GRAVITY RAINBOW (69 page)

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, discovered, or liberated a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence. He reports neither to SPOG, CIOS, BAFO, TI, nor any American counterpart-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 00000? 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. Opera-

tionally he's alone as Slothrop is out here-reporting, if and when, direct to Malenkov'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 together, compared notes on Geli and other girls of the ruins. He could have sung to the American songs his mother taught him, Kiev lullabies, starlight, lovers, white blossoms, nightingales…

"Next time we run across that Englishman," Dzabajev looking curiously at his hands on the steering-wheel, "or American, or whatever he is, find out, will you, where he
got
this shit?"

"Make a note of that," orders Tchitcherine. They both start cackling insanely there, under the tree.

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 horizontal, 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 courage 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 tinfoil 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-large, 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 over to Slothrop's, the big sap ain't doing anything but laying on his ass, c'mon, oboy! "Take that." Slothrop mutters, "a-and that!"

Arms and legs apparently working, he gets up groaning, puts his helmet on his head, grabs the ditty bag and leaves by the door, which shudders 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 overhead. 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 remains of other sets: phony-gemutlich love nests, slant-walled and palm-crowded nightclubs, papier-mache 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 Slothrop, 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 Parisian 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 Swinemunde, 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 Goll through dozens of vaguely pornographic horror movies. "I knew he was a genius from the beginning. I was only his creature." Never star material, she admits freely, no Dietrich, nor vamp a la Brigitte Helm. A touch of whatever it was they wanted, though-they (Slothrop: "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, criminals-still I was so-" bracelets flashing-"stolid, so… monumental. When I wasn't running I 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
Alpdrucken.
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 Goll had dreamed of making a film about Ludwig II. It nearly got him 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 Goll himself a little daft. Especially those
long corridors…
"Corridor metaphysics," is what the French call this condition. Oldtime corridor hepcats will chuckle fondly at descriptions of von Goll, long after running out of film, 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.
Das Wutend 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 Goll 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 trans-vestite, 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 matter. 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
Schlepzig?"

"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 passport-psychoses to want to comfort her. "This is forged. The

name's just a random alias. The guy who made it probably remembered Schlepzig from one of his movies."

"Random." A tragic, actressy smile, beginnings of a double chin,

one knee drawn up as far as these leg irons will let her. "Another fairytale word. The signature on your card is Max's. Somewhere in Stefa-nia'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 for?"

"For me." Whispering out of scarlet lips, open, wet… Hmm. Well, there's this hardon, here. He sits on the rack, leans, kisses her, presently 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."

"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 rummages 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 lashmarks 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 suspenders of the boned black rig she's wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular 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 oscula-

tion, mathematical kisses…
singularities!
Consider cathedral spires, holy minarets, the crunch of trainwheels over the points as you watch peeling away the track you didn't take… mountain peaks rising sharply to heaven, such as those to be noted at scenic Berchtesgaden… the edges of steel razors, 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 luminosity and enigma at which something in us must leap and sing, or withdraw in fright. Watching the A4 pointed at the sky-just before the last firing-switch closes-watching that singular point at the very top of the Rocket, 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?