwater,
disinfectant-a cafeteria in the middle of

the day.
There are things to hold on to. . . .

o 0 DOD 0 0

You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed over­

board in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was

rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in
the storm tonight to

see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing,
in

hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated
metal suit, something like a

deep-sea diver's, and a Wehrmacht helmet through
which he has drilled

a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs
and con­

ductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever
he nods or

shakes his head, which is often. He's a digital companion all right,
ev­

erything gets either a yes or a no, and
two-tone checkerboards of odd

shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night
around him and

Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an
American

propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the
undertaker has been ob­

sessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt.

All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though
not the kind

he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who
knows maybe thou­

sands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning
and

survived. What stories they could tell!
What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin

Franklin



-

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was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of
which the United States of America may well have been one.

Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and
downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives
at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No
real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a
singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life-do you know what
the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right
across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh?
Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all in the
gnat's-ass or red cunt hair of the At across the point. That's getting hit
by lightning, folks. You're way up there on the needle-peak of a moun­
tain, and don't think there aren't lammergeiers cruising there in the
lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off. Oh
yes. They are piloted by bareback dwarves with little plastic masks
around their eyes that happen to be shaped just like the infinity sym­
bol: 00. Little men with wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads,
although some of them are wearing outlandish headgear, not at all the
usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are Carmen Miranda hats, for
example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples,
mangoes, jeepers even watermelons-and there are World War I spike­
top Wilhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon hats with
and without N s on them, not to mention little red suits and green
capes, well here they are leaning forward into their cruel birds' ears,
whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster, just like that sacrificial
ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they won't let you fall,
they'll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will look like
the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identi­
cal there seems to be another class oflook-alike that only finds the light­
ning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all ap­
pearances no different. Ha-ha! But the lightning-struck know, all right!
Even if they may not know they know. And that's what this undertaker
tonight has set out into the storm to find.

Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps
out on the backs of eagles? Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic of
anthropology, with the lightning-struck grouped into a subculture, even
secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails, pri­
vate monthly magazine A Nickel Saved (which looks perfectly innocent,
old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know the other half of the
proverb:

"

... is a stockpile of nickel." Making the real quote nickel­
magnate Mark Hanna's: "You have been in politics long enough to

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know that no man in public office owes the public anything."
So the real

title is Long Enough, which Those Who Know,
know. The text of each

issue of the magazine, when transformed this way, yields many
interest­

ing messages). To outsiders it's just a pleasant
little club newsletter­

Jed Plunkitt held a barbecue for the Iowa Chapter
the last weekend in

April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough
luck! But come

next Barbecue, you'll be back good as new.... Minnie
Calkins (Chap­

ter 1. 793) got married Easter Sunday to a
screen-door salesman from

California. Sorry to say he's not eligible for Membership--at
least not

yet. But with all those screen
doors around, we'll sure keep our fingers

crossed! ... Your Editor has been receiving many, many
"Wha hop­

pen?" 's concerning the Spring
Convention in Decatur when all the

lights failed during the blessing.
Glad to report now that trouble was

traced finally to a giant transient in the line,
"Kind of an electrical tidal

wave," sez Hank Faffner, our engineer-on-the-scene. "Every
bulb in the

place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty,
sterile eggs." Quite a poet, Hank!

Now if you can only find out where that spike
came from-

But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat
care about busting this

code, about secret organizations or recognizable
subcultures? No, he

doesn't. The reason he is seeking these people out is that he
thinks it

will help him in his job. Can you dig that, gates?
He wants to know how

people behave before and after lightning bolts,
so he'll know better how

to handle bereaved families.

"You are perverting a great discovery to the uses
of commerce," sez

Thanatz, stepping ashore. "You ought to be ashamed
of yourself." He is

no more than five minutes into the empty town at the edge of
the marsh

when nockle KKAHH-UHNN! nocklenockle
nockle an enormous blast

of light and sound hits the water back
where the undertaker, peeved at

what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.
"Oh," comes his faint voice. "Oh, ho.

Oh-ho-ho-hof"

"Nobody lives here but us." A solid figure,
a whispering silhouette,

charcoal-colored, has materialized in Thanatz's path. "We do
not harm

visitors. But it would be better if you took another way."

They are 175s-homosexual prison-camp
inmates. They have come

north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north
till the land ended, and

have set up an all-male community
between this marsh and the Oder es­

tuary. Ordinarily, this would be
Thanatz's notion of paradise, except

that none of the men can bear to be out of
Dora-Dora was home, and

they are homesick. Their
"liberation" was a banishment. So here in a

new location they have made up a hypothetical SS
chain of command­

no longer restricted to what Destiny
allotted then for jailers, they have



�--u
__

/
-------------------���..

now managed to come up with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi
playmates, Schutzhaftlingsfiihrer to Blockfiihrer, and chosen an internal
hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Blockaltester, Kapo, Vorar­
beiter, Stubendienst, Laufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also
happens to be the German name for a chess bishop . . . if you have
seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with
his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark
color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real
purpose here inside the community-he is carrier of holy strategies,
memoranda of conscience, and when he approaches over the reedy flats
of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and brushed with the
sidebands of a Great Moment-for the Laufer is the most sacred here,
it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the
visible Lager and the invisible SS).

At the top of the complex is Schutzhaftlingsfiihrer Blicero. The name
has found its way this far east, as if carrying on the man's retreat for
him, past the last stand in the Liineburg Heath. He is the Zone's worst
specter. He is malignant, he pervades the lengthening summer nights.
Like a cankered root he is changing, growing toward winter, growing
whiter, toward the idleness and the famine. Who else could the 175s
have chosen for their very highest oppressor? His power is absolute.
And don't think he isn't really waiting, out by the shelled and rusty gas­
works, under the winding staircases, behind the tanks and towers, wait­
ing for the dawn's first carmine-skirted runner with news of how the
night went. The night is his dearest interest, so he must be told.

This phantom SS command here is based not so much on the one the
prisoners knew at Dora as on what they inferred to be the Rocket-struc­
ture next door at the Mittelwerke. The A4, in its way, was also con­
cealed behind an uncrossable wall that separated real pain and terror
from summoned deliverer. Weissmanu/Blicero's presence crossed the
wall, warping, shivering into the fetid bunkrooms, with the same reach
toward another shape as words trying to make their way through
dreams. What the 175s heard from their real SS guards there was
enough to elevate Weissmann on the spot-they, his own brother-elite,
didn't know what this man was up to. When prisoners came in earshot,
the guards stopped whispering. But their fear kept echoing: fear not of
Weissmann personally, but of the time itself, a time so desperate that he
could now move through the Mittlewerke as if he owned it, a time
which was granting him a power different from that of Auschwitz or
Buchenwald, a power they couldn't have borne themselves. . . .

On hearing the name of Blicero now, Thanatz's asshole tightens a
666

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notch. Not that he thinks the name was planted here or anything. Para­

noia is not a major problem for Thanatz. What does
bother him is being

reminded at all-reminded that he's had no word, since the noon on
the

Heath when 00000 was fired, of Blicero's status-alive or dead, power­

lord or fugitive. He isn't sure which he prefers. As long
as the Anubis

kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory
could have been

left so far behind that one day its "reality" wouldn't matter any
more.

Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.
"We think he's out there," the town spokesman is telling Thanatz,

"alive and on the run. Now and then we hear something-it
could fit

Blicero easily enough. So we wait. He will find us.
He has a prefabri­

cated power base here, waiting for him."
"What if he doesn't stay?" pure meanness, "what if he laughs at you,

and passes by?"
"Then I can't explain," the other beginning to step backward,

back

out into the rain, "it's a matter of faith."

Thanatz, who has sworn that he will never seek
out Blicero again, not

after the 00000, feels the flat of terror's blade.
"Who is your runner?" he

cries.

"Go yourself," a filtered whisper.
"Where?"

"The gasworks."
"But I have a message for-"

"Take it yourself....
"

The white Anubis, gone on to salvation. Back here,
in her wake, are

the preterite, swimming and drowning, mired
and afoot, poor passen­

gers at sundown who've
lost the way, blundering across one

another's

flotsam, the scrapings, the dreary junking of
memories-all they have to

hold to-churning, mixing, rising, falling. Men
overboard and our com­

mon debris....

Thanatz remains shaking and furious in the
well-established rain,

under the sandstone arcade. I should have sailed on,
he wants to

scream, and presently does. "I wasn't supposed to be
left with you dis­

cards....
"

Where's the court of appeals that will hear his sad story?
"I lost my footing!" Some mess cook slipped

in a puddle of elite vomit

and spilled a whole galvanized can full of
creamed yellow chicken nau­

sea all over that starboard weather deck, Thanatz didn't see it,
he was

looking for Margherita.... Too bad, les jeux
sont faits, nobody's listen­

ing and the Anubis is gone.
Better here with the swimming debris,

Thanatz, no telling what'll come sunfishing by, ask that
Oberst Enzian,

he knows (there is a key, among the wastes of the World
... and it



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won't be found on board the white Anubis because they throw every­
thing of value over the side).

So-Thanatz is out by the gasworks, up against a tar wall, mackerel
eyes bulging out of wet wool collar-shadows, all black and white, really
scared, breath smoking out corners of his mouth as green dawn begins
to grow back among the gassen. He won't be here, he's only dead only
dead? Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds
. . . sure, but which two? There's no counting on any positivism to save
him, that didn't even work back in Berlin, before the War, at Peter
Sachsa's sittings ... it only got in the way, made others impatient with
him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was always
just a tactic ... it never let him feel any freer. These days there's even
less point to it. He knows Blicero exists.

It wasn't a dream. Don't you wish it could be. Another fever that
sooner or later will break, releasing you into the cool reality of a room
... you don't have to perform that long and complicated mission after
all, no, you see it was only the fever . . . it wasn't real. . . .

This time it is real, Blicero, alive or dead, is real. Thanatz, a little
crazy now with fear, wants to go provoke him, he can't wait any more,
he has to see what it will take to get Blicero across the interface. What
screaming ass-wiggling surrender might bring him back. ...

All it brings is the Russian police. There's a working agreement about
staying inside the limits of the 175-Stadt that of course no one told
Thanatz about. The gasworks used, to be a notorious hustling spot till
the Russians made a series of mass busts. A last fading echo of the 175-
Stadt Chorale goes skipping away down the road singing some horrible
salute to faggotry such as noiliing,

f uownwi
Yumsy-numsy 'n' poopsie-poo, tomes to
If I'm a degenerate, so are you" tnarge,

"Nowadays all we get are you tourists," sez the natty civilian with the
white handkerchief in his breast-pocket, snickering in the shadow of his �oeatehat brim. "And, of course, the odd spy."

"Not me," Thanatz sez.
"Not you, eh? Tell me about it."

dwa�b)Something of a quandary, all right. In less than half a day, Thanatz toit,alhas moved from no need to worry or even think about Blicero, to always �oafterneeding some formulation of him at hand to please any stray curious nead,
cop. This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won't escape ... Thana

668



every.

ackerel
e, reaijv

'n be��
lead O�I
'0 \\'orl�
mto\a11

a Petti

utUI

\liiliilie I
,

wofM

Thanatz

any of the consequences he sets up
for himself now, not unless it's by

accident.
For example, at the outskirts of Stettin, by accident, a

Polish guerrilla

group, just arrived back from London,
mistakes the police car for one

transporting an anti-Lublin journalist to prison,
shoots out the tires,

roars in, kills the driver, wounds the civilian interrogator,
and escapes

lugging Thanatz like a sack of potatoes.
"Not me," Thanatz sez.
"Shit. He's right."
They roll him out the car door into a DP encampment

a few miles

farther on. He is herded into a wire enclosure along with 1,999 others

being sent west to Berlin.
For weeks he rides the freights, hanging in shifts to the outside of his

assigned car while inside someone else sleeps on
the straw space he va­

cated. Later they change places. It helps to stay awake. Every day
Thanatz sees half a dozen DPs go on the nod and fall off

the train, and

sometimes it's funny to watch, but too often it's not, though
DP humor

is a very dependent thing. He is rubber-stamped
on hands, forehead,

and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned,
in­

voiced, misrouted, detained, ignored. He passes in and out
the paper

grasp of Russian, British,
American and French body-jobbers, round

and round the occupation circuit, getting to recognize faces, coughs,

pairs of boots on new owners.
Without a ration card or Soldbuch, you

are doomed to be moved, in lots of 2,000, center to center,
about the

Zone, possibly forever. So, out among the ponds
and fenceposts of

Mecklenburg somewhere, Thanatz discovers
that he is exempt from

nothing. His second night on the rails his
shoes are stolen. He comes

down with a deep bronchial cough and a high fever. For a
week no one

comes to look at him. For two aspirins he has to suck off the orderly in

charge, who has grown to enjoy rough-bearded
cheeks flaming at 1030

against his thighs, the furnace breath under
his balls. In Mecklenburg

Thanatz steals a cigarette butt from a sleeping one-armed veteran,
and

is beaten and kicked for half an hour by people whose language he has

never heard before, whose faces he never gets a look at. Bugs crawl
over

him only slightly irritated that he's in their way.
His daily bread is taken

away by another DP smaller than he is, but
with the look of some right

to it, a look Thanatz at best can only impersonate-and so
he's afraid to

go after the little rag-coated liver-colored back,
the munching haystack

head . . . and others are watching: the woman who tells everyone
that

Thanatz molests her little girl at night (Thanatz can never meet her eyes

669



because yes he wants to, pull down the slender pretty pubescent's over­size GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him
so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hairthroatback Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it) and
a beetlebrowed Slav too, who has forced Thanatz to go hunting ciga­
rette butts for him after lights out, to give up his sleep not so much tothe chance of finding a real butt as to the Slav's right to demand it-the
Slav is watching too-in fact, a circle of enemies have all observed the
taking of the bread and Thanatz's failure to go after it. Their judgmentis clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the Anubis, an
honesty he can't avoid, can't shrug off . . . finally, finally he has to face,
literally with his own real face, the transparency, the real light of ...

Little by little his memory of that last rocket-firing on the Heath
grows clearer. The fevers fire-polish, the pain removes impurities. An
image keeps recurring-a muddy brown almost black eyeball reflecting
a windmill and a jagged reticule of tree-branches in silhouette . . .
doors at the sides of the windmill open and shut quickly, like loose shut­
ters in a storm . . . in the iris sky one cloud, the shape of a clamshell,
rises very purple around the edges, the puff from an explosion, some­
thing light ocher at the horizon . . . closer in it seems snarling purplearound a yellow that's brightening, intestines of yellow shadowed in vio­
let spilling outward, outward in a bellying curve toward us. There are,
oddly (not to cut this picturesque scene off, but) oddly enough, get this,
no windmills on the Liineburg Heath! Thanatz even checked around
real fast just to make sure, nope, no windmills, O.K., so, how come Bli­
cere's eye, looking out on the Heath, is reflecting a windmill, huh? Well,
to be honest, now it isn't reflecting a windmill, it's reflecting a bottle of
gin. No bottle of gin out here on the Heath either. But it was reflecting
a windmill. What's this? Could it be that Blicero's eyes, in which GretaErdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past?That would be strange. Whatever went on on those eyeballs when youweren't looking would just be lost. You'd only have fragments, now andthen. Katje, looking back over her shoulder at fresh whip-marks. Gott­fried in the morning lineup, body all Wandervogel-limp, wind blowinghis uniform in great ripples back from the bough-curves of his thighs,hair flying in the wind, saucy sideways smile, mouth a little open, jawforward, eyelids down. Blicero's own reflection in the oval mirror, an
old face-he is about to don a wig, a Dragon Lady pageboy with bangs,and he pauses, looking in, face asking what? what did you say? wig heldto the side and slightly lower so as to be another face in heavy Wig-shad­
ows nearly invisible . . . but looking closer you can see bone-ridges and

670

natz,

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nam



fat-fields begin to emerge now, an ice-glaze white bobbing,
a mask

hand-held, over the shadows in the hollow hood-space-two faces

looking back now, and Thanatz, are you going to judge
this man? Tha­

natz, haven't you loved the whip? Haven't you longed for the
brush and

sigh of ladies' clothes? Haven't you wanted to murder
a child you loved,

joyfully kill something so helpless and innocent? As he
looks up at you,

at the last possible minute, trusting you, and smiles, purses
his lips to

make a kiss just as the blow falls across his skull ... isn't
that best of

all? The cry that breaks in your chest then, the sudden,
solid arrival of

loss, loss forever, the irreversible end of love, of hope ... no denying
what you finally are . . . (but so much fear at taking

it in, the serpent

face-at opening your arms and legs and letting it enter you,
into your

true face it'll kill you if it-)
He is telling the Schwarzkommando this now, all this

and more. After

a week of shouting I know, of crying I've seen the Schwarzgeriit
when­

ever a black face appears behind the flowing wire fences, at the
cinder­

banks or the crossings, word has got around. One day they
come for

him: he is lifted from the straw as black with coal-dust as they-lifted

easy as an infant, a roach flicked
in kindness off of his face-and trans­

ported shivering, gathered moaning south
to the Erdschweinhohle

where now they are all sitting around a fire, smoking
and munching,

eyes riveted on blue Thanatz,
who has been gabbing for seven hours

nonstop. He is the only one privileged, in a way,
to tell this much of the

story, he's the fella who lost out,
the loser,

Just a fool-who-never-wins, at love,
Though-he-plays, most-ev', ry night
A loser-to-the-Ones, Above,
Who stack-the-cards, of wrong, and right.
Oh the loser never bets-it-all, and-he never-plays,

to win,
He knows if-once, you don't-succeed, you can al-ways

lose-again!
Just a loser at-the-game, of love ...

Spending night after night a-lo-o-o-one!

He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into

it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same
winner. By now he's

forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn't know
which child he lost first,

or even-hornet clouds of memory welling up--even if they aren't
two

names, different names, for the same child
. . . but then in the crash of

671



-----",!__

/
.."

/
2�

'.

others' flotsam, sharp edges, and high-spin velocities you understand, he
finds he can't hold on to this thought for long: soon he's floundering in
the open water again. But he'll remember that he held it for a little, saw
its texture and color, felt it against the side of his face as he woke from a
space of sleeping near it-that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca,
are the same. . . .

He lost Blicero, but it wasn't quite as real. After the last firing, the
unremembered night-hours to Hamburg, the hop from Hamburg to
Bydgoszcz in a purloined P-51 Mustang was so clearly Procalowski­
down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine, that Thanatz came to imagine he
had disposed of Blicero too only in that same very conditional, metallic
way. And sure enough, the metal has given way to flesh, and sweat, and
long chattering night encounters, Blicero cross-legged stammering
down at his crotch I cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh-"Can't," Blicero? "Couldn't"?
"Care"? "Cry"? Blicero that night was offering all his weapons, laying
down all maps of his revetments and labyrinths.

Thanatz was really asking: when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consist­
ent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only
attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?

And: "How can I love them?"
But there's no answer from Blicero. His eyes go casting runes with

the windmill silhouettes. A number of contributed scenes do now flash
by for Thanatz. From Ensign Morituri, a banana-leaf floor somewhere
near Malabacat in the Philippines, late '44, a baby squirms, rolls, kicks
in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and the special­attack units roar away overhead, Zeros bearing comrades away, finally
as fallen cherry-blossoms-that favorite Kamikaze image-in the spring
... from Greta Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud­
it crawls like mud, but cries like Earth, with layer-pressed generationsof gravities and losses thereto-losses, failures, last moments followed
by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffo­
cated layers, those forever lost . . . from someone, who'll ever know
who? a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth
powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast,
her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turningthis way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for . . . will she see you?
a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting ofher love-

They'll help him through it. The Erdschweinhohlers will sit up all
night with this nonstop intelligence briefing. He is the angel they've
hoped for, and it's logical he should come now, on the day when they

672

have
wrn

Coun�

rolitic
ricion,
ilie Ro

trruand

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�

Knows,
.

marbe



nd, he have their Rocket all assembled at last, their single A4 scavenged
all

ring in summer piece by piece clear across the Zone
from Poland to the Low

le, saw Countries. Whether you believed or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy
or

from a politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had
a feeling-a sus-

Bianca, picion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out of your soul, something-for
the Rocket. It is that "something" that the Angel Thanatz now illumi­

nates, each in a different way, for everybody listening.
By the time he's done, they will all know what

the Schwarzgerat was,

how it was used, where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it
was

pointed. Enzian will smile grimly, and groan to his feet,
the decision al­

ready made for him hours ago, and say, "Well,
let's have a look at the

timetables now." His Erdschweinhohle rival, Empty One Josef Om­

bindi, grips him by the forearm-"If there's anything .
. ." Enzian

nods. "See if you can work us out a tight security watch, 'kurandye."
He

hasn't called Ombindi that for a while. Nor is it a small
concession to

give the Empty Ones control of the
watch lists, at least for the duration

of this journey ...
. . . which has already begun, as one and a half levels below,

men

�. and women are busy with tackle, lines, and harness easing
rocket sec­

tions each onto its dolly, more Schwarzkommando waiting
in leather

and blueflowered files up the ramps to the outside, along the present
and future vectors strung between wood rails and grooves, Empty,

Neu­

tral and Green all together now, waiting or hauling or supervising,
some

talking for the first time since the dividing along
lines of racial life and

racial death began, how many years ago, reconciled for
now in the only

Event that could have brought them together (1 couldn't,
Enzian

knows, and shudders at what's going to happen after it's
over-but

maybe it's only meant to last its fraction of a day,
and why can't that be

enough? try to let it be enough ... ).
Christian comes past, downhill adjusting a web belt,

not quite

swaggering-night before last his sister Maria
visited him in a dream to

tell him she wished no revenge against anyone, and wanted
him to trust

and love the Nguarorerue-so their eyes now meet
not quite amused

nor quite yet in a challenge, but knowing
more together than they ever

have so far, and Christian's hand at the moment of passing
cocks out

half in salute, half in celebration, aimed toward the Heath,
northwest­

erly' Kingdom-of-Deathward, and Enzian's goes
out the same way, iya,

'kurandye! as, at some point, the two palms
do slide and brush, do

touch, and it is touch and trust enough, for this moment.
. . .



-�

/
..

D D D D D D D

Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasantafter all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this
typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode tokill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that. So far he's managed to
escape his father's daily little death-plots-but nobody has said he has
to keep escaping.

He's a cheerful and a plucky enough lad, and doesn't hold any of this
against his father particularly. That 01' Broderick's just a murderin' fool,
golly what'll he come up with next-

It's a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated
1930S swoop-facaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatidswith bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the
boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof-gar­dens and turning to wave as you pass. It is the Raketen-Stadt.

Down below, thousands of kids are running in windy courtyards and
areaways, up and down Rights of steps, skullcaps on their heads with
plastic propellers spinning in the wind rattling and blurred, kids running
messages among the plastic herbage in and out of the different soft-plas­tic offices-Here's a memo for you Tyrone, go and find the Radiant
Hour (Weepers! Didn't know it was lost! Sounds like 01' Pop's up to
somma those tricks again!), so it's out into the swarming corridors, full of
larking dogs, bicycles, pretty sub deb secretaries on roller skates, pro­duce carts, beanies whirling forever in the lights, cap-gun or water-pis­tol duels at each corner, kids dodging behind the sparkling fountainsWAIT that's a real gun, this is a real bullet zinnnggg! good try, Pop, but
you're not quite as keen as The Kid today!

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from
the day's 24 by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their
own. Travel here gets complicated-a system of buildings that move, byright angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt's street-grid. You
can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second, todesired heights or levels underground, like a submarine skipper with his
periscope-although certain paths aren't available to you. They areavailable to others, but not to you. Chess. Your objective is not the
King-there is no King-but momentary targets such as the Radiant
Hour.

Bing in pops a kid with beanie spinning, hands Slothrop another mes-
674

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sage and spins off again. "The Radiant Hour is being held captive,
if you

want to see her on display to all interested customers be present at
this

address 11 :30 a.m."-in the sky a white clockface drifts conveniently
by, hmm only half an hour to gather together my

rescue team. Rescue

team will consist of Myrtle Miraculous Hyin' in here in a shoulderpad­
ded maroon dress, the curlers still up in her hair and a tough frown fer

draggin' her outa Slumberland ... next a Negro in a pearl-gray
zoot

and Inverness cape name of Maximilian, high square pomaded head
and

a superthin mustache come zooming here out of his
"front" job, suave

manager of the Club Oogabooga where Beacon Street aristocracy
rubs

elbows ev'ry night with Roxbury winos 'n' dopefiends, yeah
hi Tyrone,

heah Ah is! H'lo Moitle baby, hyeah, hyeah, hyeah! Whut's de big rush,
mah man? Adjusting his carnation, lookin' round th' room, everybody's
here now except for that Mar-eel but hark the

familiar music-box theme

yes it's that old-timery sweet Stephen Foster
music and sure enough in

through the balcony window now comes Marcel,
a mechanical chess­

player dating back to the Second Empire, actually
built a century ago

for the great conjuror Robert-Houdin, very serious-looking
French ref­

ugee kid, funny haircut with the ears perfectly
outlined in hair that

starts abruptly a quarter-inch strip of bare plastic skin away,
black pat­

ent-shiny hair, hornrim glasses, a rather remote manner, unfortunately
much too literal with humans (imagine what happened the first time

Maximilian come hi-de-hoing in the door with one finger [ivin' in the air

sees metal-ebonite-and-plastic young Marcel sitting there and say, "Hey
man gimme some skin, man!" well not only does

Marcel give him a

heavy time about skin, skin in all its implications, oh
no that's only at

the superficial level, next we get a long discourse on the concept
of

"give," that goes on for a while, then, then he starts
in on "Man." That's

really an exhaustive one. In fact Marcel isn't anywhere
near finished

with it yet). Still, his exquisite 19th-century
brainwork-the human art

it took to build which has been flat lost, lost as the dodo bird-has stood

the Floundering Four in good stead on many, many go-rounds
with the

Paternal Peril.

But where inside Marcel is the midget Grandmaster, the little Johann
Allgeier? where's the pantograph, and the magnets?

Nowhere. Marcel

really is a mechanical chessplayer. No fakery
inside to give him any

touch of humanity at all. Each of the FF is, in fact, gifted
while at the

same time flawed by his gift-unfit by it for human living. Myrtle
Mi­

raculous specializes in performing miracles. Stupendous feats, impossi­
ble for humans. She has lost respect for humans, they are clumsy, they
fail, she does want to love them but love is the only

miracle that's

675



beyond her. Love is denied her forever. The others of her class are ei­
ther homosexuals, fanatics about law 'n' order, off on strange religious
excursions, or as intolerant of failure as herself, and though friends such
as Mary Marvel and Wonder Woman keep inviting her to parties to
meet eligible men, Myrtle knows it's no use. . . . As for Maximilian, he
has a natural sense of rhythm, which means all rhythms, up to and in!
cluding the cosmic. So he will never be where the fathomless manhole
awaits, where the safe falls from the high window shrieking like a bomb
-he is a pilot through Earth's baddest minefields, if we only stay close
to him, be where he is as much as we can-yet Maximilian's doom is
never to go any further into danger than its dapperness, its skin-exciting
first feel. . . .

Fine crew this is, getting set to go off after the Radiant-say what?
what's Slothrop's own gift and Fatal Flaw? Aw, c'mon-uh, the Radiant
Hour, collecting their equipment, Myrtle zooming to and fro material­
izing this and that:

The Golden Gate Bridge ("How about that one?" "Uh, let's see the
other one, again? with the, you know, uh ...

"

"The Brooklyn?"
"-kind of old-fashioned looking-" "The Brooklyn Bridge?" "Yeah,
that's it, with the pointed ... whatever they are ... ").

The Brooklyn Bridge ("See, for a chase-scene, Myrtle, we ought to
observe proportions-" "Do tell." "Now if we were gonna be in high­
speed automobiles, well, sure, we might use the Golden Gate . . . but
for zooming through the air now, we need something older, more inti­
mate, human-").

A pair of superlatively elegant Rolls Royces ("Quit fooling, Myrtle,
we already agreed, didn't we? No automobiles ... "),

A small plastic baby's steering wheel ("Aw all right, I know you don't
respect me as a leader but listen can't we be reasonable ... ").

Any wonder it's hard to feel much confidence in these idiots as they
go up against Pernicious Pop each day? There's no real direction here,
neither lines of power nor cooperation. Decisions are never really made
-at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallu­
cinations and all-round assholery. This is less a fighting team than nest
full of snits, blues, crotchets and grudges, not a rare or fabled bird in the
lot. Its survival seems, after all, only a mutter of blind fortune groping
through the heavy marbling of skies one Titanic-Night at a time. Which
is why Slothrop now observes his coalition with hopes for success and
hopes for disaster about equally high (and no, that doesn't cancel out to
apathy-it makes a loud dissonance that dovetails inside you sharp as
knives). It does annoy him that he can be so divided, so perfectly unable

to co

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to come down on one side or another. Those whom the old
Puritan ser­

mons denounced as "the glozing neuters of the world" have no easy
road to haul down, Wear-the-Pantsers, just cause you can't see it

doesn't mean it's not there! Energy inside is just as real, just as binding
and inescapable, as energy that shows. When's the last time you

felt in­

tensely lukewarm? eh? Glozing neuters are just as
human as heroes and

villains. In many ways they have the most grief to put up with,
don't

they? Why don't you, right now, wherever you are, city
folks or out in

the country, snuggled in quilts or riding the bus, just turn to
the Glozing

Neuter nearest you, even your own reflection
in the mirror, and

just ... sing,

How-dy neighbor, how-dy pard!
Ain't it lone-ly, say ain't it hard,
Passin' by so silent, day-after-day, with-out, even

a smile-or, a friendly word to say? Oh, let me
Tell ya bud-dy, tell ya ace,
Things're fal-lin', on their face-

Maybe we should stick together part 0' the way,
and

Skies'll be bright-er some day!
Now ev'rybody-

As the 4 suit up, voices continue singing for a while, depending
how

much each one happens to care-Myrtle displaying generous expanses
of nifty gam, and Maximilian leering up beneath

the fast-talking young
tomato's skirts, drawing bewildered giggles from adolescent Marcel,

who may be a bit repressed.
"Now," Slothrop with a boobish, eager-to-please smile,

"time for that

Pause that Refreshes!" And he's into the icebox before Myrtle's "Oh,

Jesus" has quite finished echoing . . . the light
from the cold wee bulb

turning his face to summernight blue,
Broderick and Nalline's shadow­

child, their unconfessed, their monster son, who was
born with hydrau­

lic clamps for hands that know only how to reach
and grab . . . and a

heart that gurgles audibly, like a funny fatrnan's stomach
... but look

how lost, how unarrested his face is, was, that I Yz
seconds in the glow

from the folksy old icebox humming along in
Kelvinator-Bostonian dia­

lect, "Why cummawn in, T'rone, it's nice and friendly
heeah in my

stummick, gawt lawtsa nice things, like Mawxies,
'n' big Baby

Rooths....
"

Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky
shelves and

food-mountains or food-cities of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get

pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored
sweet stuff is thermo-



dynamic elitism at its clearest-bulbs can be replaced with candles and
the radios fall silent, but the Grid's big function in this System is icebox­
ery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve thisodorless small world, this cube of changelessness), climbing over the cel­
ery ridges where the lettered cheese glasses loom high and glossy in the
middle distance, slippin' on the butter dish, piggin' on the watermelon
down to the rind, feelin' yellow and bright as you skirt the bananas, gaz­
ing down at verdigris reaches of mold across the crusted terrain of an
old, no longer identifiable casserole-bananas! who-who's been putting
bananas-

In-the-re-frig er a-tor!
o no-no-no, no-no-no!

Chiquita Banana sez we shouldn't! Somethin' awful'll happen! Who
would do that? It couldn't be Mom, and Hogan's in love with Chiquita
Banana, Tyrone's come in the room plenty of times found his brother
with banana label glued on his erect cock for ready reference, lost in
masturbatory fantasies of nailing this cute but older Latin lady while
she's wearing her hat, gigantic fruit-market hat and a big saucy smile
iAy, ay, how passionate you Yankees are! ... a-and it couldn't've been
Pop, no Pop wouldn't, but if it (is it getting cold in here?) wasn't any of
us, then (what's happening to the Spike Jones record of "Right in the
FUhrer's Face" playing back out in the living room, why's the sound
fading?) . . . unless I did it without knowing (look around, something's
squeaking on its hinges) and maybe that means I'm going crazy (what's
this brightening the bulblight, what's-) SLAM well whoever it is that's
been wantonly disregarding United Fruit's radio commercials has also
just closed young Tyrone in that icebox, and now he'll have to count on
Myrtle to get him out. Embarrassing as heck.

"Good thinking, boss man."
"Gee, M.M., I don't know what happened.
"Do you ever? Grab on to my cape."
Whoosh-
"Whew. Well," sez Slothrop, "uh, are we all ?"
"That Radiant Hour's probably light-years away by now," sez Myrt,

"and you have a snot icicle hanging outa your nose." Marcel springs to
the controls of the mobile building, keys in to Central Control a request
for omnidirectional top-speed clearance, which sometimes comes
through and sometimes not, depending on a secret process among the
granters of permission, a process it is one of the 4' s ongoing mandates to

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discover and impart to me world. This time they get Slow Crawl, Sub­
urban Vectors, lowest traffic status in the Raketen-Stadt, invoked only
once in recorded history, against a homosexual child-murdering Indian
liked to wipe off his organ afterwards on the Flag and so on-"Shit!"
hollers Maximilian at Slothrop, "Slow Crawl, Suburban Vectors! whut
th' fuck we s'posed to do man, swim or some shit?"

"Uh, Myrtle ...
"

Slothrop approaches gold-snooded M.M. a little
deferent, "uh, do you think you could . . ." Jesus they run through this
same routine every time-doesn't Myrtle wish Sniveling Slothrop would
cut this wishy-washy malarkey 'n' be a man fer once! She lights a ciga­
rette, lets it droop from one corner of her mouth, juts out the opposite
hip and sighs, "On the beam," exasperated already with this cree_Ir-

And Los! the miracle is done, they're now zipping along the corridor­
streets of the Raketen-Stadt like some long-necked sea monster. Little
kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts high over the city
dripping stone like Spanish moss petrified in mid-collapse, kids up over
the airy railings and onto the friendly back of the sleek city-cruising
monster. They climb window to window, too full of grace ever to fall.
Some of them, naturally, are spies: that honey-curled little cutie in the
blue checked pinafore and blue knee-socks, up there under the gargoyle
at the window listening in to Maximilian, who began drinking heavily as
soon as the building started to move, and is now carrying on a long de­
nunciation of Marcel under the thin scholarly disguise of trying to de­
termine if the Gallic Genius can truly be said to have any "soul." Young
lady under gargoyle is taking it all down in shorthand. These are

valu­

able data for the psychological warfare effort.
For the first time now it becomes apparent that the 4 and the Father­

conspiracy do not entirely fill their world. Their struggle is not the only,
or even the ultimate one. Indeed, not only are there many other strug­
gles, but there are also spectators, watching, as spectators will do,

hun­

dreds of thousands of them, sitting around this dingy yellow amphithea­
tre, seat after seat plunging down in rows and tiers endless miles, down
to the great arena, brown-yellow lights, food scattered on the stone

slopes up higher, broken buns, peanut shells, bones, bottles
half-filled

with green or orange sweet, fires in small wind-refuges, set in angles
where seats have been chiseled away, shallow depressions in the stone
and a bed of cherry embers where old women are cooking hashes of the

scavenged bits and crumbles and gristly lumps of food, heating
them in

thin frying pans of gray oil-water bubbling, as the faces of children

gather around to wait for food, and in the wind the dark young man,
the

slippery young knife who waits for your maid outside the iron gate
each

679



Sunday, who takes her away to a park, a stranger's automobile and a
shape of love you can never imagine, stands now with his hair untended
in the wind, his head averted from the fire, feeling the cold, the moun­
tain cold, at his temples and high under his jaw ... while beside other
fires the women gossip, one craning over pow and then to look miles
downward at the stage, to see if a new episode's come on yet-crowds
of students running by dark as ravens, coats draped around shoulders,
back out into a murky sector of seats which traditionally are never en­
tered (being reserved for the Ancestors), their voices fading still very in­
tense, dramatic, trying to sound good or at least acceptable. The women
go on, playing cards, smoking, eating. See if you can borrow a blanket
from Rose's fire over there, it's gonna be cold tonight. Hey-and a pack
of Armies while you're out-and come right back, hear me? Of course
the cigarette machine turns out to be Marcel, who else, in another of his
clever mechanical disguises, and inside one pack is a message for one of
the spectators. "I'm sure you wouldn't want Them to know about the
summer of 1945. Meet me in the Male Transvestites' Toilet, level
LI6/39C, station Metatron, quadrant Fire, stall Malkuth. You know
what time. The usual Hour. Don't be late."

What's this? What're the antagonists doing here-infiltrating their
own audience? Well, they're not, really. It's somebody else's audience
at the moment, and these nightly spectacles are an appreciable part of
the darkside-hours life of the Rocket-capital. The chances for any para­
dox here, really, are less than you think.

Maximilian is way down in the bottom of the orchestra pit posing as
the C-melody saxophone player, complete with Closet Intellectual
Book, The Wisdom of the Great Kamikaze Pilots, with illustrations by
Walt Disney-screaming, hairy-nosed, front teeth in white dihedral,
slant-eyed (long, elaborate curlicued shapes) round black licorice dog­
nosed laps, zoomin' through ev'ry page! and any time he's not playing
that saxophone, you can be sure Maximilian will be, to the casual ob­
server, immersed in this diffuse, though rewarding, work. Myrtle mean­
time is back in the candycane control room, manning the switchboard
and ready to swoop in at any time to save the others, who are sure
(through their own folly if nothing else) to be in deep trouble soon. And
Slothrop himself lurks in the Transvestites' Toilet, in the smoke, the
crowds, the buzzing fluorescent lights, piss hot as melted butter, making
notes of all the dealing going on among the stalls, bowls 'n' urinals
(you've got to look butch but not that butch and another thing no metal
showing at any vital spots, she'll knock off ten marks for everyone she
sees, and the only bonuses she gives are spelled out here: blood drawn

680

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on first try, that's an extra 20-) wondering if the cigarette-pack
mes­

sage got through and if they'll come in person or if Pop'll send a
hit man

to try for a first-round KO.
Well, there is the heart of it: the monumental yellow structure, out

there in the slum-suburban night, the never-sleeping percolation of life
and enterprise through its shell, Outside and Inside interpiercing one
another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have
much hegemony any more. The nonstop revue crosses its stage, crowd­

ing and thinning, surprising and jerking tears in an endless
ratchet:

THE Low-FREQUENCY LISTENER

The German U-boats communicated on a wave length of 28,000 me­

ters, which is down around 10 kc. A half-wave antenna
for that'd halfta

be 9 miles high, or long, and even folded here and there it is still some
antenna. It is located at Magdeburg. So is the headquarters of the Ger­
man branch of Jehovah's Witnesses. So, for a time, is Slothrop, attempt­
ing to get through to the Argentine anarchist U-boat,

now in unknown

waters. The reason why is no longer clear to him. He was either visited

again in some way by Squalidozzi, or he came upon Squalidozzi
one day

by accident, or he found, in some lint-picking
attentionless search

through pockets, rags or bedroll, the message he was given,
back at the

green edge of Aries, at the Cafe l'Eclipse long ago in Geneva. All he
knows is that finding Squalidozzi, right now, is his overriding need.

The Keeper of the Antenna is a Jehovah's witness named
Rohr. He's

just out of the Ravensbriick camp after being in since '36 (or '37,
he

can't remember). With that much camp time in, he's politically reliable

enough for the local G-S to put him, nights, in control of the
network of

longest wavelength in the Zone. Although this could be accidental,
more likely there is some eccentric justice lately begun to operate

out

here which it would behoove Slothrop to look into. There are rumors of

a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Niirnberg. No one Slothrop has
listened to is clear who's trying whom for what, but remember that

these are mostly brains ravaged by antisocial and mindless pleasures.
But the only people-if any-apt to be communicating these days

on

28,000 meters (the distance from Test Stand VII at Peenemiinde to the

HafenstraBe in Greifswald, where Slothrop in early August may see a

particular newspaper photo), except for freak Argentine anarchists,
are

the undenazified Nazis still wandering around in unaccounted-for sub­
marines holding their own secret shipboard tribunals against enemies

of

the Reich. So the closest thing in the Zone to an early Christian is put
on to listen for news of unauthorized crucifixions.

681



"Someone the other night was dying," Rohr tells him, "I don't know
if he was inside the Zone or out at sea. He wanted a priest. Should I
have got on and told him about priests? Would he've found any comfort
in that? It's so painful sometimes. We're really trying to be Chris­
tians. . . ."

"My folks were Congregationalist," Slothrop offers, "I think." It's
getting harder to remember either of them, as Broderick progresses into
Pernicious Pop and Nalline into ssshhhghhh ... (into what? What was
that word? Whatever it is, the harder he chases, the faster it goes away).

MOM SLOTHROP'S LETTER TO AMBASSADOR KENNEDY

Well hi Joe how've ya been. Listen: [ew-zeppy=-we're getting edgy
about our youngest again. Would you try bothering a few of those jolly
old London connections just once more? (Promise!!) Even if it's old news
it'll be good news for Poppy and I. I still remember what you said when
the awful word about the PT boat came in, before you knew how Jack
was. I'll never forget your words then. It's every parent's dream, Joe,
that it is.

Oh, and Hozay (whoops, don't mind that, the pen just skidded as you
can see! Naughty Nalline's on her third martini, we'll have you know).
Poppy and I heard your wonderful speech at the GE plant over in
Pittsfield the other week. You're in the groove, Mister K! How true!
we've got to modernize in Massachusetts, or it'll just keep getting worse
and worse. They're supposed to be taking a strike vote here next week.
Wasn't the WLB set up to prevent just that? It isn't starting to break
down, is it, Joe? Sometimes, you know these fine Boston Sundays, when
the sky over the Hill is broken into clouds, the way white bread appears
through a crust you hold at your thumbs and split apart.... You know,
don't you? Golden clouds? Sometimes I think-ah, Joe, I think they're
pieces of the Heavenly City falling down. I'm sorry-didn't mean this
to get so gloomy all so sudden, it's just ... but it isn't beginning to fall
apart, is it, myoid fellow Harvard-parent? Sometimes things aren't very
clear, that's all. Things look like they're going against us, and though it
always turns out fine at the end, and we can always look back and say
oh of course it had to happen that way, otherwise so-and-so wouldn't
have happened-still, while it's happening, in my heart I keep getting
this terrible fear, this empty place, and it's very hard at such times re­
ally to believe in a Plan with a shape bigger than I can see. .

Oh, anyway. Grumpy old thoughts away! Shoo! Martini Number
Four, comin' up!

Jack's a fine boy. Really I love Jack like Hogan and Tyrone, just like a
682

come

Helleo
know



ON THE PHRASE "Ass BACKWARDS"

son, my own son. 1 even love him like I don't
love my sons, ha-ha! (she

croaks) but then I'm a wicked old babe, you know that. No hope for the
likes of me....

"Something I have never understood about your language, Yankee

pig." Saure has been calling him "Yankee pig" all day now, a hilarious

joke he will not leave alone, often getting no further than "Yank-" be­
fore collapsing into some horrible twanging phthisic wheeze of a laugh,
coughing up alarming ropy lungers of many colors and marbling effects

-green, for example, old-statue green at leafy dusk.
"Sure," replies Slothrop, "you wanna learn English, me teachee you

English. Ask me anything, kraut." It is exactly the kind of blanket offer
that's always getting Slothrop in trouble.

"Why do you speak of certain reversals-machinery connected

wrong, for instance, as being 'ass backwards'? I can't understand that.
Ass usually is backwards, right? You ought to be saying 'ass forwards,' if
backwards is what you mean."

"Uh," sez Slothrop.
"This is only one of many American Mysteries," Saure sighs, "I wish

somebody could clear up for me. Not you, obviously."
Saure got a lotta gall picking on other people's language like this. One

night, back when he was a second-story man, he had the incredible luck
to break into the affluent home of Minne Khlaetsch, an astrologer of the

Hamburg School, who was, congenitally it seems, unable to pronounce,
even perceive, umlauts over vowels. That night she was just coming on
to what would prove to be an overdose of Hieropon, when Saure, who
back in those days was a curly-haired and good-looking kid, surprised
her in her own bedroom with his hand around an ivory chess Laufer

with a sarcastic smile on its face, and filled with good raw Peruvian co­
caine still full of the Earth-"Don't call for help," advises Saure flashing
his phony acid bottle, "or that pretty face goes flowing off of its bones
like vanilla pudding." But Minne calls his bluff, starts hollering for help
to all the ladies of the same age in her building who feel that same

motherly help-help-but-make-sure-there's-time-for-him-to-rape-me am­
bivalence about nubile cat burglars. What she means to scream is
"Hiibsch Rauber! Hiibsch Rauber!" which means "Cute-looking rob­
ber! Cute-looking robber!" But she can't pronounce those umlauts. So it
comes out "Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!" which means "Helicopter!
Helicopter!" well, it's 192o-something, and nobody in earshot even
knows what the word means, Liftscrewer, what's that?-nobody except



one finger-biting paranoid aerodynamics student in a tenement court­
yard far away, who heard the scream late in Berlin night, over tram­
clashing, rifle shots in another quarter, a harmonica novice who has
been trying to play "Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles" for the past
four hours, over and over missing notes, fucking up the time, the breath­
ing ii . . . berall . . . es . . . indie . . . ie . . . then longlong pause,
oh come on asshole, you can find it-Welt sour, ach, immediately cor­
rected ... through all this to him comes the cry Hubschrauber, lift­
screwer, a helix through cork air over wine of Earth falling bright, yes
he knows exactly-and can this cry be a prophecy? a warning (the sky
full of them, gray police in the hatchways with ray-guns cradled like
codpieces beneath each whirling screw we see you from above there is
nowhere to go it's your last alley, your last stormcellar) to stay inside and
not interfere? He stays inside and does not interfere. He goes on to be­
come "Sporri" of Horst Achtfaden's confession to the Schwarzkom­
mando. But he didn't go to see what Minne was hollering about that
night. She would've OD'd except for her boy friend Wimpe, an up-and­
coming IG salesman covering the Eastern Territory, who'd blown into
town after unexpectedly dumping all of his Oneirine samples on a party
of American tourists back in hilltop Transylvania looking for a new kind
of thrills-it's me Liebchen, didn't expect to be back so-but then he
saw the sprawled satin creature, read pupil-size and skin-tint, swiftly
went to his leather case for stimulant and syringe. That and an ice-filled
bathtub got her back O.K.

"

'Ass' is an intensifier," Seaman Bodine now offers, "as in 'mean ass,'
'stupid ass'-well, when something is very backwards, by analogy you'd
say 'backwards ass.'

"

"But 'ass backwards' is 'backwards ass' backwards," Same objects.
"But gee that don't make it mean forwards," blinks Bodine with a

sincere little break in his voice as if somebody's just about to hit him­
actually this is a bit of private fun for the spirited salt, it is a William
Bendix imitation. Let the others do Cagney and Cary Grant, Bodine
specializes in supporting roles, he can do a perfect Arthur Kennedy-as­
Cagney's-kid-brother, how about that? O-or Cary Grant's faithful Indian
water-bearer, Sam Jaffe. He is a white-hat in the navy of life, and that
extends to vocal impressions of the fake film-lives of strangers.

Saure meantime is into something like this with instrumental soloists,
or trying, teaching himself kind of by trial and error, currently ee-ee­
aw-aw-ing his way through some hypothetical Joachim playing his own
cadenza from the long-suppressed Rossini violin concerto (op. posth.),
and in the process driving the household mad. One morning Trudi just

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685

goes stomping away Into an Sznd Airborne mass jump
over the con­

quered city, a million fleecy canopies in the sky, falling slow as white
ash behind around the silhouette of her good-by stomp. "He's driving
me crazy." "Hi Trudi, where you going?" "I just told you-crazy!" and
don't think this wretched old horny dopefiend doesn't love her, because
he does, and don't think he isn't praying, writing down his wishes care­

fully on cigarette papers, rolling up in them his finest sacramental
kif

and smoking them down to a blister on the lip, which is the dopefiend's
version of wishing on an evening star, hoping in his heart she's just off
on another stomp, please only a stomp, let it be over inside the day just
one more time, he writes on each good-night's reefer, that's all, I won't
ask again, I'll try not to, you know me, don't judge me too hard, please
... but how many more of these stomps can there be? One's going to

be the last. Still he keeps on ee-ee-aw-aw-ing with the Rossini, radiating
his mean, lean, living-at-the-edge street-longevity, no he can't seem to

stop it, it's an old man's habit, he hates himself but
it just comes on him,

no matter what attention he brings to the problem, he can't stop drift­

ing back into the catchy cadenza.... Seaman Bodine understands,
and

is trying to help. To set up a useful interference, he has composed
his

own counter-cadenza, along the lines of those other pop tunes with clas­
sical names big around 1945 ("My Prelude to a Kiss," "Tenement Sym­
phony")-every chance he gets, Bodine will croon it to the new weekly
arrivals, Lalli just in from Lubeck, Sandra who's run away from

the

Kleinbiirgerstrasse, here's vile Bodine with his guitar ambling pelvis­
wiggling down the hallway after each naughty defector, each

choice lit­

tle sexcrime fantasy made flesh, singing and picking a moving rendition
of:

My DOPER'S CADENZA

If you hear, a "box" so sweet,

Play-in' tunes-with, a peppy beat,
That's just MY DOPER'S, CADEN-ZA-A-A-A!

Mel-o-dees, that getcha so,
Where'd they come from? I don't know!

(h-ha) It's just MY DOPER'S CADEN-ZA(A)A-A-A!

This is
the «ca­
denza" part-

Now 1 know it's not as keen as old Rossini
[snatch of La Gazza Ladra herej,

Nor as grand as Bach, or Beethoven-or-Brahms
(bubububoo[ooj 00 [sung to opening of Beethoven 5th, with full band)),

But I'd give away the fames, of a hundred Harry James
... wait, fame? of a hundred lame? Jameses ...
uh ... fameses? Hmm ...



[scherzoso] I-hi-hif this little-song, can-bring, you-to-my arms!
Dum de dum, de-dum de dee,
Oh, it's better than a symphonee-
It's MY DOPER'S CADENZA, to yoooouuu!

These days, the tenement is known as "Der Platz," and is nearly filled
up, all the way in to the last central courtyard, with friends of Saute's.
The change is unexpected-a lot more vegetation seems to be growing
now in the tenement dirt, an ingenious system of home-carpentered
light ducts and mirrors adjusted throughout the day send sunlight, for
the first time, down into these back courts, revealing colors never seen
before . . . there's also a rain-structure, to route the rain among flumes,
funnels, splash-reflectors, waterwheels, nozzles, and weirs to make a
system of rivers and waterfalls to play in this summer . . . the only
rooms that can still be locked from the inside are reserved for isolates,
fetishists, lost stumblers-in out of the occupation who need loneliness
like the dopefiend needs his dope . . . speaking of which, everywhere in
the complex now you can find army dope of all kinds stashed, from cel­
lars to mansarde floors are littered with wire loops and plastic covers
from Yz-grain syrettes of morphine tartrate squeezed toothpaste-tube
empty, broken amyl nitrite containers looted from anti-gas kits, olive­
drab tins of Benzedrine ... work is proceeding on an anti-police moat
around the entire tenement: to keep from drawing attention, this moat
here is the first in history being dug from inside out, the space directly
below the Jacobistrasse, slowly, paranoiacally, is hollowed, sculpted,
carefully shored up under the thin crust of street so the odd tram won't
find itself in unscheduled plunge-though it has been known to happen,
out in the late night with interior tram-lights warm-colored as clear
broth, out on the Peripheral runs through long stretches of unlighted
park or along singing fences of storage depots all at once like a mouth
pursing MF the blacktop buckles and you're down in some dripping
paranoids' moat, the night-shift staring in with huge denizen-of-the­
underground eyes, faced not with you so much as with the agonizing
problem of deciding is this a real bus, or are these "passengers" really
police agents in disguise well it's a touchy business, touchy.

Somewhere in Der Platz now, early morning, somebody's two-year­
old, a baby as fat as a suckling pig, has just learned the word "Sonnen­
schein." "Sunshine," sez the baby, pointing. "Sunshine,

H

running into
the other room.

"Sunshine," croaks some grownup morning-voice.
686

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"Sunshine!" hollers the baby, tottering off.

"Sunshine," a smiling-girl voice, maybe his mother.
"Sunshine!" the baby at the window, showing her, showing anybody

else who'll look, exactly.
SHIT 'N' SHINOLA

r

"Noio," Saure wants to know, "you will tell me about the American

expression 'Shit from Shinola.'
"

"What is this," screams Seaman Bodine, ''I'm being set tasks now?
This is some Continuing Study of American Slang or some shit? Tell me

you old fool," grabbing Saure by throat and lapel and shaking
him

asymmetrically, "you're one of Them too, right? Come on," the old man

Raggedy Andy in his hands, a bad morning of suspicion here for
the usu­

ally mellow Bodine, "Stop, stop," snivels the amazed Saure,
amazement

giving way, that is, to a sniveling conviction that
the hairy American

gob has lost his mind....
Well. You've heard the expression "Shit from Shinola." As in, "Aw,

he don't know Shit from Shinola! 'bout that." Or, "Marine-you don't

know Shit from Shinolal" And you get sent to the Onion Room, or

worse. One implication is that Shit and Shinola are in wildly different

categories. You would envision-maybe just
because they smell dif­

ferent-no way for Shit and Shinola
to coexist. Simply impossible. A

stranger to the English language, a German dopefiend
such as Saure,

not knowing either word, might see "Shit" as a comical interjection,
one

a lawyer in a bowler hat, folding up papers tucking
them in a tan brief­

case might smiling use, "Schitt, Herr Bummer," and he
walks out of

your cell, the oily bastard, forever . . . or Scchhit!
down comes a car­

toon guillotine on one black & white politician, head bouncing
down­

hill, lines to indicate amusing little spherical vortex patterns,
and you

thought yes, like to see that all right, yes cut it off, one
less rodent, schitt

fa! As for Shinola, we pass to universitarians
Franz Pokler, Kurt

Mondaugen, Bert Fibel, Horst Achtfaden and others,
their Schein-Aula

is a shimmering, Albert Speer-style alabaster open-air
stadium with

giant cement birds of prey up at each corner, wings shrugged
forward,

sheltering under each wing-shadow a hooded
German face ... from

the outside, the Hall is golden, the white gold precisely of one lily-of­
the-valley petal in 4 o'clock sunlight, serene, at the top of

a small, arti­

ficially-graded hill. It has a talent, this Seeming-Hall,
for posing up there

in attractive profiles, in front of noble clouds, to suggest persistence,

through returns of spring, hopes for love, meltings
of snow and ice, aca-

687



demic Sunday tranquillities, smells of grass just crushed or cut or later
turning to hay ... but inside the Schein-Aula all is blue and cold as the
sky overhead, blue as a blueprint or a planetarium. Noone in here
knows which way to look. Will it begin above us? Down there? Behind
us? In the middle of the air? and how soon. . . .

Well there's one place where Shit 'n' Shinola do come together, and
that's in the men's toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, the place Slothrop
departed from on his trip down the toilet, as revealed in the St. Veron­
ica Papers (preserved, mysteriously, from that hospital's great holo­
caust). Shit, now, is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the pres­
ence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the
stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman's warm and private
own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That's what that white
toilet's for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet's the color of
gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white porcelain's the
very emblem of Odorless and Official Death. Shinola shoeshine polish
happens to be the color of Shit. Shoeshine boy Malcolm's in the toilet
slappin' on the Shinola, working off whiteman's penance on his sin of
being born the color of Shit' n' Shinola. It is nice to think that one Satur­
day night, one floor-shaking Lindyhopping Roseland night, Malcolm
looked up from some Harvard kid's shoes and caught the eye of Jack
Kennedy (the Ambassador's son), then a senior. Nice to think that young
Jack may have had one of them Immortal Lightbulbs then go on over­
head-did Red suspend his ragpopping just the shadow of a beat, just
enough gap in the moire there to let white Jack see through, not
through to but through through the shine on his classmate Tyrone Slo­
throp's shoes? Were the three ever lined up that way-sitting, squat­
ting, passing through? Eventually Jack and Malcolm both got murdered.
Slothrop's fate is not so clear. It may be that They have something dif­
ferent in mind for Slothrop.

AN INCIDENT IN THE TRANSVESTITES' TOILET

A small ape or orangutan, holding something behind his back, comes
sidling unobserved among net-stockinged legs, bobby sox rolled down to
loop under ankle bones, subdeb beanies tucked into rayon aquamarine
waist-sashes, Finally he reaches Slothrop, who is wearing a blonde wig
and the same long flowing white cross-banded number Fay Wray wears
in her screentest scene with Robert Armstrong on the boat (considering
his history in the Roseland toilet, Slothrop may have chosen this gown
not only out of some repressed desire to be sodomized, unimaginably,
by a gigantic black ape, but also because of an athletic innocence to Fay

688

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that he s never SpOKen or except to point and whisper, "Oh, look ...
"

-some honesty, pluck, a cleanness to the garment itself, its enormous
sleeves so that wherever you pass is visibly where you've been ... ).

At that first moment, long before our flight:
Ravine, tyrannosaurus (flying-mares
And jaws cracked out of joint), the buzzing serpent
That jumped you in your own stone living space,
The pterodactyl or the Fall, no-just . . .
While I first hung there, forest and night at one,
Hung waiting with the torches on the wall.
And waiting for the night's one Shape to come,
I prayed then, not for Jack, still mooning sappy
Along the weather-decks-no. I was thinking
Of Denham-only him, with gun and camera

Wisecracking in his best bum actor's way
Through Darkest Earth, making the unreal reel

By shooting at it, one way or the other-
Carl Denham, my director, my undying,
Carl ...

Ah, show me the key light, whisper me a line.

We've seen them under a thousand names ... "Greta Erdmann" is

only one, these dames whose job it is always to cringe from the
Terror

... well, home from work they fall asleep just like us and dream of as­
sassinations, of plots against good and decent men. . . .

The ape reaches up taps Slothrop on the ass, hands him what he's
been carrying yaahhgghh it's a round black iron anarchist bomb's what
it is, with lit fuse too. . . . Ape goes scampering away. Slothrop just
stands there, in the glassed and humid rooms, his makeup starting to

run, consternation in his eyes clear as marbles and lips pressed into a

bee-stung well-what-th' -heck-Im-l-s'posed-t'-do-now? He can't say any­
thing, the contact still hasn't showed and his voice would blow his

dis­

guise. . . . The fuse is burning shorter and shorter. Slothrop
looks

around. All the washbowls and urinals are occupied. Should he just put
the fuse out in front of sornebody's cock, right in the stream of piss . . .

uh, but wouldn't that look like I was propositioning them or something?
Gee, sometimes I wish I wasn't so indecisive . . . m-maybe if I picked
somebody weaker than me . . . but then it's the little guys got

the

reflexes, remember-
He is rescued from his indecision by a very tall, fat, somewhat Orien-

689



tal-looking transvestite, whose ideal, screen and personal, seems to be
little Margaret O'Brien. Somehow this Asiatic here is managing to look
pigtailed and wistful even as he snatches the sputtering bomb away
from Slothrop, runs heaves it into an empty toiletbowl and flushes it,
turning back to Slothrop and the others with an air of civic duty well
done when suddenly-

KRUPPALOOMA comes this giant explosion: water leaps in a sur­
prised blue-green tongue (ever seen a toilet hollering, "Yikes!"?) out of
every single black-lidded bowl, pipes wrench and scream, walls and
floor shudder, plaster begins to fall in crescents and powder-sheets as all
the chattering transvestites fall silent, reach out to touch anyone nearby
as a gesture of preparation for the Voice out of the Loudspeaker, saying:

"That was a sodium bomb. Sodium explodes when it touches water."
So the fuse was a dummy, the dirty rat. . . . "You saw who threw it in
the toilet. He is a dangerous maniac. Apprehend him, and there'll be a
large reward. Your closet could make Norma Shearer's look like the
wastebasket in Gimbel's basement."

So they all leap on the poor protesting Margaret O'Brien devotee,
while Slothrop, for whom the humiliation and (presently, as the arrival
of the police grows later and later) the sexual abuse and torture were re­
ally intended (Gotta hand it to ya, Pop!) slips away, loosening as he
nears the outside the satin ties of his gown, dragging reluctantly, off of
his grease-chevroned head, the shining wig of innocence....

A MOMENT OF FUN WITH TAKESHI AND IcHIZO,
THE KOMICAL KAMIKAZES

Takeshi is tall and fat (but doesn't braid his hair like that Margaret
O'Brien), Ichizo is short and skinny. Takeshi flies a Zero, while Ichizo
flies an Ohka device, which is a long bomb, actually, with a cockpit for
Ichizo to sit in, stub wings, rocket propulsion and a few control surfaces
back aft. Takeshi only had to go to Kamikaze School for two weeks, on
Formosa. Ichizo had to go to Ohka school for six months, in Tokyo.
They are as different as peanut butter and jelly, these two. No fair ask­
ing which is which.

They are the only two Kamikazes out here at this air base, which is
rather remote actually, on an island that nobody, well, really cares much
about, any more. The fighting is going on at Leyte . . . then on to Iwo
Jima, moving toward Okinawa, but always too far away for any sortie
from here to reach. But they have their orders, and their exile. Not
much to do for kicks but go wandering on the beaches looking for dead
Cypridinae. These are crustaceans with three eyes, shaped like a potato

690

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with catwhiskers at one end. Dned and powdered, Cypridinae are also a

great source of light. To make the stuff glow in the dark, all you do is
add water. The light is blue, weird multishaded blue-some green in it,
and some indigo-amazingly cool and nocturnal blue. On moonless or
overcast nights, Takeshi and Ichizo take off all their clothes and splash
each other with Cypridina light, running and giggling under the palm
trees.

Every morning, and sometimes evening too, the Scatterbrained Sui­
cidekicks mosey down to the palm-thatched radar shack to see if there's

any American targets worth a crash-dive, anywhere inside their flying
radius. But it's the same story every time. Old Kenosho the loony ra­
darman who's always brewing up a batch of that sake back in the trans­
mitter room, in a still he's hooked up to a magnetron tube in some fien­

dish-Nip way that defies Western science, every time the fellas show up
this drunken old reprobate starts cackling, "No dying today! No dying
today! So solly!" pointing at all the blank PPI scopes, green radii sweep­
ing silent round and round trailing clear webs of green shampoo, noth­

ing but surface return for more miles than you can fly, and of the fatal
mandala both hearts would leap to, green carrier-blob screened eight­
fold in a circle of destroyer-strokes, nothing ... no, each morning's the

same-only the odd whitecap and old hysterical Kenosho, who by now
is on the floor gagging on saliva and tongue, having his Seizure, an ea­

gerly awaited part of each daily visit, each fit trying to top the one be­
fore, or at least bring in a new twist-a back-flip in the air, a gnaw or
two after Takeshi's blue-and-yellow patent wingtips, an improvised
haiku:

The lover leaps in the volcano!
It's ten feet deep,
And inactive-

as the two pilots mug, giggle, and jump around trying to avoid the griz­
zled old radarman's thrashings-what? You didn't like the haiku. It
wasn't ethereal enough? Not Japanese at all? In fact it sounded like

something right outa Hollywood? Well, Captain-yes you, Marine Cap­
tain Esberg from Pasadena-you, have just had, the Mystery Insight!
(gasps and a burst of premonitory applause) and so you-are our

Para­

noid ... For The Day! (band burst into "Button Up Your Overcoat," or

any other suitably paranoid up-tempo tune, as the bewildered
contest­

ant is literally yanked to his feet and dragged out in the aisle by this
M.C. with the gleaming face and rippling jaw). Yes, it is a movie! An-

691



other World War II situation comedy, and your chance, to find out
what it's really like, because you-have won (drumroll, more gasps,
more applauding and whistling) an all-expense, one-way trip for one, to
the movie's actual location, exotic Puke-a-hook-a-look-i Island! (the or­
chestra's ukulele section taking up now a tinkling reprise of that "White
Man Welcome" tune we last heard in London being directed at Ceza
Rozsavolgyi) on a giant TWA Constellation! You'll while your nights
away chasing vampire mosquitoes away from your own throat! Getting
blind lost, out in the middle of torrential tropical downpours! Scooping
rat turds out of the enlisted men's water barrel! But it won't be all

nighttime giddiness and excitement, Captain, because daytimes, up at
five a.m. sharp, you'll be out making the acquaintance of the Kamikaze
Zero you'll be flying! getting all checked out on those controls, making
sure you know just where that bomb-safety-release is! A-ha-hand of
course, trying to stay out of the way, of those two Nonsensical Nips,
Takeshi and Ichizo! as they go about their uproarious weekly adven­
tures, seemingly oblivious to your presence, and the frankly ominous im­
plications of your day's routine. . . .

STREETS

Strips of insulation hang up in the morning fog, after a night of moon
brightening and darkening as if by itself, because the blowing fog was so
smooth, so hard to see. Now, when the wind blows, yellow sparks will
spill away with a rattlesnake buzz from the black old fraying wires,
against a sky gray as a hat. Green glass insulators go cloudy and blind in
the day. Wood poles lean and smell old: thirty-year-old wood. Tarry
transformers hum aloft. As if it will really be a busy day. In the middle
distance poplars just emerge out of the haze.

It could have been the Semlower Strasse, in Stralsund. The windows
have the same ravaged look: the insides of all the rooms seem to've been
gutted black. Perhaps there is a new bomb that can destroy only the in­
sides of structures ... no ... it was in Greifswald. Across some wet
railroad tracks were derricks, superstructure, tackle, smells of canalside
... Hafenstrasse in Greifswald, down over his back fell the cold
shadow of some massive church. But isn't that the Petritor, that stunted
brick tower-arch straddling the alleyway ahead . . . it could be the Slii­
terstrasse in the old part of Rostock . . . or the Wandfarberstrasse in
Liineburg, with pulleys high up on the brick gables, openwork weather­
cocks up at the very peaks . . . why was he looking upward? Upward
from any of a score of those northern streets, one morning, in the fog.
The farther north, the plainer things grow. There's one gutter, down the

692

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middle of the alley, where the rain runs off. Cobbles are laid straighter
and there aren't as many cigarettes to be had. Garrison-churches echo

with starlings. To come into a northern Zone town is to enter a strange
harbor, from the sea, on a foggy day.

But in each of these streets, some vestige of humanity, of Earth, has
to remain. No matter what has been done to it, no matter what it's been

used for. ...
There were men called "army chaplains." They preached inside some

of these buildings. There were actually soldiers, dead now, who sat or

stood, and listened. Holding on to what they could. Then they went out,
and some died before they got back inside a garrison-church again.
Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the

men who

were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
salvation.

It really happened. It was quite common.
Even in a street used for that, still there will be one time, one dyed

afternoon (coaltar-impossible orange-brown, clear all the way through),
or one day of rain and clearing before bedtime, and in the yard

one hol­

lyhock, circling in the wind, fresh with raindrops fat enough
to be

chewed . . . one face by a long sandstone wall and the scuffle of all the
doomed horses on the other side, one hair-part thrown into blue shad­
ows at a turn of her head-one busful of faces passing through in the
middle of the night, no one awake in the quiet square but the driver, the
Ortsschutz sentry in some kind of brown, official-looking uniform,

old

Mauser at sling arms, dreaming not of the enemy outside in the swamp
or shadow but of home and bed, strolling now with his civilian friend
who's off-duty, can't sleep, under the trees full of road-dust and night,
through their shadows on the sidewalks, playing a

harmonica . . . down

past the row of faces in the bus,
drowned-man green, insomniac, to­

bacco-starved, scared, not of tomorrow, not yet, but of this pause
in

their night-passage, of how easy it will be to lose, and how
much it will

hurt....
At least one moment of passage, one it will hurt to lose, ought to be

found for every street now indifferently gray with commerce,
with war,

with repression ... finding it, learning to cherish what was lost,

mightn't we find some way back?
In one of these streets, in the morning fog, plastered over two slip­

pery cobblestones, is a scrap of newspaper headline,
with a wirephoto

of a giant white cock, dangling in the sky straight downward
out of a

white pubic bush. The letters

MBDRO

ROSHI



appear above with the logo of some occupation newspaper, a grinning
glamour girl riding astraddle the cannon <of a tank, steel penis with slot­
ted serpent head, 3rd Armored treads 'n' triangle on a sweater rippling
across her tits. The white image has the same coherence, the hey-Iookit­
me smugness, as the Cross does. It is not only a sudden white genital
onset in the sky-it is also, perhaps, a Tree. . . .

Slothrop sits on a curbstone watching it, and the letters, and girl with
steel cock waving hi fellas, as the fog whitens into morning, and figures
with carts, or dogs, or bicycles go by in brown-gray outlines, wheezing,
greeting briefly in fog-flattened voices, passing. He doesn't remember
sitting on the curb for so long staring at the picture. But he did.

At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east,
head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at the hori­
zon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She
loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacrificed.
The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign.

LISTENING TO THE TOILET

The basic idea is that They will come and shut off the water first. The
cryptozoa who live around the meter will be paralyzed by the great in­
break of light from overhead ... then scatter like hell for lower"
darker, wetter. Shutting the water off interdicts the toilet: with only one
tankful left, you really can't get rid of much of anything any more,
dope, shit, documents, They've stopped the inflow/outflow and here
you are trapped inside Their frame with your wastes piling up, ass hang­
ing out all over Their Movieola viewer, waiting for Their editorial blade.
Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if
not good will: Their neglect is your freedom. But when They do come
on it's like society-gig Apollos, striking the lyre

ZONGGG

Everything freezes. The sweet, icky chord hangs in the air . . . there
is no way to be at ease with it. If you try the "Are you quite finished, Su­
perintendent?" gambit, the man will answer, "No, as a matter of fact
... no, you nasty little wet-mouthed prig, I'm not half finished, not
with you....

"

So it's good policy always to have the toilet valve cracked a bit, to
maintain some flow through the toilet so when it stops you'll have that
extra minute or two. Which is not the usual paranoia of waiting for a
knock, or a phone to ring: no, it takes a particular kind of mental illness
to sit and listen for a cessation of noise. But-

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Imagine this very elaborate scientific lie: that
sound cannot travel

through outer space. Well, but suppose it can. Suppose They
don't want

us to know there is a medium there, what used to be called an "aether,"

which can carry sound to every part of the Earth. The
Soniferous

Aether. For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace,

93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations
of men have

been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it. Un­

less it changed, how would anybody know?

Except that at night now and then, in some part of the
dark hemi­

sphere, because of eddies in the Soniferous Aether, there
will come to

pass a very shallow pocket of no-sound. For a
few seconds, in a particu­

lar place, nearly every night somewhere in the World, sound-energy
from Outside is shut off. The roaring of the sun stops. For its brief life,

the point of sound-shadow may come to rest a
thousand feet above a de­

sert, between floors in an empty office building, or exactly around a

seated individual in a working-class restaurant where they hose the

place out at 3 every morning . . . it's all white tile,
the chairs and tables

riveted solid into the floor, food covered with rigid shrouds of clear plas­
tic . . . soon, from outside, rrrnnn! clank, drag, squeak of valve opening
oh yes, ah yes, Here Are The Men

With The Hoses To Hose The Place

Out-

At which instant, with no warning, the arousing feather-point of the

Sound-Shadow has touched you, enveloping you in sun-silence for oh,

let us say 2:36: 18 to 2:36:24, Central War Time,
unless the location is

Dungannon, Virginia, Bristol, Tennessee, Asheville
or Franklin, North

Carolina, Apalachicola, Florida, or conceivably in Murdo Mackenzie,
South Dakota, or Phillipsburg, Kansas, or Stockton, Plainville, or Ellis,

Kansas-yes sounds like a Roll of Honor don't it, being
read off some­

place out on the prairie, foundry colors down the sky
in long troughs,

red and purple, darkening crowd of. civilians erect and nearly-touching
as wheat stalks, and the one old man in black up at the microphone,

reading off the towns of the war dead, Dungannon
. . .

Bristol . . .

Murdo Mackenzie ... his white hair blown back by a sculpting thine­
alabaster-cities wind into leonine wreathing, his stained pored old face

polished by wind, sandy with light, earnest outboard
corners of his eye­

lids folding down as one by one, echoing out over the
anvil prairie, the

names of death-towns unreel, and surely Bleicherode or Blicero will be

spoken any minute now....
Well, you're wrong, champ-these happen to be towns

all located on

the borders of Time Zones, is all. Ha, hal Caught you with your hand in

695



your pants! Go on, show us all what you were doing or leave the area,
we don't need your kind around. There's nothing so loathsome as a sen­
timental surrealist.

"Now-the eastern towns we've listed are on Eastern War Time. All
the other towns along the interface are on Central. The western towns
just read off are on Central, while the other towns along that interface
are on Mountain. . . ."

Which is all our Sentimental Surrealist, leaving the area, gets to hear.
Just as well. He is more involved, or "unhealthily obsessed," if you like,
with the moment of sun-silence inside the white tile greasy-spoon. It
seems like a place he has been (Kenosha, Wisconsin?) already, though
he can't remember in what connection. They called him "the Kenosha
Kid," though this may be apocryphal. By now, the only other room he
can remember being in was a two-color room, nothing but the two exact
colors, for all the lamps, furniture, drapes, walls, ceiling, rug, radio, even
book jackets in the shelves-everything was either (1) Deep Cheap-Per­
fume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown. That
may've been in Kenosha, may not. If he tries he will remember, in a
minute, how he got to the white tiled room half an hour before hose-out
time. He is sitting with a coffee cup half full, heavy sugar and cream,
crumbs of a pineapple Danish under the saucer where his fingers can't
reach. Sooner or later he'll have to move the saucer to get them. He's
just holding off. But it isn't sooner and it isn't later, because

the sound-shadow comes down on him,
settles around his table, with the invisible long vortex surfaces that

brought it here swooping up away like whorls of an Aetheric Danish,
audible only by virtue of accidental bits of sound-debris that may hap­
pen to be caught in the eddying, voices far away out at sea our position
is two seven degrees two six minutes north, a woman crying in some
high-pitched language, ocean waves in gale winds, a voice reciting in
Japanese,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,
Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,
Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

which is the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit-it means

Injustice cannot conquer Principle,
Principle cannot conquer Law,
Law cannot conquer Power,
Power cannot conquer Heaven.

696

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Hi, Hi, Ho, Ken, 1 en go J ap-gibbering away on the long solar eddy
and leave the Kenosha Kid at the riveted table, where the roaring of the
sun has stopped. He is hearing, for the first time, the mighty river of his
blood, the Titan's drum of his heart.

Come into the bulbshine and sit with him, with the stranger at the

small public table. It's almost hosing-out time. See if you can sneak in
under the shadow too. Even a partial eclipse is better than never finding
out-better than cringing the rest of your life under the great Vacuum
in the sky they have taught you, and a sun whose silence you never get
to hear.

What if there is no Vacuum? Or if there is-what if They're using it
on you? What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life sur­
rounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual
life in time? What if it's in Their interest to have you believing that?

"He won't bother us for a while," They tell each other. "I just put
him on the Dark Dream." They drink together, shoot very very syn­
thetic drugs into skin or blood, run incredible electronic waveforms into
Their skulls, directly into the brainstem, and backhand each other, play­
fully, with openmouth laugh-you know, don't you is in those ageless
eyes ... They speak of taking So-and-So and "putting him on the
Dream." They use the phrase for each other too, in sterile tenderness,
when bad news is passed, at the annual Roasts, when the endless mind­

gaming catches a colleague unprepared-"Boy, did we put him on the
Dream." You know, don't you?

WITTY REPARTEE

Ichizo comes out of the hut, sees Takeshi in a barrel under some palm
leaves taking a bath and singing "Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo," some koto
tune, twanging through his nose-Ichizo screams runs back inside re­

emerging with a Japanese Hotchkiss machine gun, a Model 92, begins
setting it up with a lot of jujitsu grunting and eyepopping. About

the

time he's got the ammo belt poised, ready to riddle Takeshi in the tub,
TAKESHI: Wait a minute, wait a minute! What's all this?

ICHIzo: Oh, it's you! I-thought it was General MacArthur, in his­
rowboat!

Interesting weapon, the Hotchkiss. Comes in many nationalities, and

manages to fit in ethnically wherever it goes. American Hotchkisses are
the guns that raked through the unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee.
On the lighter side, the racy 8 mm French Hotchkiss when fired goes
haw-haw-haw-haw, just as nasal and debonair as a movie star. As for our
cousin John Bull, a lot of British Hotchkiss heavies were either resold

697



privately after World War I, or blowtorched. These melted machine
guns will show up now and then in the strangest places. Pirate Prentice
saw one in 1936, during his excursion with Scorpia Mossmoon, at the
Chelsea home of James Jello, that year's king of Bohemian clowns-but
a minor king, from a branch prone to those loathsome inbred diseases,
idiocy in the family, sexual peculiarities surfacing into public view at
most inappropriate times (a bare penis dangling out of a dumpster one
razor-clear and rainwashed morning, in an industrial back-street about
to be swarmed up by a crowd of angry workers in buttontop baggy caps
carrying spanners three feet long, Kelly crowbars, lengths of chain,
here's bareass Crown Prince Porfirio with a giant halo of aluminum­
shaving curls on his head, his mouth made up with black grease, his soft
buttocks squirming against the cold refuse picking up steel splinters that
sting deliciously, his eyes sultry and black as his lips, but oh dear what's
this, oh how embarrassing here they come around the corner he can
smell the rabble from here, though they are not too sure about Porfirio
-the march pauses in some confusion as these most inept revolutionar­
ies fall to arguing whether the apparition is a diversionary nuisance
planted here by the Management, or whether he's real Decadent Aris­
tocracy to be held for real ransom and if so how much . . . while up on
the rooftops, out from the brick and corrugated doorways begin to ap­
pear brown Government troops manning British Hotchkisses which
were not melted down, but bought up by machinegun jobbers and sold
to a number of minor governments around the world). It may have been
in memory of Crown Prince Porfirio that day of massacre that James
Jello kept a melted Hotchkiss in his rooms-or it may've been only an­
other flight of grotesquerie on dear James's part you know, he's so un­
aware....

HEART-TO-HEART, MAN-TO-MAN

-Son, been wondering about this, ah, "screwing in" you kids are
doing. This matter of the, shooting electricity into head, ha-ha?

- Waves, Pop. Not just raw electricity. That's fer drips!
-Yes, ah, waves. "Keying waves," right? ha-hah. Vh, tell me, son,

what's it like? You know Toe been something of a doper all m'life,
a-and-

-Oh Pop. Cripes. It isn't like dope at all!
-Well we got off on some pretty good "vacations" we called them

then, some pretty "weird" areas they got us into's a matter of fact­
-But you always came back, didn't you.
-What?

698

_Li�en

rose somed
-Ho, hOi

about� You
nuh? �1·ma�
us complete
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rstood that this would still be here when

you got back, just the same, exactly the same, right?
-Well ha-ha guess that's why we called 'em vacations, son! Cause

you always do come back to old Realityland, don't you.
-You always did.
-Listen Tyrone, you don't know how dangerous that stuff is. Sup-

pose someday you just plug in and go away and never come back?
Eh?

-Ho, hot Don't I wish! What do you think every electrofreak dreams

about? You're such an old fuddyduddy! A-and who sez it's a dream,
huh? M-maybe it exists. Maybe there is a Machine to take us away, take
us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the skull 'n'
into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls it's got
stored there. It could decide who it would suck out, a-and when. Dope
never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time,

into a

dying hunk of smelly meat! But We can live forever, in a clean, honest,

purified Electroworld-
-Shit that's what I get, havin' a double Virgo fer a son.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF IMIPOLEX G

Imipolex G is the first plastic that is actually erectile. Under
suitable

stimuli, the chains grow cross-links, which stiffen the molecule and
in­

crease intermolecular attraction so that this Peculiar Polymer runs far
outside the known phase diagrams, from limp rubbery amorphous to

amazing perfect tessellation, hardness, brilliant transparency, high
re­

sistance to temperature, weather, vacuum, shock of any
kind (slowly

gleaming in the Void. Silver and black. Curvewarped reflections
of stars

flowing across, down the full length of, round and round
in meridians

exact as the meridians of acupuncture. What are the stars but points in

the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our
terror and

longing? Shadows of the creature's bones and ducts-leaky, wounded,
irradiated white-mingling in with its own. It is entangled with the

bones and ducts, its own shape determined by how the Erection of the
Plastic shall proceed: where fast and where slow, where painful and
where slithery-cool ... whether areas shall exchange characteristics

of

hardness and brilliance, whether some areas should be allowed to flow

over the surface so that the passage will be a caress, where to
orches­

trate sudden discontinuities-blows, wrenchings-in among these more

caressive moments).
Evidently the stimulus would have had to be electronic.

Alternatives

for signaling to the plastic surface were limited:
(a) a thin matrix of wires, forming a rather close-set coordinate system

699

,

." �.,_ ...
f'
-----......,.,_,:�." ..... � .. _�:'.:_ "'_'�-J.",_

...

:::=:..:-
..._�- .. r-��.�"i.;

/ 1-
f'� • -

.--

I

I J:
"'

------._



over the Imipolectic Surface, whereby erecrue ana otner COllllllauuS
could be sent to an area quite specific, say on the order of % em",

(b) a beam-scanning system-or several-analogous to the well­
known video electron stream, modulated with grids and deflection
plates located as needed on the Surface (or even below the outer layer
of Imipolex, down at the interface with What lies just beneath: with
What has been inserted or What has actually grown itself a skin of Imi­
polex G, depending which heresy you embrace. We need not dwell here
on the Primary Problem, namely that everything below the plastic film
does after all lie in the Region of Uncertainty, except to emphasize to
beginning students who may be prone to Schwarrnerei, that terms refer­
ring to the Subimipolexity such as "Core" and "Center of Internal En­
ergy" possess, outside the theoretical, no more reality than do terms
such as "Supersonic Region" or "Center of Gravity" in other areas of
Science),

(c) alternatively, the projection, onto the Surface, of an electronic
"image," analogous to a motion picture. This would require a minimum
of three projectors, and perhaps more. Exactly how many is shrouded in
another order of uncertainty: the so-called Otyiyumbu Indeterminacy
Relation ("Probable functional derangement YR resulting from physical
modification � (x,y,z) is directly proportional to a higher power p of
sub-imipolectic derangement YB' p being not necessarily an integer and
determined empirically"), in which subscript R is for Rakete, and B for
Blicero.

D D D D D D D

Meantime, Tchitcherine has found it necessary to abandon his smegma­
gathering stake-out on the Argentine anarchists. The heat, alias Nikolai
Ripov of the Commissariat for Intelligence Activities, is in town and
closing in. The faithful Dzabajev, in terror or disgust, has gone off across
the cranberry bogs on a long wine binge with two local derelicts, and
may never be back. Rumor sez he is cutting a swath these days across
the Zone in a stolen American Special Services getup, posing as Frank
Sinatra. Comes into town finds a tavern and starts crooning out on the
sidewalk, pretty soon there's a crowd, subdeb cuties each a $65 fine and
worth every penny dropping in epileptiform seizures into selfless heaps
of cable-stitching, rayon pleats and Xmastree applique. It works. It's al­
ways good for free wine, an embarrassment of wine, rolling Fuder and
Fass in a rumbling country procession through the sandy streets, wher-

700

matter�"
"But \)u
"If I �\'er
"You don
"That d
"I don'



ever me UrUI1Kal U� � 111 t;;t;; lUlU themselves. Never occurs to anybody to
ask what Frank Sinatra's doing flanked by this pair of wasted rumdums.
Nobody doubts for a minute that it is Sinatra. Town hepcats usually
take the other two for a comedy team.

While nobles are crying in their nights' chains, the squires sing. The
terrible politics of the Grail can never touch them. Song is the magic
cape.

Tchitcherine understands that he is finally alone now. Whatever is to
find him will find him alone.

He feels obliged to be on the move, though there's noplace for him to

go. Now, too late, the memory of Wimpe, longago IG Farben V-Mann,
finds him. Tags along for the run. Tchitcherine was hoping he might
find a dog. A dog would have been ideal, a perfect honesty to calibrate
his own against, day to day, till the end. A dog would have been good to
have along. But maybe the next best thing is an albatross with no curse
attached: an amiable memory.

Young Tchitcherine was the one who brought up political narcotics.

Opiates of the people.
Wimpe smiled back. An old, old smile to chill even the living fire in

Earth's core. "Marxist dialectics? That's not an opiate, eh?"
"It's the antidote."
"No." It can go either way. The dope salesman may know everything

that's ever going to happen to Tchitcherine, and decide it's no use-or,
out of the moment's velleity, lay it right out for the young fool.

"The basic problem," he proposes, "has always been getting other

people to die for you. What's worth enough for a man to give up his
life? That's where religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was al­

ways about death. It was used not as an opiate so much as a technique
-it got people to die for one particular set of beliefs about death. Per­
verse, natiirlich, but who are you to judge? It was a good pitch while it
worked. But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have
had a secular version-yours. Die to help History grow to its predes­
tined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a good end a bit closer.

Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History's changes are inevitable,
why not not die? Vaslav? If it's going to happen anyway, what does it
matter?"

"But you haven't ever had the choice to make, have you."
"If I ever did, you can be sure-"
"You don't know. Not till you're there, Wimpe. You can't say."
"That doesn't sound very dialectical."

"I don't know what it is."

701



--

/ .�
-, /'

"Then, right up till the point of decision," Wimpe curious but care­
ful, "a man could still be perfectly pure ...

"

"He could be anything. I don't care. But he's only real at the points of
decision. The time between doesn't matter."

"Real to a Marxist."
"No. Real to himself."

Wimpe looks doubtful.
"I've been there. You haven't."
Shh, shh. A syringe, a number z6 point. Bloods stifling in the brown­

wood hotel suite. To chase or worry this argument is to become word­
enemies, and neither man really wants to. Oneirine theophosphate is
one way around the problem. (Tchitcherine: "You mean thiophosphate,
don't you?" Thinks indicating the presence of sulfur.... Wimpe: "I
mean theophosphate, Vaslav," indicating the Presence of God.) They
shoot up: Wimpe eying the water-tap nervously, recalling Tchaikovsky,
salmonella, a fast medley of whistlable tunes from the Pathetique. But
Tchitcherine has eyes only for the point, its German precision, its fine
steel grain. Soon he will come to know a circuit of aid stations and field
hospitals, as good for postwar nostalgia as a circuit of peacetime spas­
army surgeons and dentists will bond and hammer patent steel for life
into his suffering flesh, and pick out what has entered it by violence
with an electromagnetic device bought between the wars from Schu­
mann of Dusseldorf, with a light bulb and adjustable reflector, z-axis
locking handles and a complete set of weird-shaped Polschuhen, iron
pieces to modify the shape of the magnetic field . . . but there in Rus­
sia, that night with Wimpe, was his first taste-his initiation into the
bodyhood of steel . . . no way to separate this from the theophosphate,
to separate vessels of steel from the ungodly insane rush. . . .

For 15 minutes the two of them run screaming all over the suite, stag­
gering around in circles, lined up with the rooms' diagonals. There is in
Laszlo Jamf' s celebrated molecule a particular twist, the so-called "Po­
kler singularity," occurring in a certain crippled indole ring, which later
Oneirinists, academician and working professional alike, are generally
agreed is responsible for the hallucinations which are unique to this
drug. Not only audiovisual, they touch all senses, equally. And they
recur. Certain themes, "mantic archetypes" (as Jollifox of the Cam­
bridge School has named them), will find certain individuals again and
again, with a consistency which has been well demonstrated in the labo­
ratory (see Wobb and Whoaton, "Mantic Archetype Distribution
Among Middle-Class University Students," J. Oneir. Psy. Pharm., XXIII,
pg. 406--453). Because analogies with the ghost-life exist, this recurrence

702

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phenomenon l!� Jii..lllliU!'If\Y titi, .. L_ _ jargon, as "haunting." Whereas
other

sorts of hallucinations tend to flow by, related in deep ways that aren't
accessible to the casual dopefiend, these Oneirine hauntings show a
definite narrative continuity, as clearly as, say, the average Reader's Di­

gest article. Often they are so ordinary, so conventional-Jeaach
calls

them "the dullest hallucinations known to psychopharmacology"-that

they are only recognized as hauntings through some radical though
plausible violation of possibility: the presence of the dead, journeys by
the same route and means where one person will set out later but arrive

earlier, a printed diagram which no amount of light will make readable .
. . . On recognizing that he is being haunted, the subject enters imme­

diately into "phase two," which, though varying in intensity
from sub­

ject to subject, is always disagreeable: often sedation (0.6 mg atropine
subcut.) will be necessary, even though Oneirine is classified as a

CNS

depressant.
About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing re­

markable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset,
the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, every­
thing in the Creation, a secondary illumination-not yet blindingly
One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like
Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. . . .

TCHITCHERINE'S HAUNTING

As to whether the man is or isn't Nikolai Ripov: he does arrive the

way Ripov is said to: heavy and inescapable. He wants
to talk, only to

talk. But somehow, as they progress, into the indoor corridor-confusions
of words, again and again he will trick Tchitcherine into uttering

her­

esy, into damning himself.
"I'm here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should

air

them, honestly, man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don't you
think I've had

doubts? Even Stalin's had them. We all have."

"It's all right though. It isn't anything I can't handle."
"But you're not handling it, or they wouldn't have sent me

out here.

Don't you think they know when someone they care for is
in trouble?"

Tchitcherine doesn't want to ask. He strains against it with the mus­

cles of his heart-cage. The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing
down

his left arm. But he asks, feeling his breath shift a little, "Was I sup­

posed to die?"
"When, Vaslav?"
"In the War."

"Oh, Vaslav."

703



-�

_..-/ .f,\
"'-- --- /

"You wanted to hear what was troubling me.
"But don't you see how they'll take that? Come, bring it all the way

out. We lost twenty million souls, Vaslav. It's not an accusation you can
make lightly. They'd want documentation. Even your life might be in
danger-"

"I'm not accusing anyone ... please don't ... I only want to know
if I am supposed to die for them."

"No one wants you to die." Soothing. "Why do you think that?"
So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate,

too many words-paranoid suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning
himself, growing the capsule around his person that will isolate him
from the community forever. . . .

"Yet that's the very heart of History," the gentle voice talking across
twilight, neither man having risen to light a lamp. "The inmost heart.
How could everything you know, all you've seen and touched of it, be
fed by a lie?"

"But life after death . . ."
"There is no life after death."
Tchitcherine means he's had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his

body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way
into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for
comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and
new order-not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring,
Tchitcherine's first glimpse after the years of training: taller, more beau­
tifully muscled, less waste motion than he'd ever expected--only in the
ring, feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did
he turn to a Theory of History-of all pathetic cold comforts-to try
and make sense of it.

"The Americans say, 'There are no atheists in foxholes.' You were
never of the faith, Vaslav. You had a deathbed conversion, out of fear."

"Is that why you want me dead now?"
"Not dead. You're not much use dead." Two more olive-drab agents

have come in, and stand watching Tchitcherine. They have regular, un­
remarkable faces. This is, after all, an Oneirine haunting. Mellow, ordi­
nary. The only tipoff to its unreality is-

The radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality-
All three men are smiling at him now. There is no violation.
It's a scream, but it comes out as a roar. He leaps at Ripov, nearly

nails him with his fist too, but the others, with faster reflexes than he
counted on, have come up either side to hold him. He can't believe
their strength. Through the nerves of hip and ass he feels his Nagant

beingsll'
man girl
ber, in �

"You're
ideas whJC



htH!g �lil!.lUl lilil!Jlllllll )ll\;:)) JUllU))l0)lclGJl? ,vlJUi\J feels his own cock sliding out of
a Ger­

man girl he can't remember now, OIl the last sweetwine morning
he saw

her, in the last warm bed of the last morning departure. . . .
"You're a child, Vaslav. Only making believe that you understand

ideas which are really beyond you. We have to speak very simply for

you."
In Central Asia he was told of the functions of Moslem angels. One is

to examine the recently dead. After the last mourner has gone, angels
come to the grave and interrogate the dead one in his faith. . . .

There is another figure now, at the edge of the room. She is Tchitch­
erine's age, and in uniform. Her eyes don't

want to say anything to
Tchitcherine. She only watches. No music heard, no summer journey
taken . . . no horse seen against the steppe in the last daylight. . . .

He doesn't recognize her. Not that it matters. Not at this level of

things. But it's Galina, come back to the cities, out of the silences
after

all, in again to the chain-link fields of the Word, shining, running
secure

and always close enough, always tangible....

"Why were you hunting your black brother?" Ripov manages
to

make the question sound courteous.
Oh. Nice of you to ask, Ripov. Why was I? "When it began . . . a

long time ago-at first . . . I thought I was being punished.
Passed over.

I blamed him."

"Now?"

"I don't know."

"What made you think he was your target?"
"Who else's would he be?"

"Vaslav. Will you never rise above? These
are old barbarisms. Blood

lines, personal revenge. You think this has all been arranged for you,
to

ease your little, stupid lusts."
All right. All right. "Yes. Probably. What of it?"
"He isn't your target. Others want him."

"So you've been letting me-"
"So far. Yes."

Dzabajev could have told you. That sodden Asiatic is
first and last an

enlisted man. He knew. Officers. Fucking officer mentality. You do all

the work, then they come in, to wrap it up, to get the glory.
"You're taking it away from me."
"You can go home."
Tchitcherine has been watching the other two. He sees now that they

are in American uniform, and probably haven't understood a word. He

holds out his empty hands, his sunburned wrists, for a last application
of



steel. Ripov, in the act of turning to leave, c:1'p'pV(ll� �Ul pll�t;U. Vll. l�U,
no. You have thirty days' survivor's leave. You have survived, Vaslav.
You're to report to TsAGI when you get back to Moscow, that's all.
There'll be another assignment. We'll be taking German rocket person­
nel out to the desert. To Central Asia. I imagine they'll need an old
Central Asia hand out there."

Tchitcherine understands that in his dialectic, his own life's unfold­
ing, to return to Central Asia is, operationally, to die.

They have gone. The woman's iron face, at the very last, did not turn
back. He is alone in a gutted room, with the plastic family toothbrushes
still in their holders on the wall, melted, strung downward in tendrils of
many colors, bristles pointing to every black plane and corner and soot­
blinded window.

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than
you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and
time: the ad hoc adventure.

-Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference

North? What searcher has ever been directed north? What you're sup­
posed to be looking for lies south-those dusky natives, right? For dan­
ger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what's
north?

The escape route of the Anubis.
The Kirghiz Light.
The Herero country of death.
Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger

Mexico are sitting at a table on the redbrick terrace of Der Grob Sau­
gling, an inn by the edge of a little blue Holstein lake. The sun makes
the water sparkle. The housetops are red, the steeples are white. Every­
thing is miniature, neat, gently pastoral, locked into the rise and fall of
seasons. Contrasting wood X s on closed doors. The brink of autumn. A
cow sez moo. The milkmaid farts at the milk pail, which echoes with a
very slight clang, and the geese honk or hiss. The four envoys drink wa­
tered Moselle and talk mandalas.

The Rocket was fired southward, westward, eastward. But not north­
ward-not so far. Fired south, at Antwerp, the bearing was about 1730•

706

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!

E"",��, -":IUU:""O :""'';:���b :"� "'''��'-'�'-''''iinde, 0720. Fired west, at London,
about

2600. Working it out with the parallel rulers, the missing (or, if you
want, "resultant") bearing comes out to something like 3540. This
would be the firing implied by all the others, a ghost-firing which, in the

logic of mandalas, either has occurred, most-secretly, or will
occur.

So the conferees at the Gross Suckling Conference here, as it will
come to be known, sit around a map with their instruments, cigarettes
and speculations. Sneer not. Here is one of the great deductive mo­
ments in postwar intelligence. Mexico is holding out for a weighting sys­
tem to make vector lengths proportional to the actual number of firings
along each one. Thomas Gwenhidwy, ever sensitive to

events in geo­

graphical space, wants to take the 1944 Blizna firings (also eastward)
into account, which would pull the arrow northward from 3540-and
even closer to true north if the firings at London and Norwich from
Walcheren and Staveren are also included.

Evidence and intuition-and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror

that lies inside us, every one-point to 0000: true North. What
better

direction to fire the ooooo?

Trouble is, what good's a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing,
without knowing where the Rocket was fired from to begin with?

You

have a razor-edge, 280 km long, sweeping east/west across the
Zone's

pocked face, endlessly sweeping, obsessive, dithering, glittering,
un­

bearable, never corning to rest. . . .

Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color pic­
ture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist

the

Gross Suckling clutches a dripping hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing per­
sonal), with the other he reaches out for a human

Mother's Nipple that

emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side,
his gaze arrested

by the approaching tit, his mouth open-a gleeful look,
teeth pointed

and itching, a glaze of FOODmunchmunchyesgobblemmm
over his

eyes. Der Grob Saugling, 23rd card of the
Zone's trumps major....

Roger likes to think of it as a snap of Jeremy as
a child. Jeremy, who

Knows All, has forgiven Jessica her time with Roger. He's had an outing
or two himself, and can understand, he's of liberal mind, the War

after

all has taken down certain barriers, Victorianisms you might say (a tale

brought to you by the same jokers who invented the
famous Polyvinyl

Chloride Raincoat) ... and what's this, Roger, he's trying to impress

you? his eyelids make high, amiable crescents as
he leans forward

(smaller chap than Roger thought) clutching his glass, sucking
on the

most tasteless Pipe Roger has ever seen, a reproduction in brier
of Win­

ston Churchill's head for a bowl, no detail is spared, even a cigar in its



---�

/ �,
- _./

.

mouth with a little hole drilled down it so that some of the smoke can
actually seep out the end . . . it is a servicemen's pub in Cuxhaven
here, the place used to be a marine salvage yard, so the lonesome sol­
diers sit dreaming and drinking among all that nautical junk, not at the
same level as in one's usual outdoor cafe, no, some are up in tilted
hatchways, or dangling in boatswain's chairs, crow's-nests, sitting over
their bitter among the chain, tackle, strakework, black iron fittings. It's
night. Lanterns have been brought out to the tables. Soft little nocturnal
waves hush on the shingle. Late waterfowl cry out over the lake.

"But will it ever get us, Jeremy, you and me, that's the ques­
shun. . . " Mexico has been uttering these oracular-often, as at the
Club today for lunch, quite embarrassing-bits of his ever since he
showed up.

"Er, will what ever get me, old chap?" It's been old chap all day.
"Havcn't=-ch'ever felt something wanted to gesh you, Jeremy?"
"Get me." He's drunk. He's insane. I obviously can't let him near

Jessica these math chaps they're like oboe players it affects the brain or
something....

Aha, but, once a month, Jeremy, even Jeremy, dreams: about a gam­
bling debt . . . different sorts of Collectors keep arriving . . . he can­
not remember the debt, the opponent he lost to, even the game. He
senses a great organization behind these emissaries. Its threats are al­
ways left open, left for Jeremy to complete . . . each time, terror has
come welling up through the gap, crystal terror. . . .

Good, good. The other sure-fire calibration test has already been
sprung on Jeremy-at a prearranged spot in a park, two unemployed

. Augustes leap out in whiteface and working-clothes, and commence
belting each other with gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises,
cunningly detailed, all in natural color. These phancy phalli have
proven to be a good investment. Roger and Seaman Bodine (when he's
in town) have outdrawn the ENSA shows. It is a fine source of spare
change-multitudes will gather at the edges of these north German vil­
lages to watch the two zanies whack away. Granaries, mostly empty,
poke up above the rooftops now and then, stretching a wood gallows­
arm against the afternoon sky. Soldiers, civilians, and children. There is
a lot of laughter.

Seems people can be reminded of Titans and Fathers, and laugh. It
isn't as funny as a pie in the face, but it's at least as pure.

Yes, giant rubber cocks are here to stay as part of the arsenal. . . .
What Jessica said-hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of

different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of

708

want to pu
"\\'e\'e

rocKet."
"But \\t
"'\11\'�

"You're

- -

- .

- ,-

I �,," \ ,.� --= ---:;4'---� I l,,/..//f:: . ..� I ,,", �



leUer§ 1be1lwceelDl m®lliD!�= 'We're going to be married. We're trying

very hard to have a baby."
All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity

and

Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both-just
come with

me Jess, please . . . I need you. . . ."
She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes

off. "Se­

curity." Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing
in the

air as in through the screen door of the Quonset office with
a smell of

tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word,
her

spell against demons.
"Jess-" shit is he going to cry? he can feel it building

like an or­

gasm-
Who saves him (or interferes with his orgasm)? Why, Jeremy

himself.

Old Beaver shows up and waves off the heat, who go surly, fangflashing
back to masturbating into Crime Does Not Pay Comics, gazing dreamy
at guardroom pinups of J. Edgar Hoover or

whatever it was they were

up to, and the
romantic triangle are suddenly all to have lunch together

at the Club. Lunch together? Is this Noel Coward or some shit? Jessica
at the last minute is overcome by some fictitious female syndrome
which both men guess to be morning-sickness, Roger figuring

she'll do

the most spiteful thing she can think of, Jeremy seeing it
as a cute little

private yoo-hoo for 2-hoo. So that leaves
the fellas alone, to talk briskly

about Operation Backfire, which is the British program
to assemble

some A4s and fire them out into the North Sea.
What else are they going

to talk about?

"Why?" Roger keeps asking, trying to piss Jeremy
off. "Why do you

want to put them together and fire them?"
"We've captured them, haven't we? What does

one do with a

rocket?"

"But why?"
"Why? Damn it, to see, obviously. Jessica

tells me you're-ah-a
math chap?"

"Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-sigma, equals
one over the

square root of two pi, times e to the
minus s squared over two little­

sigma squared."
"Good Lord." Laughing, hastily checking out the room.

"It is an old saying among my people."
Jeremy knows how to handle this. Roger

is invited to dinner in the

evening, an intimate informal party
at the home of Stefan Utgarthaloki,

an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in
Cuxhaven.

"You're welcome to bring a guest, of course," gnaws the eager Beaver,

J '



"there're a lot of snazzy NAAFIs about, it woman t De too OlIDCUlt ror
you to-"

"Informal means lounge suit, eh?" interrupts Roger. Too bad, he
hasn't got one. The prospects of being nabbed tonight are good. A party
that includes (a) an Operation Backfire figure, (b) a Krupp executive,
must necessarily then include (c) at least one ear to the corporate grape­
vine that's heard of the Urinating Incident in Clive Mossmoon's office.
If Roger only knew what Beaver and his friends really have in mind!

He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought
him from the Panama Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them
as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green,
lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions-the
pointed lapels have to be reinforced with coat-hanger stays because they
extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit-underneath his purple­
on-purple satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing
his waist in to a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression
of the jacket, which then falls to Bodine's knees quintuple-vented in
yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back up over his ass. The pants
are belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten
inches, so he has to use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The
whole suit is blue, not suit-blue, no-really BLUE: paint-blue. It is im­
mediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings it haunts the pe­
ripheral vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that
forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel su­
perficial. A subversive garment, all right.

"Just you and me, podner?" sez Bodine. "Ain't that kind of cutting it
a little close?"

"Listen," Roger chuckling unhealthily at what's also just occurred to
him, "we can't even bring those big rubber cocks along. Tonite, we're
going to have to use our wits!"

"Tell you what, I'll just send a motorcycle out to Putzi's, round us up
a goon squad, and-"

"You know what? You've lost your sense of adventure. Yeh. You
didn't use to be like this, you know."

"Look old buddy," pronouncing it in Navy Dialect: buddih, "c'mon,
buddih. Putcherself in my shoes."

"I might, if they weren't ... that ... shade of yellow-"
"Just a humble guy," the swarthy doughboy of the deep scratching in

his groin after an elusive crab with a horn finger, rippling the ballooning
pleats and fabric of his trousers, "just a freckleface kid from Albert Lea,
Minnesota, down there on Route 69 where the speed limit's lickety-split

710

ever recomn

rou're still
�an��ter hit.
ili� iliat stOll
'n' iliat'� a g!

"Bodine. di
I "�hit. I can

evefJihing. A�
.

ana assay It. I

J f�e-ilief"f
luclanl varnplf

eary�,� 10
Zone- .I



all .lUt;J.H. .lV.l.l5' J�"'''' ... � J �&& -
J it in the Zone here, kind of a freckle-

face kid used a safety pin through a cork for a catwhisker
and stayed up

listened to the voices coast to coast before I was 10 and
none of them

ever recommended gettin' into any of them gang wars, buddih.
Be glad

you're still so fuckin' naive, Rog, wait'll you see your
first European­

gangster hit, they like to use 3 rounds: head, stomach,
and heart. You

dig that stomach? Over here stomach's no
second-class organ, podner

'n' that's a good autumn kind of thought to keep in
mind."

"Bodine, didn't you desert? That's a death-sentence,
isn't it?"

"Shit, I can square that. But I'm only a cog. Don't go thinking
I know

everything. All I know is my trade. I can show you
how to wash coke

and assay it, I can feel a gem and
tell you from the temperature if it's

a

fake-the fake won't suck as much heat from your body, 'glass is a re­

luctant vampire,' ancient dealers' saying, a-and I
can spot funnymoney

easy as E on an eye chart, I got
one of the best visual memories in the

Zone-" So, Roger drags him off, monologuing, in his
zoot suit, to the

Krupp wingding.
Coming in the door, first thing Bodine

notices is this string quartet

that's playing tonight. The second violin happens
to be Gustav Schla­

bone, Saure Bummer's frequent unwelcome doping partner, "Captain

Horror," as he is affectionately but not inaccurately
known around Der

Platz-and playing viola is Gustav's accomplice in suicidally depressing

everybody inside 100 meters' radius
wherever they drop in (who's that

tapping and giggling at your door, Fred
and Phyllis?), Andre Omnopon,

of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig
tattoo on stomach (which

is becoming the "hep" thing lately: even
back in the Zone of the Inte­

rior the American subdebs all think it's swoony). Gustav and
Andre are

the Inner Voices tonight. Which is especially odd because
on the pro­

gram is the suppressed quartet from
the Haydn Op. 76, the so-called

"Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, which gets
its name from the Largo,

cantabile e mesto movement, in which the Inner
Voices are called to

play kazoos instead of their usual instruments, creating problems
of dy­

namics for cello and first violin that are unique in the
literature. "you

actually need to shift in places from a spiccato
to a detache," Bodine

rapidly talking a Corporate Wife of
some sort across the room toward

the free-lunch table piled with lobster hors d'oeuvres and capon
sand­

wiches-"less bow, higher up you understand, soften
it-then there's

also about a thousand ppp-to-Hf blasts, but only the one, the
notorious

One, going the other way....
"

Indeed, one reason for the work's sup­

pression is this subversive use
of sudden Hf quieting to ppp. It's the

touch of the wandering sound-shadow, the Brennschluss
of the Sun.

711



They don't want you listening to too mUCH or tnat scurr-c-at least nor tne
way Haydn presents it (a strange lapse in the revered composer's behav­
ior): cello, violin, alto and treble kazoos all rollicking along in a tune
sounds like a song from the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, "You Should
See Me Dance the Polka," when suddenly in the middle of an odd bar
the kazoos just stop completely, and the Outer Voices fall to plucking a
non-melody that tradition sez represents two t Sth-century Village Idi­
ots vibrating their lower lips. At each other. It goes on for 20, 40 bars,
this feeb's pizzicato, middle-line Kruppsters creak in the bowlegged vel­
vet chairs, bibuhbuhbibuhbuh this does not sound like Haydn, Mutti!
Reps from ICI and GE angle their heads trying to read in the candle­
light the little programs lovingly hand-lettered by Utgarthaloki's partner
in life, Frau Utgarthaloki, nobody is certain what her first name is
(which is ever so much help to Stefan because it keeps them all on the
defensive with her). She is a blonde image of your mother dead: if you
have ever seen her travestied in beaten gold, the cheeks curving too far,
deformed, the eyebrows too dark and whites too white, some zero in­
difference that in the end is truly evil in the way They've distorted her
face, then you know the look: Nalline Slothrop just before her first mar­
tini is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest. So is her son Tyrone, but
only because by now-early Virgo-he has become one plucked alba­
tross. Plucked, hell-stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful
if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively
identified and detained." Only feathers . . . redundant or regenerable
organs, "which we would be tempted to classify under the 'Hydra-Pha­
nomen' were it not for the complete absence of hostility...."-Na­
tasha Raum, "Regions of Indeterminacy in Albatross Anatomy," Pro­
ceedings of the International Society of Confessors to an Enthusiasm for
Albatross Nosology, Winter 1936, great little magazine, they actually
sent a correspondent to Spain that winter, to cover that, there are issues
devoted entirely to analyses of world economics, all clearly relevant to
problems of Albatross Nosology-does so-called "Night Worm" belong
among the Pseudo-Goldstrassian Group, or is it properly considered­
indications being almost identical-a more insidious form of Mopp's
Hebdomeriasis?

Well, if the Counterforce knew better what those categories con­
cealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dis­
mantle the Man. But they don't. Actually they do, but they don't admit
it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive
presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that's the hard fact. The
Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a

712

I toonin not

German cal

nl�ht It I du
ll�tener tart
�ets tickled
crater fup i
!old to valle
lence dane

That' th
Roger ha \
rune is an �

� cession, hi
meal ac



whr.; :.����� ���, ':':'::':_:.. ::_'_ _a. las a cover known as
the Ego, and their

mission in this world is Bad Shit. We do know what's going on, and we

let it go on. As long as we can see them, stare at them,
those massively

moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse,
however

rarely. We need that. And how they know it-how often,
under what

conditions. . . . We ought to be seeing much popular-magazine
cover­

age on the order of The Night Rog and Beaver Fought
Over Jessica

While She Cried in Krupp's Arms, and drool over every blurry photo-

Roger must have been dreaming for a minute here of
the sweaty eve­

nings of Thermidor: the failed Counterforce,
the glamorous ex-rebels,

half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly love,
camera­

worthy wherever they carry on . . . doomed pet
freaks.

They will use us. We will help legitimize Them, though They
don't

need it really, it's another dividend for Them, nice but
not critical. . . .

Oh yes, isn't that exactly what They'll do. Bringing Roger
now, at a

less than appropriate time and place here in the bosom of
the Opposi­

tion, while his life's first authentic love is squirming only
to get home

and take another wad of Jeremy's sperm so they'll make their day's

quota-in the middle of all that he has to
walk (ow, fuck) right into the

interesting question, which is worse: living on as
Their pet, or death? It

is not a question he has ever imagined himself asking seriously.
It has

come by surprise, but there's no sending it away now,
he really does

have to decide, and soon enough, plausibly soon, to feel the terror
in his

bowels. Terror he cannot think away. He has to choose
between his life

and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise,
but a decision

to live, on Their terms. . . .
The viola is a ghost, grainy-brown, translucent, sighing

in and out of

the other Voices. Dynamic shifts abound. Imperceptible lifts, pla­

tooning notes together or preparing
for changes in loudness, what the

Germans call "breath-pauses," skitter among the phrases. Perhaps
to­

night it is due to the playing of Gustav
and Andre, but after a while the

listener starts actually hearing the pauses instead of the
notes-his ear

gets tickled the way your eye
does staring at a recco map until bomb

craters flip inside out to become muffins
risen above the tin, or ridges

fold to valleys, sea and land flicker across quicksilver edges-so
the si­

lences dance in this quartet. A-and wait'll those kazoos
come on!

That's the background music for what is to transpire. The plot against

Roger has been formulated
with shivering and giddy glee. Seaman Bo­

dine is an unexpected bonus. Going in to dinner becomes
a priestly pro­

cession, full of secret gestures and understandings.
It is a very elaborate

meal, according to the menu, full of releves, poissons,
entremets.

713



"What's this 'Uberraschungbraten' herer oearuan Duume a:SK:S llt;l1t­
hand dinner companion Constance Flamp, loose-khakied newshound
and toughtalkin' sweetheart of ev'ry GI from Iwo to Saint-Lo.

"Why, just what it sez, Boats," replies "Commando Connie," "that's
German for 'surprise roast.'

"

"I'm hep," sez Bodine. She has-maybe not meaning to-gestured
with her eyes-perhaps, Pointsman, there is such a thing as the kind­
ness-reflex (how many young men has she seen go down since'42?) that
now and then, also beyond the Zero, survives extinction. . . . Bodine
looks down at the far end of the table, past corporate teeth and polished
fingernails, past heavy monogrammed eating-tools, and for the first time
notices a stone barbecue pit, with two black iron hand-operated spits.
Servants in their prewar livery are busy layering scrap paper (old
SHAEF directives, mostly), kindling, quartered pine logs, and coal, lus­
cious fist-sized raven chunks of the kind that once left bodies up and
down the sides of the canals, once, during the Inflation, when it was ac­
tually held that mortally dear, imagine. . . . At the edge of the pit, with
Justus about to light the taper, as Gretchen daintily laces the fuel with
GI xylene from down in the dockyards, Seaman Bodine observes Rog­
er's head, being held by four or six hands upside down, the lips being
torn away from the teeth and the high gums already draining white as a
skull, while one of the maids, a classic satin-and-lace, impish, torturable
young maid, brushes the teeth with American toothpaste, carefully
scrubbing away the nicotine stains and tartar. Roger's eyes are so hurt
and pleading. . . . All around, guests are whispering. "How quaint, Ste­
fan's even thought of head cheese!" "Oh, no, it's another part I'm wait­
ing to get my teeth in . . ." giggles, heavy breathing, and what's that
pair of very blue peg pants all ripped . . . and what's this staining the
jacket, and what, up on the spit, reddening to a fat-glazed crust, is turn­
ing, whose face is about to come rotating around, why it's-

"No ketchup, no ketchup," the hirsute bluejacket searching agitat­
edly among the cruets and salvers, "seems to be no . . . what th' fuck
kind of a place is this, Rog," yelling down slantwise across seven enemy
faces, "hey, buddih you find any ketchup down there?"

Ketchup's a code word, okay-
"Odd," replies Roger, who clearly has seen exactly the same thing

down at the pit, "I was just about to ask you the same question!"
They are grinning at each other like fools. Their auras, for the record,

are green. No shit. Not since winter of '42, in convoy in a North Atlantic
gale, with accidental tons of loose 5-inch ammo rolling all over the ship,

714

jokes, rea
hysteric�
high in the

"Some }a

fillen near})
'I Thel arrl. ,

noW 10 del

ofilie COUI I

ance \l'l�
c nacK al "The

nim ilian h

10 le rid 0



c'-' '-"v ....... u......... ��� .L���' ���. � ly knocking off sister ships right and left,
at Battle Stations inside mount 51 listening to Pappy Hod tell disaster

jokes, really funny ones, the whole gun crew clutching their stomachs

hysterically, gasping for air-not since then has Seaman Bodine felt so

high in the good chances of death.
"Some layout, huh?" he calls. "Pretty good food!" Conversation has

fallen nearly silent. Politely curious faces are turning. Flames leap in the

pit. They are not "sensitive flames," but if they were they might be able
now to detect the presence of Brigadier Pudding. He is now a member
of the Counterforce, courtesy of Carroll Eventyr. Courtesy is right. Se­
ances with Pudding are at least as trying as the old Weekly Briefings
back at "The White Visitation." Pudding has even more of a mouth on
him than he did alive. The sitters have begun to whine: "Aren't we ever
to be rid of him?" But is is through Pudding's devotion to culinary
pranksterism that the repulsive stratagem that follows was devised.

"Oh, I don't know," Roger elaborately casual, "I can't seem to find

any snot soup on the menu. . . ."

"Yeah, I could've done with some of that pus pudding, myself. Think
there'll be any of that?"

"No, but there might be a scum souffle!" cries Roger, "with a side of
-menstrual marmalade!"

"Well I've got eyes for some of that rich, meaty smegma
stew!"

suggests Bodine. "Or howbout a clot
casserole?"

"I say," murmurs a voice, indeterminate as to sex, down the
table.

"We could plan a better meal than this," Roger waving the menu.
"Start off with afterbirth appetizers, perhaps some clever little scab
sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off of course . . . o-or booger bis­
cuits! Mmm, yes, spread with mucus mayonnaise? and topped with a
succulent bit of slime sausage. . . ."

"Oh I see," sez Commando Connie, "it has to be alliterative. How

about ... um ... discharge dumplings?"
"We're doing the soup course, babe," sez cool Seaman Bodine,

"so let

me just suggest a canker consomme, or perhaps a barf
bouillon."

"Vomit vichysoisse," sez Connie.
"You got it."

"Cyst salad," Roger continues, "with little cheery-red squares
of

abortion aspic, tossed in a subtle dandruff dressing."
There is a sound of well-bred gagging, and a regional sales manager

for ICI leaves hurriedly, spewing a long crescent of lumpy beige vomit
that splatters across the parquetry. Napkins are being raised

to faces all

715



down the table. Silverware is being laid down, SIlver rmgmg the neios or
white, a puzzling indecision here again, the same as at Clive Moss­
moon's office. . . .

On we go, through fart fondue (skillfully placed bubbles of anal gas
rising slowly through a rich cheese viscosity, yummm), boil blintzes,
Vegetables Venereal in slobber sauce. . . .

A kazoo stops playing. "Wart waffles!" Gustav screams.
"Puke pancakes, with sweat syrup," adds Andre Omnopon, as Gustav

resumes playing, the Outer Voices meantime haVing broken off in con­
fusion.

"And spread with pinworm preserves," murmurs the cellist, who is
not above a bit of fun.

"Hemorrhoid hash," Connie banging her spoon in delight, "bowel
burgers!"

Frau Utgarthaloki jumps to her feet, upsetting a platter of stuffed
sores-beg pardon, no they're deviled eggs-and runs from the room,
sobbing tragically. Her suave metal husband also rises and follows,
casting back at the troublemakers virile stares that promise certain
death. A discreet smell of vomit has begun to rise through the hanging
tablecloth. Nervous laughter has long embrittled to badmouth whis­
pering.

"A choice of gangrene goulash, or some scrumptious creamy-white
leprosy loaf," Bodine in a light singsong "le-pro-sy [down a third to]
loaf," playfully hounding the holdouts, shaking a finger, c'mon ya little
rascals, vomit for the nice zootster. . . .

"Fungus fricassee!" screams Roger the Rowdy. Jessica is weeping on
the arm of Jeremy her gentleman, who is escorting her, stiff-armed,
shaking his head at Roger's folly, away forever. Does Roger have a sec­
ond of pain right here? Yes. Sure. You would too. You might even ques­
tion the worth of your cause. But there are nosepick noodles to be
served up buttery and steaming, grime gruel and pustule porridge to be
ladled into the bowls of a sniveling generation of future executives,
pubic popovers to be wheeled out onto the terraces stained by holo­
caust sky or growing rigid with autumn.

"Carbuncle cutlets!"
"With groin gravy!"
"And ringworm relish!"
Lady Mnemosyne Gloobe is having a seizure of some kind, so violent

that her pearls break and go rattling down the silk tablecloth. A general
loss of appetite reigns, not to mention overt nausea. The flames in the
pit have dwindled. No fat to feed them tonight. Sir Hannibal Grunt-

716

Man,"

In her pac' I

clipping. ,
. alltiedln

loaf of br (
a��n t the

\ hillside. a
off to und n



Gvu�m:ic·\.\.'C �Lj u... v .... .c�-----b' _ � .ween spasms of yellow bile foaming out
his nose, to bring the matter up in Parliament. ''I'll see you two in the
Scrubs if it kills me!" Well ...

A gentle, precarious soft-shoe out the door, Bodine waving his wide­
brim gangster hat. Ta-ta, foax. The only guest still seated is Constance

Flamp, who is still roaring out dessert possibilities: "Crotch custard!

Phlegm fudge! Mold muffins!" Will she catch hell tomorrow. Pools of
this and that glitter across the floor like water-mirages at the Sixth Ante­
chamber to the Throne. Gustav and the rest of the quartet have aban­

doned Haydn and are all following Roger and Bodine out the door, ka­
zoos and strings accompanying the Disgusting Duo:

Oh gimme some 0' that acne, a-la-mode,
Eat so much-that Ah, jes' ex-plode!
Say there buddih you can chow all nite, on

Toe-jam tarts 'n' Diarrhea Dee-lite. . ..

"I have to tell you," Gustav whispering speedily, "I feel so awful
about it, but perhaps you don't want people like me. You see ... I was
a Storm Trooper. A long time ago. You know, like Horst Wessel."

"So?" Bodine's laughing. "Maybe I was a Melvin Purvis Junior G-
Man."

"A what?"

"For Post Toasties."

"For whom?" The German actually thinks Post Toasties is the name
of some American FUhrer, looking vaguely like Tom Mix or some other
such longlip bridlejaw cowboy.

The last black butler opens the last door to the outside, and escape.

Escape tonight. "Pimple pie with filth frosting, gentlemen,"
he nods.

And just at the other side of dawning, you can see a
smile.

D D D D D D D

In her pack, Geli Tripping brings along a few of Tchitcherine's
toenail

clippings, a graying hair, a piece of bedsheet with a
trace of his sperm,

all tied in a white silk kerchief, next to a bit of Adam and Eve root and a

loaf of bread baked from wheat she has rolled naked in and ground
against the sun. She has left off tending her herd of

toads on the witches'

hillsides, and has passed her white wand to another apprentice. She is

off to find her gallant Attila. Now there are a good few hundred of
these

717



young women in the Zone who're smitten with love tor Tchitcherine, all
of them sharp as foxes, but none quite as stubborn as Geli-and none
are witches.

At noon she comes to a farmhouse with a floor of blue and white tiles
in the kitchen, elaborate old china plates hung like pictures, and a rock­
ing-chair. "Do you have a photo of him?" the old woman handing her a
tin army plate with the remains of her morning's Bauernfriihstuck. "I
can give you a spell."

"Sometimes 1 can call up his face in a cup of tea. But the herbs have
to be gathered carefully. I'm not that good at it yet."

"But you're in love. Technique is just a substitute for when you get
older."

"Why not stay in love always?"
The two women watch each other across the sunny kitchen. Cabinets

with glass panes shine from the walls. Bees buzz outside the windows.
Geli goes and pumps water from the well, and they brew some straw­
berry-leaf tea. But Tchitcherine's face doesn't appear.

The night the blacks started off on their great trek, Nordhausen felt
like a city in a myth, under the threat of some special destruction-en­
gulfment by a crystal lake, lava from the sky . . . for an evening, the
sense of preservation there was lost. The blacks, like the rockets in
the Mittelwerke, had given Nordhausen continuity. Now the blacks
are gone: Geli knows they are on collision course with Tchitcherine.
She doesn't want duels. Let the university boys duel. She wants her
graying steel barbarian alive. She can't bear to think that she may al­
ready have touched him, felt his scarred and historied hands, for the
last time.

Behind, pushing her, is the town's somnolence, and at night-the
strange canaried nights of the Harz (where canary hustlers are busy
shooting up female birds with male hormones so they'll sing long
enough to be sold to the foreign suckers who occupy the Zone)-full of
too many spells, witch-rivalries, coven politics . . . she knows that's not
what magic is about. The Hexes-Stadt, with its holy mountains cropped
in pale circles all up and down their green faces by the little tethered
goats, has turned into just another capital, where the only enterprise is
administrating-the feeling there is of upstairs at the musicians' union
-no music, just glass-brick partitions, spittoons, indoor plants-no
practicing witches left. You either come to the Brocken-complex with a
bureaucratic career in mind, or you leave it, and choose the world.
There are the two distinct sorts of witch, and Geli is the World-choos­
ing sort.

718

Here is

knee that fl

I ing, with he

loldiers com

Jne, of the II
. alK about Tch

Illeon1¥ one Ii'
aamiring. un e

, tomrletely, Tc
aooutto be pur
�inilter \. Ripo

; Bul!lnit. Tchi

•

�ou�h\'e�"
rle� I'ellled in )
�tmT lot� 0

m�can�s, n I
, mite,
I 1I\\'e� � /1

liThe roc' I

III \\'o�dn'

Cron the er
a�eO road, On

� 000, A bit ap
� ann out r
�intedhand

• and have learn
touch makin�
watches the i

\ ilieman na In
mandala, ,



H..n.v .l� U.lV
�

•• '-'-L-L�' .... ££'-' £� •• �_ring gray men's trousers rolled to the
knee that flap around her thighs as she walks by the rye fields. . . walk­

ing, with her head down, pushing hair out of her eyes often. Sometimes
soldiers come by, and give her rides. She listens for news of Tchitcher­
ine, of the trekking Schwarzkommando. If it feels right, she will even
ask about Tchitcherine. The variety of the rumors surprises her. I'm not
the only one who loves him ... though theirlove of course is friendly,
admiring, unsexual . . . Cell's the only one in the Zone who loves him

completely. Tchitcherine, known in some circles as "the Red Doper," is
about to be purged: the emissary is none other than Beria's top man, the
sinister N. Ripov himself.

Bullshit, Tchitcherine's already dead, didn't you hear, he's been dead
for months ...

· . . they've had somebody impersonating him till all the others in
his Bloc are taken care of . . .

· . . no, he came into Liineburg last weekend, my mate's seen him

before, no mistake, it's him . . .
· . . he's lost a lot of weight and takes a heavy bodyguard every­

where he goes. At least a dozen. Orientals mostly . . .
· .. fully equipped with Judas Iscariot no doubt. That one's hard to

believe. A dozen? Where does anybody find that many people he can
trust? Especially out at the edge like he is-

"What edge?" They're rattling along in the back of a 2 Yz-ton lorry
through very green rolling country . . . a storm is blowing up mute pur­
ple, veined in yellow, behind them. Cell's been drinking wine with

this

scurvy lot of tommies, a demolition squad who've been out all day
clear­

ing canals. They smell of creosote, marsh-mud, ammonia from the dyna­
mite.

"Well you know what he's doing."
"The rockets?"
"I wouldn't want to be in his place, that's all."

Up on the crest of a hill, an army surveying party is restoring
a dam­

aged road. One silhouette leans peering through a transit, one
holds a

bob. A bit apart from the instrument man another engineer
stands with

his arms out straight to the sides, his head moves sighting along either

pointed hand, then the arms swoop together . . . if you close your eyes,
and have learned to let your arms move by themselves, your fingers will
touch making a perfect right angle from where they were . . . Celi
watches the tiny act: it is devotional, graceful, and she feels the cross
the man has made on his own circle of visible earth . . . unconsciously a

mandala ... it is a sign for her. He is pointing her on her way. Later

719



that evening she sees an eagle flying across me marsnes, III me same di­
rection. It's golden-dark, almost night. The region is lonely and Pan is
very close. Geli has been to enough Sabbaths to handle it-she thinks.
But what is a devil's blue bite on the ass to the shrieking-outward, into
stone resonance, where there is no good or evil, out in the luminous
spaces Pan will carry her to? Is she ready yet for anything so real? The
moon has risen. She sits now, at the same spot where she saw the eagle,
waiting, waiting for something to come and take her. Have you ever
waited for it? wondering whether it will come from outside or inside?
Finally past the futile guesses at what might happen . . . now and then
re-erasing brain to keep it clean for the Visit ... yes wasn't it close to
here? remember didn't you sneak away from camp to have a moment
alone with What you felt stirring across the land ... it was the equinox
. . . green spring equal nights . . . canyons are opening up, at the bot­
toms are steaming fumaroles, steaming the tropical life there like greens
in a pot, rank, dope-perfume, a hood of smell ... human consciousness,
that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing, is about to be born.
This is the World just before men. Too violently pitched alive in con­
stant flow ever to be seen by men directly. They are meant only to look
at it dead, in still strata, transputrefied to oil or coal. Alive, it was a
threat: it was Titans, was an overpeaking of life so clangorous and mad,
such a green corona about Earth's body that some spoiler had to be
brought in before it blew the Creation apart. So we, the crippled keep­
ers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God's spoilers. Us.
Counter-revolutionaries. It is our mission to promote death. The way we
kill, the way we die, being unique among the Creatures. It was some­
thing we had to work on, historically and personally. To build from
scratch up to its present status as reaction, nearly as strong as life, hold­
ing down the green uprising. But only nearly as strong.

Only nearly, because of the defection rate. A few keep going over to
the Titans every day, in their striving subcreation (how can flesh tumble
and flow so, and never be any less beautiful?), into the rests of the folk­
song Death (empty stone rooms), out, and through, and down under the
net, down down to the uprising.

In harsh-edged echo, Titans stir far below. They are all the presences
we are not supposed to be seeing-wind gods, hilltop gods, sunset gods
-that we train ourselves away from to keep from looking further even
though enough of us do, leave Their electric voices behind in the twi­
light at the edge of the town and move into the constantly parted cloak
of our nightwalk till

Suddenly, Pan-leaping-its face too beautiful to bear, beautiful

720

rommand, I
�eat fio\\ 0 \
ner) but the n

, nemu t ke'p
oecome pr i
wiiliout ex

\ iliat he exi
ilienew KlnO(



Serpc.u, ';"\.:; ��:;. .. '-' .1.£ .. :.-�:.:.:.:.:;'� .: ::�.:.::::ings in the sky-into the sure
bones of

fright-
Don't walk home at night through the empty country. Don't go into

the forest when the light is too low, even too late in the afternoon-it
will get you. Don't sit by the tree like this, with your cheek against the
bark. It is impossible in this moonlight to see if you are male or female
now. Your hair spills, silver white. Your body under the gray cloth is so

exactly vulnerable, so fated to degradation time and again. What
if he

wakes and finds you've gone? He is now always the same, awake or

asleep-he never leaves the single dream, there are no more differences
between the worlds: they have become one for him. Thanatz and Mar­

gherita may have been his last ties with the old. That may be why they
stayed so long, it was his desperation, he wanted to hold on, he

needed

them ... but when he looks at them now he doesn't see them as often

any more. They are also losing what reality they brought here,
as Gott­

fried lost all of his to Blicero long ago. Now the boy moves image to

image, room to room, sometimes out of the action,
sometimes part of it

. . .
whatever he has to do, he does. The day has its logic, its needs, no

way for him to change it, leave it, or live outside it. He is helpless,
he is

sheltered secure.

It's only a matter of weeks, and everything will be over, Germany
will

have lost the War. The routines go on. The boy cannot imagine any­
thing past the last surrender. If he and Blicero are separated,

what will

happen to the flow of days?
Will Blicero die no please don't let him die.... (But he will.) "You're

going to survive me," he whispers. Gottfried kneels
at his feet, wearing

the dog collar. Both are in army clothes. It's a long time since
either of

them dressed as a woman. It is important tonight that they both be men.

"Ah, you're so smug, you little bastard....
"

It is only another game isn't it, another excuse for a whipping?
Gott­

fried keeps silent. When Blicero wants an answer, he says so.
It happens

often that he only wants to talk, and that may go on for hours. No
one

has ever talked to Gottfried before, not like this. His father uttered only
commands, sentences, flat judgments. His mother was emotional,

a

great flow of love, frustration and secret
terror passed into him from

her, but they never really talked. This is so more-than-real . .
. he feels

he must keep every word, that none must be lost. Blicero's
words have

become precious to him. He understands that Blicero
wants to give,

without expecting anything back, give away what he loves.
He believes

that he exists for Blicero, even if the others have all ceased to,
that in

the new kingdom they pass through now, he is the only other living
in-

721



habitant. Was it this he expected to be taxen 0y, taken mtor rsuceros
seed, sputtering into the poisoned manure of his bowels . . . it is waste,
yes, futility . . . but . . . as man and woman, coupled, are shaken to
the teeth at their approaches to the gates of life, hasn't he also felt more,
worshipfully more past these arrangements for penetration, the style,
garments of Haying without passion, sheer hosiery perishable as the skin
of a snake, custom manacles and chains to stand for the bondage he
feels in his heart . . . all become theatre as he approached the gates of
that Other Kingdom, felt the white gigantic muzzles somewhere inside,
expressionless beasts frozen white, pushing him away, the crust and
mantle hum of mystery so beyond his poor hearing . . . there have to be
these too, lovers whose genitals are consecrated to shit, to endings, to
the desperate nights in the streets when connection proceeds out of all
personal control, proceeds or fails, a gathering of fallen-as many in
acts of death as in acts of life-or a sentence to be alone for another

night.... Are they to be denied, passed over, all of them?
On his approaches to it, taken inward again and again, Gottfried can

only try to keep himself open, to loosen the sphincter of his soul. . . .
"And sometimes I dream of discovering the edge of the World. Find­

ing that there is an end. My mountain gentian always knew. But it has
cost me so much.

"America was the edge of the World. A message for Europe, conti­
nent-sized, inescapable. Europe had found the site for its Kingdom of
Death, that special Death the West had invented. Savages had their
waste regions, Kalaharis, lakes so misty they could not see the other
side. But Europe had gone deeper-into obsession, addiction, away
from all the savage innocences. America was a gift from the invisible
powers, a way of returning. But Europe refused it. It wasn't Europe's
Original Sin-the latest name for that is Modern Analysis-but it hap­
pens that Subsequent Sin is harder to atone for.

"In Africa, Asia, Amerindia, Oceania, Europe came and established
its order of Analysis and Death. What it could not use, it killed or al­
tered. In time the death-colonies grew strong enough to break away.
But the impulse to empire, the mission to propagate death, the structure
of it, kept on. Now we are in the last phase. American Death has come
to occupy Europe. It has learned empire from its old metropolis. But
now we have only the structure left us, none of the great rainbow
plumes, no fittings of gold, no epic marches over alkali seas. The savages
of other continents, corrupted but still resisting in the name of life, have
gone on despite everything . . . while Death and Europe are separate

722

Edge, our n

sphere, hall
_ learned to d

stood ilie men
for �ettin(1 ba

, rresence back
��es out iliere

e

", Grarity
Jan�eroflalljl
�arance.nar&..
,., onl� ilieu
orOKen)'ear
ony \\iilionh/' .

"I ��n I

- •

- .. -if I ,,"'"" \ /......" : �_j -----.� I (�'.�.,_�-_ ,4 "'- �



as ever, ':...���� ::.::"�":: '��"""
'"'''''''''' ''''''",,''""omated. Death only rules here. It has

never, in love, become one with....
"Is the cycle over now, and a new one ready to begin? Will our

new

Edge, our new Deathkingdom, be the Moon? I dream of a great glass
sphere, hollow and very high and far away . . . the colonists have
learned to do without air, it's vacuum inside and out ... it's under­

stood the men won't ever return ... they are all men. There are ways
for getting back, but so complicated, so at the mercy of language, that

presence back on Earth is only temporary, and never 'real' . . . pas­
sages out there are dangerous, chances of falling so shining and deep.
. . . Gravity rules all the way out to the cold sphere, there is always the

danger offalling. Inside the colony, the handful of men have a frosty ap­
pearance, hardly solid, no more alive than memories, nothing to

touch

... only their remote images, black and white film-images, grained,
broken year after hoarfrost year out

in the white latitudes, in empty col­

ony, with only infrequent visits from the accidental, like
me. . . .

"I wish I could recover it all. Those men had once been through a

tragic day-ascent, fire, failure, blood. The events
of that day, so long

ago, had put them into exile forever . . . no, they
weren't really space­

men. Out here, they wanted to dive between the worlds, to fall, turn,
reach and swing on journeys curved through the shining, through

the

winter nights of space-their dreams were of rendezvous, of
cosmic tra­

peze acts carried on in loneliness, in sterile grace,
in certain knowledge

that no one would ever be watching, that loved ones had been lost for­

ever. ...

"The connections they hoped for would always miss by trillions of
dark miles, by years of frozen silence. But I wanted to bring you

back

the story. I remember that you used to whisper me to sleep
with stories

of us one day living on the Moon ... are you beyond that by
now?

You've got much older. Can you feel in your body how strongly
I have

infected you with my dying? I was meant to: when a certain
time has

come, I think that we are all meant to. Fathers are
carriers of the virus

of Death, and sons are the infected . . . and, so that the infection may
be more certain, Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father

and son beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female .
. .

oh Gottfried of course yes you are beautiful to me but I'm dying ... I

want to get through it as honestly as I can, and your immortality rips
at

my heart-can't you
see why I might want to destroy that, oh that stu­

pid clarity in your eyes . . . when I see you in morning
and evening

ranks, so open, so ready to take my sickness in and shelter it,
shelter it

inside your own little ignorant love. . . .



"Your love." He nods several times. BUl IllS eyes are too uallgeruusly
spaced beyond the words, stunned irreversibly away from real Gott­
fried, away from the weak, the failed smells of real breath, by barriers
stern and clear as ice, and hopeless as the one-way flow of European
time....

"I want to break out-to leave this cycle of infection and death. I
want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life,
will be gathered, inseparable, into the radiance of what we would be­
come....

"

Gottfried kneels, numb, waiting. Blicero is looking at him. T)eeply: his
face whiter than the boy has ever seen it. A raw spring wind beats the
canvas of their tent. It's near sunset. In a moment Blicero must go out to
take evening reports. His hands rest near a mound of cigarette butts in a
mess tray. His myopic witch's eyes, through the thick lenses, may be
looking into Gottfried's for the first time. Gottfried cannot look away.
He knows, somehow, incompletely, that he has a decision to make ...
that Blicero expects something from him . . . but Blicero has always
made the decisions. Why is he suddenly asking . . .

It all poises here. Passageways of routine, still cogent enough, still
herding us through time . . . the iron rockets waiting outside . . . the
birth-scream of the latest spring torn across rainy miles of Saxony,
route-sides littered with last envelopes, stripped gears, seized bearings,
rotted socks and skivvies fragrant now with fungus and mud. If there is
still hope for Gottfried here in this wind-beat moment, then there is
hope elsewhere. The scene itself must be read as a card: what is to
come. Whatever has happened since to the figures in it (roughly drawn
in soiled white, army gray, spare as a sketch on a ruined wall) it is pre­
served, though it has no name, and, like The Fool, no agreed assignment
in the deck.

D D D D D D D

Here's Enzian ramrodding his brand-new rocket through the night.
When it rains, when the mist is heavy, before the watch can quite get
tarps over, the glossy skin of the rocket is seen to've turned to dark
slate. Perhaps, after all, just before the firing, it will be painted black.

It is the 00001, the second in its series.
Russian loudspeakers across the Elbe have called to you. American

rumors have come jiving in to the fires at night and summoned, against
the ground of your hopes, the yellow American deserts, Red Indians,

morning, a �
its inertia, '

, moires of per
more out of f,

ill love, wiped
i \\�nter berm.

oreailis in \\hl

",
Where\\lIl

itl Dod.", brute.
Inameor reti n

( •
dnotreenemun

i�O .. ,00: ID
�acn,acnud

rna)' account f

��i�nt that i
(itr,!ourfold
cnitectural nd
ol'erheadam
andcande ' n(
war in variou
can see the \\'

, struggle down
and its epa!



blue CJft}, g:.:vv:,: .. �"'-' .. �� . .;._�.� .. ---.I ou feel about the
old Rocket? Not now

that it's giving you job security, but back then-do you remember any
more what it was like wheeling them out by hand, a dozen of you that

morning, a guard of honor in the simple encounter of your bodies with
its inertia . . . all your faces drowning in the same selfless look-the
moires of personality softening, softening, each sweep of surf a little
more out of focus till all has become subtle grades of cloud-all hatred,
all love, wiped away for the short distance you had to push it over the
winter berm, aging men in coatskirts flapping below your boottops,
breaths in white spouts breaking turbulent as the waves behind you .

. . .
Where will you all go? What empires, what deserts? You caressed

its body, brute, freezing through your gloves, here together without
shame or reticence you twelve struggled, in love, on this Baltic shore­
not Peenemiinde perhaps, not official Peenemiinde . . . but once, years

ago . . . boys in white shirts and dark vests and caps .
. . on some

beach, a children's resort, when we were younger ... at Test Stand
VII

the image, at last, you couldn't leave-the way the
wind smelled salt

and dying, the sound of winter surf, the premonition of rain you
could

feel at the back of your neck, stirring in the clipped hairs.... At Test
Stand VII, the holy place.

But young men have all grown older, and there's
little color in the

scene ... they are pushing into the sun, the glare strikes them squint­
ing and grinning, bright here as the morning shift at

Siemens with the

centaurs struggling high on the wall, the clock without numerals, bicy­
cles squeaking, lunchpails and lunchbags and the lowered faces

of the

trudging dutiful streams of men and women into the dark openings
. . .

it resembles a Daguerreotype taken of the early Raketen-Stadt by a for­

gotten photographer in 1856: this is the picture, in fact,
that killed him

-he died a week later from mercury poisoning after inhaling fumes of

the heated metal in his studio . . . well, he was a habitue of mercury
fumes in moderate doses, he felt it did his brain some good, and that

may account for pictures like "Der
Raketen-Stadt": it shows, from a

height that is topographically impossible in Germany,
the ceremonial

City, fourfold as expected, an eerie precision to all
lines and shadings ar­

chitectural and human, built in mandalic form like a Herero village,
overhead a magnificent sky, marble carried to a wildness of white billow

and candescence . . . there seems to be building, or demolition, under

way in various parts of the City, for nothing
here remains the same, we

can see the sweat in individual drops on the workers' dark necks as they

struggle down in the bonedamp cellars . . . a bag
of cement has broken,

and its separate motes hang in the light . . . the City
will always be

725



changing, new tire-treads in the dust, new cIgarette wrappers m me
garbage . . . engineering changes to the Rocket create new routes of
supply, new living arrangements, reflected in traffic densities as viewed
from this unusual height-there are indeed tables of Functions to get
from such City-changes to Rocket-modifications: no more than an ex­
tension, really, of the techniques by which Constance Babington-Smith
and her colleagues at R. A. F. Medmenham discovered the Rocket back
in 1943 in recco photographs of Peenemiinde.

But remember if you loved it. If you did, how you loved it. And how
much-after all you're used to asking "how much," used to measuring,
to comparing measurements, putting them into equations to find out
how much more, how much of, how much when . . . and here in your
common drive to the sea feel as much as you wish of that dark double­
minded love which is also shame, bravado, engineers' geopolitics­
"spheres of influence" modified to toruses of Rocket range that are par­
abolic in section . . .

. . . not, as we might imagine, bounded below by the line of the
Earth it "rises from" and the Earth it "strikes" No But Then You Never

Really Thought It Was Did You Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below
The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it's only the
peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out
of the other silent world, violently (a jet airplane crashing into faster­
than-sound, some years later a spaceship crashing into faster-than-light)
Remember The Password In The Zone This Week Is FASTER-THAN,
THE-SPEEDOFLIGHT Speeding Up Your Voice Exponentially­
Linear Exceptions Made Only In Case of Upper Respiratory Com­
plaints, at each "end," understand, a very large transfer of energy:
breaking upward into this world, a controlled burning-breaking down­
ward again, an uncontrolled explosion . . . this lack of symmetry leads
to speculating that a presence, analogous to the Aether, flows through
time, as the Aether flows through space. The assumption of a Vacuum in
time tended to cut us off one from another. But an Aether sea to bear us
world-to-world might bring us back a continuity, show us a kinder uni­
verse, more easygoing. . . .

So, yes yes this is a scholasticism here, Rocket state-cosmology . . .
the Rocket does lead that way-among others-past these visible ser­
pent coils that lash up above the surface of Earth in rainbow light, in
steel tetany . . . these storms, these things of Earth's deep breast we
were never told . . . past them, through the violence, to a numbered
cosmos, a quaint brownwood-paneled, Victorian kind of Brain War, as
between quaternions and vector analysis in the 188os-the nostalgia of

726

Aether, th

elegantly
-

here, certai
a number of

combat, in tu
. 10undabJe .

taKen in a ro�h

�aDDalist5 \\ho
I Durnercup and

newrevelatioll\
etl) �ood and e\
mru TWIil. 'om

( �ocKet to take

hro�rpetualh I
Buttnelf h rt

lar�ealead
narelllsr:r •

LtG.ilie�
�rlOnal infr
noelllma�
anor°intedm
ndlin�clascr

Here are ili
,

lorurtl!'atm
�reOalterna
.\merican !roo

hnallm

now with ('Dug
ovmize unifo
Whi�un ro
cillin. To avoid
crowns aaain b

. under hay t c
rainy \\1\\0\\
otten at rando
up the ra\'in
(official pau\.



Aethel, Uie 5i1,,61 , pb:,,�u.uiu.iii�u, �tone-anchored, knurled-brass, filigreed

elegantly functional shapes of your grandfathers. These sepia
tones are

here, certainly. But the Rocket has to be many things, it
must answer to

a number of different shapes in the dreams of those who touch
it-in

combat, in tunnel, on paper-it must survive heresies shining, uncon­

foundable . . . and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have been

taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne
...

Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah, letter by letter-rivets,
burner cup and brass rose, its text is theirs to permute

and combine into

new revelations, always unfolding . . . Manichaeans who see two Rock­

ets, good and evil, who speak together in the sacred
idiolalia of the Pri­

mal Twins (some say their names are Enzian and Blicero) of a good
Rocket to take us to the stars, an evil Rocket for the World's suicide, the

two perpetually in struggle.
But these heretics will be sought and the dominion of silence will en­

large as each one goes down ... they will
all be sought out. Each will

have his personal Rocket. Stored in its target-seeker will
be the heretic's

EEG, the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossomings
of

personal infrared, each Rocket will know its
intended and hunt him,

ride him a green-doped and silent hound, through our World, shining
and pointed in the sky at his back, his guardian

executioner rushing in,

rushing closer. . . .
Here are the objectives. To make the run over tracks that may

end

abruptly at riverside or in carbonized trainyard,
over roads even the un­

paved alternates to which are patrolled now by
Russian and British and

American troops in a hardening occupation, a fear of
winter bleaching

the men all more formal, into braces of Attention they ignored during
the summer, closer adherence now to the paperwork as colors of

trees

and brush begin their change, as purple blurs out over
miles of heath,

and nights come sooner. To have to stay out
in the rains of early Virgo:

the children who stowed away on the trek against all orders are
down

now with coughs and fevers, sniffling at night, hoarse little
voices inside

oversize uniform jackets. To brew tea for them from fennel, betony,
Whitsun roses, sunflowers, mallow leaves-to loot sulfa drugs and peni­
cillin. To avoid raising road-dust when the sun has dried the

ruts and

crowns again by noon. To sleep in the fields. To hide
the rocket sections

under haystacks, behind the Single wall of a gutted
railroad shed, among

rainy willows down beside
the river beds. To disperse at any alarm, or

often at random, just for drill-to flow like a net, down out
of the Harz,

up the ravines, sleeping
in the dry glazed spaces of deserted spas

(official pain, official death watching
all night from the porcelain eyes of

727



statues), digging in nights' perimeters, smelling pine needles boots and
trench-shovels have crushed. . . . To keep faith that it is not trek this
time, nor struggle, but truly Destiny, the 00001 sliding like an oiled bolt
into the receivership of the railway system prepared for it last spring, a
route only apparently in ruins, carefully crafted by the War, by special
techniques of bombardment, to take this most immachinate of tech­
niques, the Rocket-the Rocket, this most terribly potential of bom­
bardments....

The 00001 goes disassembled, in sections-warhead, guidance, fuel
and oxidizer tanks, tail section. If they all make it to the firing site, it
will have to be put back together there.

"Show me the society that never said, 'I am created among men,'
"

Christian walks with Enzian in the fields above the encampment,
"

'to

protect you each from violence, to give shelter in time of disaster'-but
Enzian, what protection is there? what can protect us from that," ges­
turing down the valley at the yellow-gray camouflage netting they can
both, X-ray eyed for this one journey, see through. . . .

Enzian and the younger man somehow have drifted into these long
walks. Nothing deliberate on either side. Is this how successions occur?
Each man is suspicious. But there are no more of the old uncomfortable
silences. No competing.

"It comes as the Revealer. Showing that no society can protect, never
could-they are as foolish as shields of paper. . . ." He must tell Chris­
tian everything he knows, everything he suspects or has dreamed. Pro­
claiming none of it for truth. But he must keep nothing back for himself.
Nothing is his to keep. "They have lied to us. They can't keep us from
dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies.
What have They ever given us in return for the trust, the love-They
actually say 'love'-we're supposed to owe Them? Can They keep us
from even catching cold? from lice, from being alone? from anything?
Before the Rocket we went on believing, because we wanted to. But the
Rocket can penetrate, from the sky, at any given point. Nowhere is safe.
We can't believe Them any more. Not if we are still sane, and love the
truth."

"We are," nods Christian. "We do." He isn't looking at Enzian to
confirm it, either.

"Yes."
"Then ... in the absence of faith
One night, in the rain, their laager stops for the night at a deserted re­

search station, where the Germans, close to the end of the War, were
developing a sonic death-mirror. Tall paraboloids of concrete are stag-

728

gered, W
explosion
crete mim

anything j
perimental�
compiled. B
rou rapjd�'
needed might
�)iDle ripple
DOnl, could ru

worlethan d
iliec\iff, and n
olrrofit. To ex
term of the

When Enzi
whether the d
coarse enoucr
in the face, I

lances liKe t'n
upward �



gertU, '\IV Hne aHO HHYHVUU1:i.l(." Ci'U. oss the plain. The idea was to set off an

explosion in front of the paraboloid, at the exact focal point. The con­
crete mirror would then throw back a perfect shock wave to destroy
anything in its path. Thousands of guinea pigs, dogs and cows were ex­
perimentally blasted to death here-reams of death-curve data were

compiled. But the project was a lemon. Only good at short range, and

you rapidly came to a falloff point where the amount of explosives
needed might as well be deployed some other way. Fog, wind, hardly
visible ripples or snags in the terrain, anything less than perfect condi­
tions, could ruin the shock wave's deadly shape. Still, Enzian can envi­
sion a war, a place for them, "a desert. Lure your enemy to a desert.
The Kalahari. Wait for the wind to die."

"Who would fight for a desert?" Katje wants to know. She's wearing
a hooded green slicker looks even too big for Enzian.

"In,
"

Christian squatting down, looking up at the pale curve of reflec­
tor they've come to the base of and have gathered at in the rain, sharing
a smoke, taking a moment away from the rest of the trek, "not 'for.'
What he's saying is 'in.'

"

Saves trouble later if you can get the Texts straight soon as they're
spoken. "Thank you," sez Oberst Enzian.

A hundred meters away, huddled into another white paraboloid,
watching them, is a fat kid in a gray tanker jacket. Out of its pocket
peer two furry little bright eyes. It is fat Ludwig and his lost lemming
Ursula-he has found her at last and after all and despite everything.
For a week they have been drifting alongside the trek, just past visibil­

ity, pacing the Africans day by day ... among trees at the tops of es­

carpments, at the fires' edges at night Ludwig is there, watching . . .

accumulating evidence, or terms of an equation . . . a boy and his lem­

ming, out to see the Zone. Mostly what he's seen is a lot of chewing gum
and a lot of foreign cock. How else does a foot-loose kid get by in the
Zone these days? Ursula is preserved. Ludwig has fallen into a fate
worse than death and found it's negotiable. So not all lemmings go over
the cliff, and not all children are preserved against snuggling into the sin
of profit. To expect any more, or less, of the Zone is to disagree with the
terms of the Creation.

When Enzian rides point he has the habit of falling into reveries,
whether the driver is talking or not. In night without headlamps, a mist
coarse enough to be falling, or now and then blown like a wet silk scarf
in the face, inside and outside the same temperature and darkness, bal­

ances like these allow him to float just under waking, feet and arms bug­
upwards pushing at the rubbery glass surface-tension

between the two

729



-

--�� -

/ �\
/'

levels, sticking in it, dream-caressed at hands and teet become super­
sensitive, a good home-style horizontalless drowse. The engine of the
stolen truck is muffled in old mattresses tied over the hood. Henryk the
Hare, driving, keeps a leery eye on the temperature gauge. He's called
"the Hare" because he can never get messages right, as in the old Her­
ero story. So reverences are dying.

A figure slips into the road, flashlight circling slowly. Enzian unsnaps
the isinglass window, leans out into the heavy mist, and calls "faster
than the speed of light." The figure waves him on. But in the last edge
of Enzian's glance back, in the light from the flash rain is sticking to the
black face in big fat globules, sticking as water does to black grease­
paint, but not to Herero skin-

"Think we can make a U-turn here?" The shoulders are treacherous,
and both men know it. Back in the direction of camp the line of slow­

rolling lowlands is lit up by a thud of apricot light.
"Shit," Henryk the Hare jamming it in reverse, waiting for orders

from Enzian as they grind slowly backwards. The one with the flashlight
may have been the only lookout, there may be no enemy concentration
for miles. But-

"There." Beside the road, a prone body. It's Mieczislav Omuzire,
with a bad head wound. "Get him in, come on." They load him into the
back of the idling truck, and cover him with a shelter half. No time to
find out how bad it is. The blackface sentry has vanished for good. From
the direction they're backing in comes the stick-rattle of rifle fire.

"We're going into this backwards?"
"Have you heard any mortar fire?"
"Since the one? No."
"Andreas must have knocked it out then."

"Oh, they'll be all right, Nguarorerue. I'm worrying about us."
Orutyene dead. Okandio, Ekori, Omuzire wounded, Ekori critically.

The hostiles were white.
"How many?"
"Dozen maybe."
"We can't count on a safe perimeter-" blue-white flashlight blob­

bing ellipse-to-parabola across the shaking map, "till Braunschweig. If
it's still there." Rain hits the map in loud spatters.

"Whore's the railroad?" puts in Christian. He gets an interested look
from Andreas. It's mutual. There's a good deal of interest here lately.
The railroad is 6 or 7 miles northwest.

The people come empty their belongings next to the Rocket's trailer
rigs. Saplings are being axed down, each blow loud and carrying . . . a

730

frame is l

here and t

simulate pi
cook wagon
will move 0

angle east, b
ilie British an

�o))ible to nd
, ,

' all the \I'

Andreas 11

oon� , , , lolle
to�y somethL1

j(Ye)�" Bli I"

Andreas,"
"We�� The
'look !�

o�nt. Hi elbQ\
oiliers have \\r'
�u! habit per
[n� the dead
ilirough at eac
Heswallow a
�,Speed I
chewing on
lVomen to ke
tion, He \\ ant
to happen to
His people a

Chomp l
there L\ubi



frar..'; _� _ :"---b � _ _ J lles of clothing, pots and kettles
stuffed

here and there under the long tarpaulin between bent-sapling hoops, to
simulate pieces of rocket. Andreas is calling, "All decoys muster by the
cook wagon," fishing in his pockets for the list he keeps. The decoy trek
will move on northward, no violent shift in direction-the rest will

angle east, back toward the Russian Army. If they get just close enough,
the British and American armies may move more cautiously. It may be

possible to ride the interface, like gliding at the edge of a thunderstorm
. . . all the way to the end between armies East and West.

Andreas sits dangling feet kicking heels against tailgate bong ...

bong . . . tolling departure. Enzian looks up, quizzical. Andreas wants
to say something. Finally: "Christian goes with you, then?"

"Yes?" Blinking under rain-beaded eyebrows. "Oh, for God's sake,
Andreas."

"Well? The decoys are supposed to make it too, right?"
"Look, take him with you, if you want."
"I only wanted to find out," Andreas shrugs, "what's been settled."
"You could have asked me. Nothing's been 'settled.'

"

"Maybe not by you. That's your game. You think it'll preserve you.
But it doesn't work for us. We have to know what's really going to hap­
pen."

Enzian kneels and begins to lift the heavy iron tailgate. He knows
how phony it looks. Who will believe that in his heart he wants to be­

long to them out there, the vast Humility sleepless, dying, in pain
to­

night across the Zone? the preterite he loves, knowing he's always to
be

a stranger. ... Chains rattle above him. When
the edge of the gate is

level with his chin, he looks up, into Andreas's eyes. His arms are braced

tight. His elbows ache. It is an offering. He wants to ask,
How many

others have written me off? Is there a fate only I've been kept blind to?
But habits persist, in their own life. He struggles to his feet, silently, lift­

ing the dead weight, slamming it into place. Together they slip
bolts

through at each corner. "See you there," Enzian waves, and turns away.
He swallows a tablet of German desoxyephedrine then pops in a stick of

gum. Speed makes teeth grind, gum gets chewed by grinding teeth,
chewing on gum is a technique, developed during the late War by
women, to keep from crying. Not that he wants to cry for the separa­
tion. He wants to cry for himself: for what they all must believe is going
to happen to him. The more they believe it, the better chance

there is.

His people are going to demolish him if they can. . . .

Chomp, chomp, hmm good evening ladies, nice job on the lashings
there Ljubica, chomp, how's the head Mieczislav, bet they were sur-

731



prised when the bullets bounced off! he'il-Ilell cnomp, cnomp, evenmg
"Sparks" (Ozohande), anything from Hamburg yet on the liquid oxygen,
damned Oururu better come through-ru, or we gonna have a bad-ass
time trying to lay low till he do-ru-oh shit who's that-

It's Josef Ombindi's who it is, leader of the Empty Ones. But till he
stopped smiling, for a few seconds there, Enzian thought it was Or­
utyene's ghost. "The word is that the Okandio child was killed too."

"Not so." Chomp.
"She was my first try at preventing a birth."
"So you maintain a deadly interest in her," chomp, chomp. He knows

that's not it, but the man annoys him.
"Suicide is a freedom even the lowest enjoy. But you would deny that

freedom to a people."
"No ideology. Tell me if your friend Oururu is going to have the LOX

generator ready to roll. Or if there is a funny surprise, instead, waiting
for me in Hamburg."

"All right, no ideology. You would deny your people a freedom even
you enjoy, Oberst Nguarorerue." Smiling again like the ghost of the
man who fell tonight. Probing for the spot, jabbing what? what? want to
say what, Oberst? till he sees the tiredness in Enzian's face, and under­
stands it is not a trick. "A freedom," whispering smiling, a love song
under black skies edged all around in acid orange, a commercial full of
Cathar horror at the practice of imprisoning souls in the bodies of new­
borns, "a freedom you may exercise soon. I hear your soul talking in its
sleep. I know you better than anyone."

Chomp, chomp, oh I had to give him the watch lists didn't I. Oh, am
I a fool. Yes, he can choose the night.... "You're a hallucination, Om­
bindi," putting just enough panic into his voice so that if it doesn't work
it'll still be a good insult, "I'm projecting my own death-wish, and it
comes out looking like you. Uglier then I ever dreamed." Giving him
the Spaceman Smile for a full 30 seconds, after only 10 seconds of which
Ombindi has already begun to shift his eyes, sweat, press his lips to­
gether, look at the ground, turn away, look back, but Enzian prolongs it,
no mercy tonight my people, Spaceman Smile turning everything inside
a mile radius to frozen ice-cream colors NOW that we're all in the
mood, how about installing the battery covers anyway, Djuro? That's
right, X-ray vision, saw right through the tarp, write it down as another
miracle . . . you there Vlasta, take the next radio watch, forget what it
says on the list, there's never been any more than routine traffic logged
with Hamburg and I wanna know why, wanna know what does come
through when Ombindi's people are on watch . . . communication on

732

to move OIl

ne's lI'alkjIl�
nis forage ca

et1r, without
�eeping their
Tnere's no re
was, woico 1\

Tne fat 00,1
iliatoe's "

�ml\'ritten 0
�OU. �'othina

ilonly sleep,'
arawin .in
�ower, In the
Or some kind
the middle dl
ayoun if\.

totally at p ,
ten, in Eno\
hand, It l
you U)elc



the trek COIIlIIlauu uey_ uellCy l� by CW dots and dashes-no voices to

betray. But operators swear they can tell the individual sending-hands.
Vlasta is one of his best operators, and she can do good hand-imitations
of most of Ombindi's people. Been practicing up, just in case.

The others, who've been all along wondering if Enzian was ever going
to move on Ombindi, can tell now by the look on his face and the way
he's walking through- So, with little more than touches to the brim of
his forage cap, Signaling Plan So-and-So, the Ombindi people are qui­
etly, without violence, relieved of all watch duties tonight, though still

keeping their weapons and ammo. No one has ever taken those away.
There's no reason to. Enzian is no more vulnerable now than he ever

was, which was plenty.
The fat boy Ludwig is a white glowworm in the mist. The game is

that he's scouting for a vast white army, always at his other flank, ready
to come down off of the high ground at a word from Ludwig, and smear
the blacks into the earth. But he would never call them down. He

would rather go with the trek, invisible. There is no hustling for him
down there. Their journey doesn't include him. They have somewhere
to go. He feels he must go with them, but separate,

a stranger, no more

or less at the mercy of the Zone. . . .

o 0 0 0 0 0 0

It's a bridge over a stream. Very seldom will traffic come by overhead.
You can look up and see a whole slope of cone-bearing trees rushing up
darkly away from one side of the road. Trees creak in sorrow for the

en­

gineered wound through their terrain, their terrenity or earthhood.
Brown trout flick by in the stream. Inside the culvert, other shelterers
have written on the damp arch of wall. Take me, Stretchfoot, what keeps
you? Nothing worse than these days. You will be like gentle sleep.

Isn't

it only sleep? Please. Come soon- Private Rudolf Effig, 12.iv·45·
A

drawing, in Commando blackface-grease, of a man looking closely
at a

flower. In the distance, or smaller, appears to be a woman, approaching.
Or some kind of elf, or something. The man isn't looking at her (or it). In
the middle distance are haystacks. The flower is shaped like the cunt of
a young girl. There is a luminary looking down from the sky,

a face on it

totally at peace, like the Buddha's. Underneath, someone else
has writ­

ten, in English: Good drawing! Finish! and underneath that, in another
hand, It IS finished, you nit. And so are you. Nearby, in German, I loved

you Lisele with
all my heart-no name, rank, unit or serial number.

733



· .. Initials, tic-tac-toe games you can tell were playea atone, a game
of hangman in which the mystery word was never filled in: GE __
RAT __ and the hanged body visible almost at the other end of the cul­
vert, even this early in the day, because it's a narrow road, and no real
gradient of shadow. A bicycle is incompletely hidden in the weeds at
the side of the road. A late butterfly pale as an eyelid winks aimlessly
out over the stalks of new hay. High up on the slope, someone is swing­
ing an ax-blade into a living tree ... and here is where and when the
young witch finds Vaslav Tchitcherine at last.

He's sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just waiting. A
passive solenoid waiting to be sprung. At her step, his head lifts, and he
sees her. She is the first presence since last night he's looked at and seen.
Which is her doing. The charm she recited then, fastening the silk
crotch torn from her best underpants across the eyes of the doll, his
eyes, Eastern and liquid, though they'd been only sketched in clay with
her long fingernail, was this:

May he be blind now to all but me. May the burning sun of love shine
in his eyes forever. May this, my own darkness, shelter him. By all the
holy names of God, by the Angels Melchidael, Yahoel, Anafiel, and the
great Metatron, I conjure you, and all who are with you, to go and do
my will.

The secret is in the concentrating. She inhibits everything else: the
moon, the wind in the junipers, the wild dogs out ranging in the middle
of the night. She fixes on Tchitcherine's memory and his wayward eyes,
and lets it build, pacing her orgasm to the incantation, so that by the
end, naming the last Names of Power, she's screaming, coming, without
help from her fingers, which are raised to the sky.

Later she breaks a piece of the magic bread in half, and eats one part.
The other is for Tchitcherine.

He takes the bread now. The stream rushes. A bird sings.
Toward nightfall, the lovers lying naked on a cold grass bank, the

sound of a convoy approaches on the little road. Tchitcherine pulls on
his trousers and climbs up to see if he can beg some food, or cigarettes.
The black faces pass by, mba-kayere, some glancing at him curiously,
others too Involved with their own exhaustion, or with keeping a tight
guard on a covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001.
Enzian on his motorcycle stops for a moment, mba-kayere, to talk to the
scarred, unshaven white. They're in the middle of the bridge. They talk
broken German. Tchitcherine manages to hustle half a pack of Ameri­
can cigarettes and three raw potatoes. The two men nod, not quite for­
mally, not quite smiling, Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns to his

734

journey.
shivering
stream. �

gone.
This i n

cubic enYirOl
rising throug\
ning.l pa t \
sperm and �
how \m\)lUUt
the War aa



o 0 0 0 0 0 0

jOUI uey . .1 CIHlCHvl111C; 115.l.ll.':) a. vJ.garette, watching them
down the road, �

shivering in the dusk. Then he goes back to his young girl
beside the l

stream. They will have to locate some firewood before all the light
is )

gone. �
This is magic. Sure-but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not

the

first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening,
often forever, without knowing it.

By now the City is grown so tall that elevators are long-haul affairs,
with

lounges inside: padded seats and benches, snack bars,
newsstands where

you can browse through a whole issue of Life between stops.
For those

faint hearts who first thing on entering seek out the Certificate of In­

spection on the elevator wall, there are young
women in green overseas

caps, green velvet basques, and tapered yellowstripe
trousers-a femi­

nine zootsuit effect-who've been well-tutored in all kinds of elevator

lore, and whose job it is to set you at ease. "In the early days," pipes
young Mindy Bloth of Carbon City, Illinois, smiling vacantly away

in

profile, close by the brass moire of diamond-blurs passing, passing
in

vertical thousands-her growing-up face, dreamy and practical as the

Queen of Cups, never quite looks for you, is always
refracted away

some set angle in the gold-brown medium between you . . . it's
morn­

ing, and the flower man at the rear of the elevator,
down a step or two,

behind the little fountain, has brought lilacs and irises fresh and early-
"before the Vertical Solution, all transport was, in effect, two-dimen- �
sional-ah, I can guess your question-" as a smile, familiar and

unre- I

fracted for this old elevator regular, passes between girl and heckler- �
"

'What about airplane flight, eh?' That's what you were going to
ask �

wasn't it!" as a matter of fact he was going to ask about the Rocket and
'

everyone knows it, but the subject is under a
curious taboo, and polite

Mindy has brought in now a chance for actual violence,
the violence of

repression-the bleached colors of a September morning sky opposite
the sunrise, and the filing-edge of a morning wind-into this intimate

cubic environment moving so smoothly upward through space (a bubble

rising through Castile soap where all around
it's green lit by slow light-

ning), past levels already a-bustle with heads seething brighter
than

sperm and eggs in
the sea, past some levels left dark, unheated, some-

how forbidden, looking oddly wasted, levels where nobodv's been since

the War aaaaa-ahhh! howling past, "a common aerodynamic effect," ex-

735



plains patient Mindy, "involving our own boundary layer and the shape
of the orifice as we pass it-" "Oh you mean that before we get to it,"
hollers another heckler, "it's a different shape?" "Yup, and after we go
by it too, Mac," Mindy brushes him off, broadly mugging the same thing
with her mouth, purse-relax-smile-these jagged openings howling,
hauling forlorn and downward, already stories gone beneath the soles of
your shoes, a howl bent downward like a harmonica note-but why
don't any of the busy floors make a sound going by? where the lights are
shining warm as Xmas-week parties, floors that beckon you into densi­
ties of glass faceting or screening, good-natured coffee-urn grousing,
well golly, here goes another day, howdy Marie, where you ladies hiding
the drawings on the SG-l . . . what do you mean Field Service has them
... again? doesn't Engineering Design have any rights, it's like watch­
ing your child run away, to see a piece of equipment get set out to the
Field (Der Veld). That it is. A broken heart, a mother's prayer. ...
Slowly, the voices of the Lubeck Hitler Youth Glee Club fade in behind
(nowadays the boys sing at officers' clubs all across the Zone under their
road name, "The Lederhoseners." They are dressed appropriately, and
sing-when the house feels right-with their backs turned to the audi­
ences, their sly little faces turned over shoulders to flirt with the fighting
men:

But sharper than a Mother's tears
Are the beatings Mutti gave to me

with a beautifully coordinated wiggle then to each pair of buttocks
gleaming through leather so tight that the clenching of gluteal muscles
is plainly visible, and you can bet there isn't a cock in the room doesn't
stir at the sight, and scarcely an eye that can't hallucinate that maternal
birch smacking down across each naked ass, the delicious red lines, the
stern and beautiful female face, smiling down through lowered lashes,
only a glint of light off of each eye-when you were first learning to
crawl, it was her calves and feet you saw the most of-they replaced
her breasts as sources of strength, as you learned the smell of her leather
shoes, and the sovereign smell rose as far as you could see-to her
knees, perhaps-depending on fashion that year-to her thighs. You
were infant in the presence of leather legs, leather feet ... ).

"Isn't it possible," Thanatz whispers, "that we all learned that classi­
cal fantasy at Mother's knees? That somewhere tucked in the brain's
plush album is always a child in Fauntleroy clothes, a pretty French
maid begging to be whipped?"

Ludwig shifts his rather fat ass under Thanatz's hand. Both have per-
736

imeters
how, to



imeters mey are llUl �uppu�vU to cross.
But they have crept away any­

how, to a piece of the interface, a cold thicket they've pounded
down a

space in the middle of, to lie on. "Ludwig, a little Sand M never hurt

anybody."
"Who said that?"

"Sigmund Freud. How do I know? But why are we taught to feel
reflexive shame whenever the subject comes up? Why will the Structure
allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one?

Because submis­

sion and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They
cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submis­

sion so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after
dominance

so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it,

only power. I tell you, if Sand M could be established universally, at
the

family level, the State would wither away."
This is Sado-anarchism and Thanatz is its leading theoretician in the

Zone these days.
It is the Liineburg Heath, at last. Rendezvous was made last night

with the groups carrying fuel and oxidizer tanks. The
tail-section group

has been on the radio all morning, trying to get a position fix, if the skies

will only clear. So the assembly of the 00001 is occurring also
in a geo­

graphical way, a Diaspora running backwards, seeds of
exile flying in­

ward in a modest preview of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gath­
ering in the fallen sparks.... Remember the story about

the kid who

hates kreplach? Hates and fears the dish, breaks out in these
horrible

green hives that shift in relief maps
all across his body, in the mere pres­

ence of kreplach. Kid's mother takes him to the psychiatrist.
"Fear of

the unknown," diagnoses this gray eminence, "let him watch you

making the kreplach, that'll ease him into it." Home
to Mother's

kitchen. "Now," sez Mother, "I'm going to make us a delicious sur­

prise!" "Oh, boy!" cries the kid, "that's keen, Morn!" "See,
now I'm sift­

ing the flour and salt into a nice little pile."
"What's that, Mom, ham­

burger? oh, boy!" "Hamburger, and onions. I'm frying
them here, see,

in this frying pan." "Gee, I can hardly wait! This is exciting]
What're ya

doin' now?" "Making a little volcano in the flour here, and breaking
these eggs into it." "Can

I help ya mix it up? Oh, boy!" "Now, I'm going
to roll the dough out, see? into a nice flat sheet, now I'm cutting it up
into squares-" "This is terrif, Mom!" "Now I spoon some of

the ham­

burger into this little square, and now
I fold it over into a tri-"

"GAAHHHH!" screams the kid, in absolute terror- "kreplach!"
As some secrets were given to the Gypsies to preserve against centrif­

ugal History, and some to the Kabbalists,
the Templars, the Rosicru-

737



-_ �-........
-

/ �\�
/'

cians, so have this Secret of the Fearful J-\ssemOlY, and others, round
their ways inside the weatherless spaces of this or that Ethnic Joke.
There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the
Zone to be present at his own assembly-perhaps, heavily paranoid
voices have whispered, his time's assembly-and there ought to be a
punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being bro­
ken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down, Celtic
style, in the order suggested by Mr. A. E. Waite, laid out and read, but
they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and
scuffling future, to mediocrity (not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in
his chroniclers too, yes yes nothing like getting the 3 of Pentacles upside
down covering the significator on the second try to send you to the tube
to watch a seventh rerun of the Takeshi and Ichizo Show, light a ciga­
rette and try to forget the whole thing)-to no clear happiness or re­
deeming cataclysm. All his hopeful cards are reversed, most unhappily
of all the Hanged Man, who is supposed to be upside down to begin
with, telling of his secret hopes and fears....

"There never was a Dr. Jamf," opines world-renowned analyst
Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry-"Jamf was only a fiction, to help him explain
what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for those rockets
each time exploding in the sky . . . to help him deny what he could not
possibly admit: that he might be in love, in sexual love, with his, and his
race's, death.

"These early Americans, in their way, were a fascinating combination
of crude poet and psychic cripple. . . ."

"We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop," a
spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an interview with
the Wall Street Journal.

INTERVIEWER: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-point.
SPOKESMAN: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was divided.

It was one of our fatal weaknesses. [I'm sure you want to hear about
fatal weaknesses.] Some called him a "pretext." Others felt that he was
a genuine, point-for-point microcosm. The Microcosmists, as you must
know from the standard histories, leaped off to an early start. We-it
was a very odd form of heretic-chasing, really. Across the Low
Countries, in the summer. It went on in fields of windmills, marshlands
where it was almost too dark to get a decent sight. I recall the time
Christian found an old alarm clock, and we salvaged the radium, to coat
our plumb-bob strings with. They shone in the twilight. You've seen
them holding bobs, hands characteristically gathered near the crotch. A

738

dark fig
meters a

on theap
[Yes. A ell
it is that I

traitor. I ca

Marys, cn/lsi
lome of thtm

ole. �1r firl! "

\\'eco�ld feel

cago ��l.\



da.. � .l16UJ. v vv HU u. JU V ....... U ��
��£ninescent piss falling to the ground fifty

meters away ... "The Presence, pissing," that became
a standard joke

on the apprentices. A Raketen-Stadt Charlie Noble, you might say.
. . .

[Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all . . .
the worst of

it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what they want. I
am a

traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by your tireless Typhoid
Marys, cruising the markets and the stations. We did manage

to ambush

some of them. Once we caught some in the Underground. It was
terri­

ble. My first action, my initiation. We chased them down the
tunnels.

We could feel their fright. When the tunnels branched, we had only the
treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on. Chances were good
for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails gleamed, as they

do

aboveground on a rainy night. And the whispers then-the
shadows

who waited, hunched in angles at the maintenance stations, lying

against the tunnel walls, watching the chase.
"The end is too far," they

whispered. "Go back. There are no stops on this
branch. The trains run

and the passengers ride miles of blank
mustard walls, but there are no

stops. It's a long afternoon run ....
"

Two of them got away. But we

took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the

years of grease and passag , 1966 and 1971,
I tast d my first blood. Do

you want to put this part in?] We
drank the blood of our enemies.

That's why you see Gnostics so hunted. The sacrament
of the Eucharist

is really drinking the blood of the enemy. Th Grail,
the Sangraal, is the

bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why
should the black

honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire,
stone night

and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips on a
humble bowl?

No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to swallow the enemy,
down into

the slick juicery to be taken in by all the cells. Your officially
defined

"mortal sin," that is. A sin against you. A section of your penal code,
that's all. [The true sin was yours: to interdict that union. To

draw that

line. To keep us worse than enemies, who are after
all caught in the

same fields of shit-to keep us strangers.
We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends,

we

cherished. ]

Item S-1706.31, Fragment of Undershirt, U.S. Navy issue,
with brown stain

assumed to be blood in shape of sword running lower left to upper right.

Not included in the Book of Memorabilia is this footnote.
The piece

of cloth was given to Slothrop by Seaman Bodine, one night
in the Chi­

cago Bar. In a way, the evening
was a reprise of their first meeting.

Bo-

739



dine, smoldering fat reefer stuck in under the strings at the neck ot his
guitar, singing mournfully a song that's part Roger Mexico's and part
some nameless sailor stuck in wartime San Diego:

Last week I threw a pie at someone's Momma,
Last night I threw a party for my mind,
Last thing I knew that 6:02 was screamin' over my head,
Or it might've been th' 11:59

[Refrain]:
Too many chain-link fences in the evening,
Too many people shiverin' in the rain,
They tell me that you finally got around to have your

baby,
And it don't look like I'll see your face again.
Sometimes I wanna go back north, to Humboldt County­
Sometimes I think I'll go back east, to see my kin
There's times I think I almost could be happy,
If I knew you thought about me, now and then. .

Bodine has a siren-ring, the kind kids send away cereal boxtops for,
cleverly arranged in his asshole so it can be operated at any time by
blowing a fart of a certain magnitude. He's gotten pretty good at punc­
tuating his music with these farted WHEEEEeeee's, working now at
getting them in the right key, a brand-new reflex arc, ear-brain-hands­
asshole, and a return toward innocence too. The merchants tonight are
all dealing a bit slower. Sentimental Bodine thinks it's because they're
listening to his song. Maybe they are. Bales of fresh coca leaves just in
from the Andes transform the place into some resonant Latin ware­
house, on the eve of a revolution that never will come closer than smoke
dirtying the sky above the cane, sometimes, in the long lace afternoons
at the window. . . . Street urchins are into a Busy Elf Routine, wrap­
ping each leaf around a betel nut, into a neat little packet for chewing.
Their reddened fingers are living embers in the shadow. Seaman Bodine
looks up suddenly, canny, unshaven face stung by all the smoke and
unawareness in the room. He's looking straight at Slothrop (being one of
the few who can still see Slothrop as any sort of integral creature any
more. Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together,
even as a concept-"It's just got too remote" 's what they usually say).
Does Bodine now feel his own strength may someday soon not be

740

enough
somebo(
much ..

"Here.
Does he

"Look, I

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iliere'loaIlIll.'
loe lame hed

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\\iiliiliei\\ii
Toer were

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enough eitner: tnat SOOIl, llKe all the others, he'll have
to let go? But "

somebody's got to hold on, it can't happen to all of us-no, that'd be too �I
much . . . Rocketman, Rocketman. You poor fucker. 0

"Here. Listen. I want you to have it. Understand? It's yours." �
Does he even hear any more? Can he see this cloth, this stain?

"Look, I was there, in Chicago, when they ambushed him. I was
there that night, right down the street from the Biograph, I heard the

gunfire, everything. Shit, I was just a boot, I thought this was what lib­
erty was all about, so I went running. Me and half Chicago. Out of the
bars, the toilets, the alleys, dames holding their skirts up so they could
run faster, Missus Krodobbly who's drinking her way through the Big
Depression, waitin' till the sun shines thru, and whatta you know,
there' half my graduating class from Great Lakes, in dress blues with
the same bedspring marks as mine, and there's longtime hookers and

pockmark fags with breath smelling like the inside of a motorman's
glove, old ladies from Back of the Yards, subdebs just out the movies
with the sweat still cold on their thighs, gate, everybody was there.

They were taking off clothes, tearing checks out of checkbooks, ripping
off pieces of each others' newspaper, just so they could soak up some of

John Dillinger's blood. We went crazy. The Agents didn't stop us. Just
stood with smoke still curling out of their muzzles while the people all
went down on that blood in the street. Maybe I went along without

thinking. But there was something else. Something I must've needed
... if you can hear me ... that's why I'm giving this to you. O.K.?
That's Dillinger's blood there. Still warm when I got to it. They
wouldn't want you thinking he was anything but a 'common criminal'-
but Their head's so far up Their ass-he still did what he did.

He went �
out socked Them right in the toilet privacy of Their banks. Who cares �
what he was thinking about, long as it didn't get in the way? A-and it l
doesn't even matter why we're doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we �
need isn't right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep

it

working. Courage, brains, sure, O.K., but without that grace? forget
it.

Do you-please, are you listening? This thing here works. Really
does.

It worked for me, but I'm out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly with-
out it. But you. Rocky. You....

"

It wasn't their last meeting, but later on there were always others

around, doper-crises, resentments about burns real or intended, and by
then, as he'd feared, Bodine was beginning, helpless, in shame, to

let

Slothrop go. In certain rushes now, when he sees
white network being

cast all directions on his field of vision, he understands it
as an emblem

of pain or death. He's begun to spend more of
his time with Trudi.

741



-

/ r- \
t,

/

Their friend Magda was picked up on first-degree mopery and taken
back to Leverkusen, and an overgrown back court where electric lines
spit overhead, the dusty bricks sprout weeds from the cracks, shutters
are always closed, grass and weeds turn to bitterest autumn floor. On
certain days the wind brings aspirin-dust from the Bayer factory. The
people inhale it, and grow more tranquil.

They both feel her absence. Bodine finds presently that his character­
istic gross laugh, hyeugh, hyeugh, has grown more German, tiachz,
tiachx. He's also taking on some of Magda's old disguises. Good-natured
and penetrable disguises, as at a masked ball. It is a transvestism of car­
ing, and the first time in his life it's happened. Though nobody asks,
being too busy dealing, he reckons it's all right.

Light in the sky is stretched and clear, exactly like taffy after no more
than the first two pulls.

"Dying a weird death," Slothrop's Visitor by this time may be
scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human
being out on the road, "the object of life is to make sure you die a weird
death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under
very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . ."

Item S-1729.06, Bottle containing 7 cc. of May wine. Analysis indicates pres­
ence of woodruff herb, lemon and orange peel.

Sprigs of woodruff, also known as Master of the Woods, were carried
by the early Teutonic warriors. It gives success in battle. It appears that
some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Dzabajev one night in the
heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of
Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's
no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of
his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him
on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock
group-seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones,
near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River.
It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework
across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of
the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's:
the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo­
a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the
Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in
the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea....)

Now there's only a long cat's-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain
tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of

742

�meterl, I�, \[

tlnn�, the ap\)t
:rrtie, The will
tunnd a knife in
�rabout to In
�na capmaned n
dno wake a�ain
rreezing your dr
GOlVn the k\,:l.

A wine ru' h
evator ceilin� a
rate in two, t\,.



darker gray. It IS ulsplayeu auuve, more than looking down on, this "
gathering of Dzabajev and his friends. Inside the town, a strange con- �,1
vention is under way. Village idiots from villages throughout Germany �
are streaming in (streaming from mouth as well as leaving behind high- �
pitched trails of color for the folks to point at in their absence). They are
expected to pass a resolution tonight asking Great Britain for Common-
wealth status, and perhaps even to apply for membership in the UNO.
Children in the parish schools are being asked to pray for their success.
Can 13 years of Vatican collaboration have clarified the difference be-

tween what's holy and what is not? Another State is forming in the
night, not without theatre and festivity. So tonight's prevalence of Mai-
trinke, which Dzabajev has managed to score several liters of. Let the
village idiots celebrate. Let their holiness ripple into interference-pat-
terns till it clog the lantern-light of the meeting hall. Let the chorus line
perform heroically: 16 ragged staring oldtimers who shuffle aimlessly
about the stage, jerking off in unison, waggling penises in mock quarter-
staffing, brandishing in twos and threes their green-leaved poles, expos-
ing amazing chancres and lesions, going off in fountains of sperm strung
with blood that splash over glazed trouser-pleats, dirt-colored jackets
with pockets dangling like Go-year-old breasts, sockless ankles penna-
nently stained with the dust of the little squares and the depopulated
streets. Let them cheer and pound their seats, let the brotherly spit
flow. Tonight the Dzabajev circle have acquired, through an ill-coordi-
nated smash-and-grab at the home of Niederschaumdorf's only doctor, a

gigantic hypodermic syringe and needle. Tonight they will shoot wine.
If the police are on the way, if far down the road certain savage ears can

already pick up the rumble of an occupation convoy across the night kil­
ometers, signaling past sight, past the first headlamp's faintest scat­

tering, the approach of danger, still no one here is likely to break the
circle. The wine will operate on whatever happens. Didn't you wake up
to find a knife in your hand, your head down a toilet, the blur of a long
sap about to smash your upper lip, and sink back down to the old red
and capillaried nap where none of this could possibly be happening?
and wake again to a woman screaming, again to the water of the canal

freezing your drowned eye and ear, again to too many Fortresses diving
down the sky, again, again.... But no, never real.

A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the el­
evator ceiling as it rockets upward, and no way to get down. You sepa­
rate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware of the other.

743



THE OCCUPATION OF MINGEBOROUGH

The trucks come rolling down the hill, where the State highway nar­
rows, at about three in the afternoon. All their headlights are on. Elec­
tric stare after stare topping the crest of the hill, between the maple
trees. The noise is terrific. Gearboxes chatter as each truck hits the end
of the grade, weary cries of "Double-clutch it, idiot!" come from under
the canvas. An apple tree by the road is in blossom. The limbs are wet
with this morning's rain, dark and wet. Sitting under it, with anyone
else but Slothrop, is a barelegged girl, blonde and brown as honey. Her
name is Marjorie. Hogan will come home from the Pacific and court
her, but he'll lose out to Pete Dufay. She and Dufay will have a daugh­
ter named Kim, and Kim will have her braids dipped in the school ink­
wells by young Hogan, J r. It will all go on, occupation or not, with or
without Uncle Tyrone.

There's more rain in the air. The soldiers are mustering by Hicks's
Garage. In the back lot is a greasy dump, a pit, full of ball-bearings,
clutch plates, and pieces of transmission. In the parking lot below­
shared with the green-trimmed candy store, where he waited for the
first slice of very yellow schoolbus to appear each 3: 15 around the cor­
ner, and knew which high-school kids were easy marks for pennies-are
six or seven old Cord automobiles, in different stages of dustiness and
breakdown. Souvenirs of young empire, they shine like hearses now in
the premonition of rain. Work details are already putting up barricades,
and a scavenging party has invaded the gray clapboards of Pizzini's
Store, standing big as a barn on the corner. Kids hanging around the
loading platform, eating sunflower seeds out of burlap sacks, listen to
the soldiers liberating sides of beef from Pizzini's freezer. If Slothrop
wants to get home from here, he has to slide into a pathway next to the
two-story brick wall of Hicks's Garage, a green path whose entrance is
concealed behind the trash-fire of the store, and the frame shed where
Pizzini keeps his delivery truck. You cut through two lots which aren't
platted exactly back to back, so that actually you're skirting one fence
and using a driveway. They are both amber and black old ladies' houses,
full of cats alive or stuffed, stained lampshades, antimacassars and
doilies on all the chairs and tables, and a terminal gloom. You have to
cross a street then, go down Mrs. Snodd's driveway beside the holly­
hocks, through a wire gate and Santora's back yard, over the rail fence
where the hedge stops, across your own street, and home. . . .

But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the
kids' short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get
home.

744

Gustava
holder and r

punched hole
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turns out s{1' ,1

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ili1Kazooil
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.lJ1\..\._,.l"-. J.l'j DER PLATZ

Gustav and Andre, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed­
holder and reed from Andre's kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil­
punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the
kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke­
turns out sly Saure has had ex-Peenemunde engineers, propulsion-group
people, working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and
guess what-in terms of flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke
ratio, the perfect shape turns out to be that of the classical kazoo!

Yeah, another odd thing about the kazoo: the knuckle-thread above
the reed there is exactly the same as a thread in a light-bulb socket.
Gustav, good old Captain Horror, wearing a liberated pair of very yel­
low English shooting-glasses ("Helps you find the vein easier, I guess"),
likes to proclaim this as the clear signature of Phoebus. "You fools think
the kazoo is a subversive instrument? Here-" he always packs a light
bulb on his daily rounds, no use passing up an opportunity to depress
the odd dopefiend . . . deftly screwing the light bulb flush against the
reed, muting it out, "You s e? Phoebus is even behind the kazoo. Hal
hal hal" Schadenfreude, wors than a prolonged onion fart, seeps
through the ro m.

But what Gustav's light bulb-none other than our friend Byron­
wants to say is no, it's not that way at all, it's a declaration of brother­

hood by th Kazoo for all th captive and oppr ssed light bulbs. . . .
There is a movie going on, und r the rug. On the floor, 24 hours a

day, pull back the rug sure enough there's that damn movie! A really
offensive and tast less film by Gerhardt von Coll, daily rushes in fact
from a project which will never be completed. Springer just plans to

keep it going indefinitely there, under the rug. The title is New Dope,
and that's what it's about, a brand new kind of dope that nobody's ever
heard of. One of the most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the

minute you take it you are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody
what it's like, or worse, where to get any. Dealers are as in the dark as

anybody. All you can hope is that you'll come across somebody
in the

act of taking (shooting? smoking? swallowing?) some. It is the dope that
finds you, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around
with guns which are

like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of

life-pull the trigger and bullets are sucked back out of the recently
dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible is actually reversed as

the corpse comes to
life to the accompaniment of a backwards gunshot

(you can imagine what drug-ravaged
and mindless idea of fun the daily

sound editing on this turns out to be). Titles flash on such as

745



And here he is himself, the big ham, sitting on the toilet, a . . . well
what appears to be an unusually large infant's training toilet, up be­
tween the sitter's legs rises the porcelain head of a jackal with what, em­
barrassingly, proves to be a reefer, in its rather loosely smiling mouth­
"Through evil and eagles," blithers the Springer, "the climate blondes
its way, for they are no strength under the coarse war. No not for ro­
guery until the monitors are there in blashing sheets of earth to mate
and say medoshnicka bleelar medoometnozz in bergamot and playful
fantasy under the throne and nose of the least merciful king. . . ." well,
there is a good deal of this sort of thing, and a good time to nip out for
popcorn, which in the Platz turn out to be morning-glory seeds popped
into little stilled brown explosions. None of the regular company here
actually watch the movie under the rug much-only visitors passing
through: friends of Magda, defectors from the great aspirin factory in
Leverkusen, over in the corner there dribbling liberated cornstarch and
water on each other's naked bodies, giggling unhealthily . . . devotees
of the I Ching who have a favorite hexagram tattooed on each toe, who
can never stay in one place for long, can you guess why? Because they
always have I Ching feet! also stumblebum magicians who can't help
leaving themselves wide open for disastrous visits from Qlippoth, Ouija­
board jokesters, poltergeists, all kinds of astral-plane tankers and feebs
-yeah they're all showing up at Der Platz these days. But the alterna­
tive is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody's ready for
that. . . . Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high,
watching us at our many perversities, crawling across black satin, gag­
ging on whip-handles, licking the blood from a lover's vein-hit, all of it,
every lost giggle or sigh, being carried on under a sentence of death
whose deep beauty the angel has never been close to.

WEISSMANN'S TAROT

Weissmann's Tarot is better than Slothrop's. Here are the real cards,
exactly as they came up.

Significator: Knight of Swords
Covered by: The Tower
Crossed by: Queen of Swords
Crowning: King of Cups
Beneath: Ace of Swords
Before: 4 of Cups
Behind: 4 of Pentacles

Heapj
horse, chi
heath ore)
while dark

path jll a p
over the �re
and at last th

ilie sunlj�ht
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Heil ttlt �

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falling from i
Gnostic or



..L u5� of Pentacles
House: 8 of Cups
Hopes and Fears: 2 of Swords
What will come: The World

He appears first with boots and insignia shining as the rider on a black
horse, charging in a gallop neither he nor horse can control, across the
heath over the giant grave-mounds, scattering the black-faced sheep,
while dark stands of juniper move dreamily, death-loving, across his
path in a parallax of unhurrying fatality, presiding as monuments do
over the green and tan departure of summer, the dust-colored lowlands
and at last the field-gray sea, a prairie of sea darkening to purple where
the sunlight comes through, in great circles, spotlights on a dancing­
floor.

He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situ­
ation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers
have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to
anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust
that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and
never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are con­
demned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they
cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to

impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish
to usurp the place of, and fail. . . . So generation after generation of
men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, si­
lent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted
to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, will­
ing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for
death.

Of 77 cards that could have come up, Weissmann is "covered," that
is his present condition is set forth, by The Tower. It is a puzzling card,
and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning
striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown,
falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a
Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is general­
ized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which,
by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also
the Rocket.

Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn believe The Tower repre-
sents victory over splendor, and avenging force. As Goebbels, beyond
all his professional verbalizing, believed in the Rocket as an avenger.

On the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the path of The Tower connects the

747



sephira Netzach, victory, with Hod, glory or splendor. Hence the
Golden Dawn interpretation. Netzach is fiery and emotional, Hod is wa­
tery and logical. On the body of God, these two Sephiroth are the
thighs, the pillars of the Temple, resolving together in Yesod, the sex
and excretory organs.

But each of the Sephiroth is also haunted by its proper demons or
Qlippoth. Netzach by the Ghorab Tzerek, the Ravens of Death, and
Hod by the Samael, the Poison of God. Noone has asked the demons at
either level, but there may be just the wee vulnerability here to a sensa­
tion of falling, the kind of very steep and out-of-scale fall we find in
dreams, a falling more through space than among objects. Though the
different Qlippoth can only work each his own sort of evil, activity on
the path of The Tower, from Netzach to Hod, seems to've resulted in
the emergence of a new kind of demon (what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes
indeedyfoax! A-and if you don't think there are Marxist-Leninist magi­
cians around, well you better think again.0. The Ravens of Death have
now tasted of the Poison of God . . . but in doses small enough not to
sicken but to bring on, like the Amanita muscaria, a very peculiar state
of mind. . . . They have no official name, but they are the Rocket's
guardian demons.

Weissmann is crossed by the Queen of his suit. Perhaps himself, in
drag. She is the chief obstacle in his way. At his foundation is the Single
sword flaming inside the crown: again, Netzach, victory. In the Ameri­
can deck this card has come down to us as the ace of spades, which is a
bit more sinister: you know the silence that falls on the room when it
comes up, whatever the game. Behind him, moving out of his life as an
influence, is the 4 or Four of Pentacles, which shows a figure of modest
property desperately clutching on to what he owns, four gold coins­
this feeb is holding two of them down with his feet, balancing another
on his head and holding the fourth tightly against his stomach, which is
ulcerous. It is the stationary witch trying to hold her candy house
against the host of nibblers out there in the dark. Moving in, before him,
comes a feast of cups, a satiety. Lotta booze and broads for Weissmann
coming soon. Good for him-although in his house he is seen walking
away, renouncing eight stacked gold chalices. Perhaps he is to be given
only what he must walk away from. Perhaps it is because in the lees of
the night's last cup is the bitter presence of a woman sitting by a rocky
shore, the Two of Swords, alone at the Baltic edge, blindfolded in the
moonlight, holding the two blades crossed upon her breasts . . . the
meaning is usually taken as "concord in a state of arms," a good enough

748

descrip
fears.

Himse

des, medl
to stand h

comple,\ioJ)
And WeJ�SJ
come what h

beginning.

There i. an
at the mom'
antechanl\) '1
and \)a))\n\!_



descnpuon or me z.one nowauays, and it describes his deepest hopes, or 1J
fears. W.

Himself, as the World sees him: the scholarly young Page of Penta- �
cles, meditating on his magic gold talisman. The Page may also be used �
to stand for a young girl. But Pentacles describe people of very dark
complexion, and so the card almost certainly is Enzian as a young man.
And Weissmann may at last, in this limited pasteboard way, have be-
come what he first loved.

The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king. If
you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academ­
ics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of
directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low.

His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.

THE LAST GREEN AND MAGENTA

The Heath grows green and magenta in all directions, earth and

heather, coming of age-
No. It was spring.

THE HORSE

In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing,
tarnished silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The
heathen Germans who lived h re sacrificed horses once, in their old

ceremonies. Later the hors 's role changed from holy offering to servant
of power. By then a great change was working on the Heath, kneading,
turning, stirring with fingers strong as wind.

Now that sacrifice has become a political act, an act of Caesar, the
last horse cares only about how the wind starts up this afternoon: rises
at first, and tries to stick, to catch, but fails . . . each time, the horse
feels a similar rising in his heart, at the edges of eye, ear, brain.... Fi­

nally, at the sure catching of the wind, which is also a turning in the

day, his head rises, and a shiver comes over him-possesses him. His tail
lashes at the clear elusive flesh of the wind. The sacrifice in the grove is

beginning.
ISAAC

There is an Aggadic tradition from around the 4th century that Isaac,
at the moment Abraham was about to sacrifice him on Moriah, saw the

antechambers of the Throne. For the working mystic, having the vision
and passing through the chambers one by one, is terrible and complex.

749



-�// '_',,,
-,

- ,(

You must have not only the schooling in countersizns and seals, not omy
the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also a
hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you. The angels at the
doorways will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel
practical jokes, to turn you aside. The Qlippoth, shells of the dead, will
use all your love for friends who have passed across against you. You
have chosen the active way, and there is no faltering without finding the
most mortal danger.

The other way is dark and female, passive, self-abandoning. Isaac
under the blade. The glittering edge widening to a hallway, down, up
which the soul is borne by an irresistible Aether. Gerhardt von Coll on
his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrel-assing down the long corri­
dors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport, in his in­
nocence. . . .) The numinous light grows ahead, almost blue among all
this gilt and glass. The gilders worked naked and had their heads shaved
bald-to get a static charge to hold the fluttering leaf they had first to
run the brush through their pubic hair: genital electricity would shine
forever down these gold vistas. But we have long left mad Ludwig and
his Spanish dancer guttering, fading scarlet across the marble, shining so
treacherously like sweet water . . . already that lies behind. The ascent
to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last ges­
tures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route.

PRE-LAUNCH

A giant white fly: an erect penis buzzing in white lace, clotted with
blood or sperm. Deathlace is the boy's bridal costume. His smooth feet,
bound side by side, are in white satin slippers with white bows. His red
nipples are erect. The golden hairs on his back, alloyed German gold,
pale yellow to white, run symmetric about his spine, run in arches fine
and whirled as the arches of a fingerprint, as filings along magnetic lines
of force. Each freckle or mole is a dark, precisely-set anomaly in the
field. Sweat gathers at his nape. He is gagged with a white kid glove.
Weissmann has engineered all the symbolism today. The glove is the fe­
male equivalent of the Hand of Glory, which second-story men use to
light their way into your home: a candle in a dead man's hand, erect as
all your tissue will grow at the first delicious tongue-flick of your mis­
tress Death. The glove is the cavity into which the Hand fits, as the
00000 is the womb into which Gottfried returns.

Stuff him in. Not a Procrustean bed, but modified to take him. The
two, boy and Rocket, concurrently designed. Its steel hindquarters bent

750

so beaut

gerat an
writhe a

pressed a
, '

, and 0

right one,
00000, She

love, lick and

li�uid oxygen
YOU past fee/in

rouforwiJl �/
rotechnic era.
Lieochen,

He's been �\
�rown by ilie IG
�aaeO to gi\'e it
viliole frequenci
rleasantly. hke
\\inooll'·ias, "

Part of ilie r

,\t long la t. d
toolate�" alwa\
�cause of COt;
miltake bv one
due to be fot
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Superman \
erector si hin
Ditter manna
Wilt in tbe



so beautilully ... he tits well. They are mated to each other, Schwarz­
gerat and next higher assembly. His bare limbs in their metal bondage
writhe among the fuel, oxidizer, live-steam lines, thrust frame, com­
pressed air battery, exhaust elbow, decomposer, tanks, vents, valves
... and one of these valves, one test-point, one pressure-switch is the
right one, the true clitoris, routed directly into the nervous system of the
00000. She should not be a mystery to you, Gottfried. Find the zone of
love, lick and kiss . . . you have time-there are still a few minutes. The
liquid oxygen runs freezing so close to your cheek, bones of frost to burn
you past feeling. Soon there will be the fires, too. The Oven we fattened
you for will glow. Here is the sergeant, bringing the Ziindkreuz. The py­
rotechnic Cross to light you off. The men are at attention. Get ready,
Liebchen.

HARDWARE

He's been given a window of artificial sapphire, four inches across,
grown by the IG in 1942 as a mushroom-shaped boule, a touch of cobalt
added to give it a greenish tint-very heat-resistant, transparent to most
visible frequencies-it warps the images of sky and clouds outside, but
pleasantly, like Ochsen-Augen in Grandmother's day, the days before
window-glass. . . .

Part of the vaporized oxygen is routed through Gottfried's Imipolex
shroud. In one of his ears, a tiny speaker has been surgically implanted.
It shines like a pretty earring. The data link runs through the radio-guid­
ance system, and the words of Weissmann are to be, for a while, multi­

plexed with the error-corrections sent out to the Rocket. But there's no
return channel from Gottfried to the ground. The exact moment of his
death will never be known.

CHASE MUSIC

At long last, after a distinguished career of uttering, "My God, we are
too late!" always with the trace of a sneer, a pro-forma condescension­
because of course he never arrives too late, there's always a reprieve, a
mistake by one of the Yellow Adversary's hired bunglers, at worst a vital
clue to be found next to the body-now, finally, Sir Denis Nayland
Smith will arrive, my God, too late.

Superman will swoop boots-first into a deserted clearing, a launcher­
erector sighing oil through a slow seal-leak, gum evoked from the trees,
bitter manna for this bitterest of passages. The colors of his cape will

wilt in the afternoon sun, curls on his head begin to show their first

751



threads of gray. Philip Marlowe will suffer a horrible migraine and reach
by reflex for the pint of rye in his suit pocket, and feel homesick for the
lacework balconies of the Bradbury Building.

Submariner and his multilingual gang will run into battery trouble.
Plasticman will lose his way among the Imipolex chains, and topologists
all over the Zone will run out and stop payments on his honorarium
checks ("perfectly deformable," indeed!) The Lone Ranger will storm in
at the head of a posse, rowels tearing blood from the stallion's white
hide, to find his young friend, innocent Dan, swinging from a tree limb
by a broken neck. (Tonto, God willing, will put on the ghost shirt and
find some cold fire to hunker down by to sharpen his knife.)

"Too late" was never in their programming. They find instead a mo­
ment's suspending of their sanity-but then it's over with, whew, and
it's back to the trail, back to the Daily Planet. Yes Jimmy, it must've
been the day I ran into that singularity, those few seconds of absolute
mystery . . . you know Jimmy, time-time is a funny thing. . . .
There'll be a thousand ways to forget. The heroes will go on, kicked up­
stairs to oversee the development of bright new middle-line personnel,
and they will watch their system falling apart, watch those Singularities
begin to come more and more often, proclaiming another dispensation
out of the tissue of old-fashioned time, and they'll call it cancer, and just
won't know what things are coming to, or what's the meaning of it all,
Jimmy....

These days, he finds he actually misses the dogs. Who would have
thought he'd ever feel sentimental over a pack of slobbering curs? But
here in the Sub-ministry all is so odorless, touchless. The sensory depri­
vation, for a while, did stimulate his curiosity. For a while he kept a
faithful daily record of his physiological changes. But this was mostly re­
membering about Pavlov on his own deathbed, recording himself till the
end. With Pointsman it's only habit, retro-scientism: a last look back at
the door to Stockholm, closing behind him forever. The entries began to
fall off, and presently stopped. He signed reports, he supervised. He
traveled to other parts of England, later to other countries, to scout for
fresh talent. In the faces of Mossmoon and the others, at odd moments,
he could detect a reflex he'd never allowed himself to dream of: the tol­
erance of men in power for one who never Made His Move, or made it
wrong. Of course there are still moments of creative challenge-

Yes, well, he's an ex-scientist now, one who'll never get Into It far
enough to start talking about God, apple-cheeked lovable white-haired
eccentric gabbing from the vantage of his Laureate-no he'll be left
only with Cause and Effect, and the rest of his sterile armamentarium

752

mUlt negotiate e
mauicand faith. K

b

�aobalist 'ecret
"\OIV the tilt

life, It i alo tt

raili�, Each path
ilia to one of th

111itor, "what h
"The sign tl

jar of Thorazin
m� drug that h
Itmake him a
around suntan
man's children
wafer capacito
To his inatten
Edelman tnou
nad crept into
a jet plane ru
ered the pra
scrutinize ea



I /1 anum

. . . IllS mmerai cornaors uu llUl shine. They will stay the same neutral
nameless tone from here in to the central chamber, and the perfectly re­
hearsed scene he is to play there, after all.

COUNTDOWN

The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w., was invented by Fritz
Lang in 1929 for the Ufa film Die Frau in Mond. He put it into the
launch scene to heighten the suspense. "It is another of my damned
'touches,'

"

Fritz Lang said.
"At the Creation," explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman,

"God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and
sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the num­
bers 1-10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul
must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with
magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many
Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.

"Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of
Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22
paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and
also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although
the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree
of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

"Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine.
But the Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the
axis of a particular Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the
Great Firing."

"But but with a new axis, a newly spinning Earth," it occurs to the
visitor, "what happens to astrology?"

"The signs change, idiot," snaps Edelman, reaching for his family-size
jar of Thorazine. He has become such a habitual user

of this tranquiliz­
ing drug that his complexion has deepened to an alarming slate-purple.
It makes him an oddity on the street here, where everybody else walks
around suntanned, and red-eyed from one irritant or another. Edel­
man's children, mischievous little devils, have lately taken to slipping
wafer capacitors from junked transistor radios into Pop's Thorazine jar.
To his inattentive eye there was hardly any difference: so, for a while,
Edelman thought he must be developing a tolerance, and that the Abyss
had crept intolerably close, only an accident away-a siren in the street,
a jet plane rumbling in a holding pattern-but luckily

his wife discov­

ered the prank in time, and now, before he swallows, he is careful to
scrutinize each Thorazine for leads, mu's, numbering.

753



"Here-" hefting a fat Xeroxed sheaf, "the Ephemeris. Based on the
new rotation."

"You mean someone's actually found the Bodenplatte? The Pole?"
"The delta-t itself. It wasn't made public, naturally. The 'Kaisersbart

Expedition' found it."
A pseudonym, evidently. Everyone knows the Kaiser has no beard.

STRUNG INTO THE ApOLLONIAN DREAM . . .

When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it
with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bi­
sects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward
chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear
surface before him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his
childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of
an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space.
His eyes taken on and on, and further. . . . The plastic surface flutters
minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.

The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels
warm in here. His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender­
tabs. He has found a shallow bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek
as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his hair tickling his back, his bared
shoulders. It's a dim, whited room. A room for lying in, bridal and open
to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will fall on him.

Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and dras­
tically filtered. They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you're
going under ether. Though they now only speak the ritual words, he can
still tell them apart.

The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he
knows. It doesn't frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so
long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood . . . it was there as he
began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was al­
ways real. Come, wake. All is well.

ORPHEUS PUTS DOWN HARP

LOS ANGELES (PNS)-Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the Orpheus
Theatre on Melrose, has come out against what he calls "irresponsible
use of the harmonica." Or, actually, "harbodica," since Manager
Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects his
speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as "the Adenoid."
Anyway, Zhlubb states that his queues, especially for midnight show-

754

ings, have
strument.

"It's been

ilie act uncaL/n

"Here, Richa

�ere," meamrhil
mrulating hi Far
�� ra�e.

�janager Zhlul
�ennitelv." he COIl
�at )te;'e Edelm, n
&oeaabes,"

Ittention center�
traditionally th
\t is not white
engineered as tl
�o, one hesitat
and they are a\\
ager's enterta\
taste, alma t a
Come gibberi



on the ings, have lC:lllel1 llllU C:l �ldle UJ. IH::;af anarchy because of the musical in­
strument.

"It's been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casares Film
Festival," complains Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a perma­
nent five-o'clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows),
and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted "peace sign,"
which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U, exposing in
the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.

"Here, Richard," jeers a passerby, "I got your French cuff, right
here," meanwhile exposing himself in the grossest possible way and ma­
nipulating his foreskin in a manner your correspondent cannot set upon
his page.

Manager Zhlubb winces slightly. "That's one of the ringleaders,
definitely," he confides. "I've had a lot of trouble with him. Him and
that Steve Edelman." He pronounces it "Edelbid." "I'b dot afraid to

dabe dabes."
The case he refers to is still pending. Steve Edelman, a Hollywood

businessman, accused last year of an 11569 (Attempted Mopery with a
Subversive Instrument), is currently in Atascadero under indefinite ob­
servation. It is alleged that Edelman, in an unauthorized state of mind,
attempted to playa chord progression on the Department of Justice list,
out in the street and in the presence of a whole movie-queue of wit­
nesses.

"A-and now they're all doing it. Well, not 'all,' let me just clarify that,
of course the actual lawbreakers are only a small but loud minority,
what I meant to say was, all those like Edelman. Certainly not all those
good folks in the queue. A-ha-ha. Here, let me show you something."

He ushers you into the black Managerial Volkswagen, and before you
know it, you're on the freeways. Near the interchange of the San Diego
and the Santa Monica, Zhlubb points to a stretch of pavement: "Here's
where I got my first glimpse of one. Driving a VW, just like mine. Imag­
ine. I couldn't believe my eyes." But it is difficult to keep one's whole
attention centered on Manager Zhlubb. The Santa Monica Freeway is

traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man.
It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously
engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor.
No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks,
and they are all out today, making it difficult for you to follow the Man­

ager's entertaining story. You cannot repress a certain shudder of
dis­

taste, almost a reflexive Consciousness of Kind, in their presence. They
come gibbering in at you from all sides, swarming in, rolling their eyes

755



through the side windows, playing harmonicas and even kazoos, in tull
disrespect for the Prohibitions.

"Relax," the Manager's eyes characteristically aglitter. "There'll be a
nice secure home for them all, down in Orange County. Right next to
Disneyland," pausing then exactly like a nightclub comic, alone in his
tar circle, his chalk terror.

Laughter surrounds you. Full, faithful-audience laughter, coming
from the four points of the padded interior. You realize, with a vague
sense of dismay, that this is some kind of a stereo rig here, and a glance
inside the glove compartment reveals an entire library of similar tapes:
CHEERING (AFFECTIONATE), CHEERING (AROUSED), HOSTILE MOB in an as­
sortment of 22 languages, YESES, NOES, NEGRO SUPPORTERS, WOMEN
SUPPORTERS, ATHLETIC-oh, come nOW-FIRE-FIGHT (CONVENTIONAL),
FIRE-FIGHT (NUCLEAR), FIRE-FIGHT (URBAN), CATHEDRAL ACOUSTICS ....

"We have to talk in some kind of code, naturally," continues the
Manager. "We always have. But none of the codes is that hard to break.
Opponents have accused us, for just that reason, of contempt for the
people. But really we do it all in the spirit of fair play. We're not mon­
sters. We know we have to give them some chance. We can't take hope
away from them, can we?"

The Volkswagen is now over downtown L.A., where the stream of
traffic edges aside for a convoy of dark Lincolns, some Fords, even
GMCs, but not a Pontiac in the lot. Stuck on each windshield and rear
window is a fluorescent orange strip that reads FUNERAL.

The Manager's snifHing now. "He was one of the best. 1 couldn't go
myself, but 1 did send a high-level assistant. Who'll ever replace him, 1
wonder," punching a sly button under the dash. The laughter this time
is sparse male oh-hoho's with an edge of cigar smoke and aged bourbon.
Sparse but loud. Phrases like "Dick, you character!" and "Listen to
him," can also be made out.

"I have a fantasy about how I'll die. I suppose you're on their payroll,
but that's all right. Listen to this. It's 3 a.m., on the Santa Monica Free­
way, a warm night. All my windows are open. I'm doing about 70, 75.
The wind blows in, and from the floor in back lifts a thin plastic bag, a
common dry-cleaning bag: it comes floating in the air, moving from be­
hind, the mercury lights turning it white as a ghost . . . it wraps around
my head, so superfine and transparent I don't know it's there really until
too late. A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death. . . ."

Heading up the Hollywood Freeway, between a mysteriously-can­
vased trailer rig and a liquid-hydrogen tanker sleek as a torpedo, we
come upon a veritable caravan of harmonica players. "At least it's not

those tam

bourines as

Quilted-st
shine like a 1

tion Day, an
Ventura Free

terings, Return
Vessels, , , '

The sound 0

ilia�ly into hi I
But the ound

Imo�, it fills the
btl

move, , , could I

'l aon't think th

lor ilie Knob of th



in full those tamnounnes, LlllUDD muu.ers. "There aren't as many
tam­

bourines as last year, thank God."
Quilted-steel catering trucks crisscross in the afternoon. Their ripples

shine like a lake of potable water after hard desert passage. It's a Collec­
tion Day, and the garbage trucks are all heading north toward the
Ventura Freeway, a catharsis of dumpsters, all hues, shapes and bat­
terings. Returning to the Center, with all the gathered fragments of the
Vessels....

The sound of a siren takes you both unaware. Zhlubb looks up

sharply into his mirror. "You're not holding, are you?"
But the sound is greater than police. It wraps the concrete and the

smog, it fills the basin and mountains further than any mortal could
ever

move . . . could move in time. . . .

"I don't think that's a police siren." Your guts in a spasm, you reach
for the knob of the AM radio. "1 don't think-"

11 �a

THE CLEARING

"Raumen," cries Captain Blicero. Peroxide and permanganate tanks
have been serviced. The gyros are run up. Observers crouch down

in

the slit trenches. Tools and fittings are stashed rattling in the back of an

idling lorry. The battery-loading crew and the sergeant who screwed
in

the percussion pin climb in after, and the truck hauls away
down the

fresh brown ruts of earth, into the trees. Blicero remains for a few sec­

onds at launch position, looking around to see that all is in order. Then
he turns away and walks, with deliberate speed, to the fire-control car.

"Steuerung klar?" he asks the boy at the steering panel.
"Ist klar." In the lights from the panel, Max's face is hard, stubborn

gold.
"Treibwerk klar?"
"Ist klar," from Moritz at the rocket motor panel. Into the phone

dangling at his neck, he tells the Operations Room, "Luftlage
klar."

"Schliissel auf SCHIESSEN," orders Blicero.

Moritz turns the main key to FIRE. "Schliissel steht auf SCHIESSEN."
Klar.
There ought to be big dramatic pauses here. Weissmann's head ought

to be teeming with last images of creamy buttocks
knotted together in

fear (not one trickle of shit, Liebchen?)
the last curtain of gold lashes

over young eyes pleading, gagged
throat trying to say too late what he

should have said in the tent last night . . . deep in the throat, the gullet,
where Bliceros own cock's head has burst for the

last time (but what's

this just past the spasming cervix, past
the Curve Into The Darkness

757



The Stink The
.... The White ... The Corner ... Waiting.

Waiting For-). But no, the ritual has its velvet grip on them all. So
strong, so warm....

"Durchschalten." Blicero's voice is calm and steady.
"Luftlage klar," Max calls from the steering panel.
Moritz presses the button marked VORSTUFE. "Ist durchgeschaltet."
A pause of 15 seconds while the oxygen tank comes up to pressure. A

light blazes up on Moritz's panel.
Enthiftung. "Beluftung klar."
The ignition lamp lights: Zundung. "Zundung klar."
Then, "Vorstufe klar." Vorstufe is the last position from which Moritz

can still switch backward. The flame grows at the base of the Rocket.
Colors develop. There is a period of four seconds here, four seconds of
indeterminacy. The ritual even has a place for that. The difference be­
tween a top-grade launch officer and one doomed to mediocrity is in
knowing exactly when, inside this chiming and fable-crowded passage,
to order Hauptstufe.

Blicero is a master. He learned quite early to fall into a trance, to wait
for the illumination, which always comes. It is nothing he's ever spoken
of aloud.

"Hauptstufe."
"Hauptstufe ist gegeben."
The panel is latched forever.
Two lights wink out. "Stecker 1 und 2 gefallen," Moritz reports. The

Stotz plugs lie blasted on the ground, tossing in the splash of flame. On
gravity feed, the flame is bright yellow. Then the turbine begins to roar.
The flame suddenly turns blue. The sound of it grows to full cry. The
Rocket stays a moment longer on the steel table, then slowly, trembling,
furiously muscular, it begins to rise. Four seconds later it begins to pitch
over. But the flame is too bright for anyone to see Gottfried inside, ex­
cept now as an erotic category, hallucinated out of that blue violence,
for purposes of self-arousal.

ASCENT

This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the
deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim,
in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape. . . .

Moving now toward the kind of light where at last the apple is apple­
colored. The knife cuts through the apple like a knife cutting an apple.
Everything is where it is, no clearer than usual, but certainly more
present. So much has to be left behind now, so quickly. Pressed down-

758

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and-all 10 ms eiasuc UUl1U�, pI essed painfully (his pectorals ache, an "
inner thigh has frozen numb) till his forehead is bent to touch one knee, Q'
where his hair rubs in a touch crying or submissive as a balcony empty �
in the rain, Gottfried does not wish to cry out ... he knows they can't �
hear him, but still he prefers not to . . . no radio back to them . . . it
was done as a favor, Blicero wanted to make it easier for me, he knew I'd
try to hold on-hold each voice, each hum or crackle-

He thinks of their love in illustrations for children, in last thin pages
fluttering closed, a line gently, passively unfinished, a pastel hesitancy:
Blicerc's hair is darker, shoulder-length and permanently waved, he is
an adolescent squire or page looking into an optical device and beck­
oning the child Gottfried with a motherly or eager-to-educate look ...
now he is far away, seated, at the end of an olive room, past shapes
going out of focus, shapes Gottfried can't identify as friend or enemy,
between him and-where did he-it's already gone, no ... they're be­
ginning to slide away now faster than he can hold, it's like falling to
sleep-they begin to blur CATCH you can hold it steady enough to see
a suspender-belt straining down your thighs, white straps as slender as
the legs of a fawn and the points of the black . . . the black CATCH
you've let a number of them go by, Gottfried, important ones you didn't
want to miss . . . you know this is the last time . . . CATCH when did

the roaring stop? Brennschluss, when was Brennschluss it can't be this
soon ... but the burnt-out tail-opening is swinging across the sun and

through the blonde hair of the victim here's a Brocken-specter, some­
one's, something's shadow projected from out here in the bright sun and
darkening sky into the regions of gold, of whitening, of growing still as
underwater as Gravity dips away briefly . . . what is this death but a

whitening, a carrying of whiteness to ultrawhite, what is it but bleaches,
detergents, oxidizers, abrasives- Streckefuss he's been today to the

boy's tormented muscles, but more appropriately is he Blicker, Bleich­
erode, Bleacher, Blicero, extending, rarefying the Caucasian pallor to an
abolition of pigment, of melanin, of spectrum, of separateness from
shade to shade, it is so white that CATCH the dog was a red setter, the
last dog's head, the kind dog come to see him off can't remember what
red meant, the pigeon he chased was slateblue, but they're both white
now beside the canal that night the smell of trees oh I didn't want to
lose that night CATCH a wave between houses, across a street, both
houses are ships, one's going off on a long, an important journey, and the

waving is full of ease and affection
CATCH last word from Blicero:

"The edge of evening . . . the long curve of people all wishing on the
first star. . . . Always remember those men and women along the thou-

759



/ �.�
/'

/'
-

sands of miles of land and sea. The true moment of shadow is the mo­
ment in which you see the point of light in the sky. The single point, and
the Shadow that has just gathered you in its sweep

"

Always remember.
The first star hangs between his feet.
Now-

DESCENT

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard
and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show!
The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has
broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us,
old fans who've always been at the movies (haven't we?) to tell which
before the darkness swept in. The last image was too immediate for any
eye to register. It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early
evening in each great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never
die, coming outside to wish on the first star. But it was not a star, it was
falling, a bright angel of death. And in the darkening and awful expanse
of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see ...
it is now a closeup of the face, a face we all know-

And it is just here, just at this dark and silent frame, that the pointed
tip of the Rocket, falling nearly a mile per second, absolutely and for­
ever without sound, reaches its last unmeasurable gap above the roof of
this old theatre, the last delta-t.

There is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to
you, or to reach between your own cold legs ... or, if song must find
you, here's one They never taught anyone to sing, a hymn by William
Slothrop, centuries forgotten and out of print, sung to a simple and
pleasant air of the period. Follow the bouncing ball:

There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one ...
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev'ry stone.

Now everybody-



 



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