GRAVITY RAINBOW (118 page)

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 shutters 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, something light ocher at the horizon… closer in it seems snarling purple around a yellow that's brightening, intestines of yellow shadowed in violet 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 Luneburg Heath! Thanatz even checked around real fast just to make sure, nope, no windmills, O.K., so, how come Blicero'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 Greta Erdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past?
That would
be strange. Whatever went on on those eyeballs when you weren't looking would just be lost. You'd only have fragments, now and then. Katje, looking back over her shoulder at fresh whip-marks. Gottfried in the morning lineup, body all Wandervogel-limp, wind blowing his uniform in great ripples back from the bough-curves of his

thighs, hair flying in the wind, saucy sideways smile, mouth a little open, jaw forward, 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 held to the side and slightly lower so as to be another face in heavy wig-shadows nearly invisible… but looking closer you can see bone-ridges and 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? Thanatz, 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
\dssjust 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 Schwarzgerat
whenever a black face appears behind the flowing wire fences, at the cinderbanks 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 transported shivering, gathered moaning south to the Erd-schweinhohle 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 fbol-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 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-consistent 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 Mabalacat in the Philippines, late '44, a baby squirms, rolls, kicks in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and the special-attack 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 generations of gravities and losses thereto-losses, failures, last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffocated 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, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for…

will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her 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 have their Rocket all assembled at last, their single A4 scavenged all summer piece by piece clear across the Zone from Poland to the Low Countries. Whether you believed or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling- a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out of your soul,
something
-for the Rocket. It is that "something" that the Angel Thanatz now illuminates, 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 already made for him hours ago, and say, "Well, let's have a look at the timetables now." His Erdschweinhohle rival, Empty One Josef Ombindi, 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 sections 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, Neutral 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 (/ 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,

northwesterly, 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…

Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own
Father,
trying episode after episode to kill 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 oP Broderick's just a mur-derin' 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 caryatids with 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 flights 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 oP Pop's up to somma those
tricks
again!), so it's out into the swarming corridors, full of larking dogs, bicycles, pretty subdeb 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 fountains WAIT
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, by right 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, to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine

skipper with his periscope-although certain paths aren't available to you. They are available 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 message 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 flyin' in here in a shoulderpadded 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 chessplayer dating back to the Second Empire, actually built a century ago for the great conjuror Robert-Houdin, very serious-looking French refugee kid, funny haircut with the ears perfectly outlined in hair that starts abruptly a quarter-inch strip of bare plastic skin away, black patent-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 jivin' 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.