GRAVITY RAINBOW (3 page)

No, they are making believe to be narodnik, but / know, they are of lasi, 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 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 leaders 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:

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 Girly'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 chorus. Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real one, rushing toward the screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an elegant Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight conceived 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 fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid 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 landscaped 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 little 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 organization 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 folklore broken down, no Gary 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 develop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode: vaulting lazily and well 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 snaps taken of them in the street… it is Loaf who borrows one's shirt runs out of cigarettes finds the illicit one in your pocket and lights up in the canteen at high noon, where presently he is reeling about with a loose smile, addressing the sergeant commanding the red-cap section by his Christian name. So of course when Pirate makes the mistake of verifying the fantasy with Loaf, it's not very long at all before higher echelons know about it too. Into the dossier it goes, and eventually the Firm, in Their tireless search for negotiable skills, will summon him under Whitehall, to observe him in his trances across the blue baize fields and the terrible paper gaming, his eyes rolled back into his head reading old, glyptic old graffiti on his own sockets…

The first few times nothing clicked. The fantasies were O.K. but belonged to nobody important. But the Firm is patient, committed to the Long Run as They are. At last, one proper Sherlock Holmes London evening, the unmistakable smell of gas came to Pirate from a dark

street lamp, and out of the fog ahead materialized a giant, organlike form. Carefully, black-shod step by step, Pirate approached the thing. It began to slide forward to meet him, over the cobblestones slow as a snail, leaving behind some slime brightness of street-wake that could not have been from fog. In the space between them was a crossover point, which Pirate, being a bit faster, reached first. He reeled back, in horror, back past the point-but such recognitions are not reversible.
It was a giant Adenoid.
At least as big as St. Paul's, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!

This lymphatic monster had once blocked the distinguished pharynx of Lord Blatherard Osmo, who at the time occupied the Novi Pazar desk at the Foreign Office, an obscure penance for the previous century of 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,

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 Adenoid, some horrible transformation of cell plasma it is quite beyond Edwardian 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 swallowing 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 election, a new pretention 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 London, black phaetons clatter in massive ant-cortege over the trusswork bridges, observer balloons are stationed in the sky, "Got it in Hampstead Heath, just sitting
breathing,
like… going in, and out…" "Any sort
of sound
down there?" "Yes, it's horrible… like a stupendous
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 mil 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 appear 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 deluge of some disgusting orange mucus in which the unfortunate men are
digested
-not screaming but actually laughing,
enjoying
themselves…

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 historic buildings are no more, Government offices have been relocated, but so dispersed that communication among them is highly uncertain-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 P.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking was still quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operatives then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firm's 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 Europe, and EO. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm knew just the man.

Every day, for 2 1/2 years, Pirate went out to visit the St. James Adenoid. 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 clearly 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
Ade
noid
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 Novi 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 allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, but not enough for it to poison him.

Teddy Bloat's on his lunch hour, but lunch today'll be, ack, a soggy banana sandwich in wax paper, which he's packing inside his stylish kangaroohide 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 American 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.