GRAVITY RAINBOW (7 page)

Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. "The White Visitation," being devoted to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there. It's none of Pirate's business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger's enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction. He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something not quite decent.

What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about it he could find a way, security or not. His reluctance is not Pirate's own over the machinery of Operation Black Wing. It looks more like shame. Wasn't Mexico's face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex… hmm. Knowing Bloat, perhaps that's what it is, young lady gamming well-set-up young man, several poses-more wholesome than anything this war's ever photographed… life, at least…

There's Mexico's girl, just entering the room. He spots her immediately, the clarity around her, the absence of smoke and noise… is he seeing auras now? She catches sight of Roger and smiles, her eyes enormous… 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 outside 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 fantasies 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-partying, 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 unreality 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 gentry, the ceiling obligingly came down a foot, lamps swayed from 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 timetables, 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 Johannesburg, South Africa. Midgets in their dark winter clothes, exquisite little frocks and nip-waisted overcoats, were running all over the station, gobbling their bonvoyage chocolates and lining up for news photos. 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…

They're bound eastward now, Roger peering over the wheel, hunched Dracula-style inside his Burberry, Jessica with bright millions of droplets still clinging in soft net to her shoulders and sleeves of drab wool. They want to be together, in bed, at rest, in love, and instead it's eastward tonight and south of the Thames to rendezvous with a certain high-class vivisectionist before the clock of St. Felix chimes one. And when the mice run down, who knows tonight but what they've run for good?

Her face against the breath-fogged window has become another dimness, 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 Pointsman 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 improperly annealed, ready to go smash at any indefinite touch in a whinning matrix of stresses-

"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-"

"Quite right, and all that magnificent esprit you lot are so justly famous 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 cinema 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 there'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 Jessica 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 18th-century heart of downtown Tunbridge Wells, Roger motoring in the vintage Jaguar up to London, Jessica at the roadside struggling prettily 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-

"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 unspeakable act out here in the streets of Tunbridge Wells-"

At which moment the rocket falls. Cute, cute. A thud, a hollow drumroll. 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, rendering it in a great crunch useless for anything but scrap.

"I'm 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 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 numbered. 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, teleki-netics, astral travelers, 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 "psychical" 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 mellower 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…