Gravity's Rainbow Page 16

  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 totally 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 not such 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 of the wild turkey of North America. Alas, their tragedy is to be the dominant form of Life on Mauritius, but incapable of speech.”

  That was it, right there. No language meant no chance of co-opting them 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 Conversion 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 dispensing light glassy and deep over them all . . . they have come from 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 sanctified, taken in. . . . For as much as they are the creatures of God, and have the gift of rational discourse, acknowledging that only in His Word is eternal life to be found . . . And there are tears of happiness in the 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 moments 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 from hunger in this world, then beyond, in Christ’s kingdom, our salvations must be, in like measure, inextricable. Otherwise the dodoes would be only what they appear as in the world’s illusory light—only our prey. God could not be that cruel.

  Frans can look at both versions, the miracle and the hunt of more years than he can remember now, as real, equal possibilities. In both, 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 would weigh less, its cock, flint, and steel give him surer ignition—but he felt a nostalgia about the haakbus . . . he didn’t mind the extra 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 sinuous river Thames a drastic stain of burnt orange to remind a visitor of 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 floor-boards—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 government 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 starlings of London, converging by millions to hazy stone pedestals, to emptying squares and a great collective sleep. They flow in rings, concentric rings, 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 coerced out of him by none less than Gerhardt von Göll, 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 currencies, the establishment and disestablishment of an astonishing network of market operations winking on, winking off across the embattled continent, even as the firefights whistle steel up and down the streets and the firestorms sweep oxygen up in the sky and the customers fall smothered like bugs in the presence of Flit . . . but commerce has not taken away von Göll’s Touch: these days it has grown more sensitive than ever. In these first rushes the black man moves about in SS uniform, among the lath and canvas mockups of rocket and Meillerwagen (always shot through pines, through snow, from distant angles that don’t give away the English location), the others in plausible blackface, recruited 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 Schwarzkommando—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 a
nd there are twelve shots. It will be antiqued, given a bit of fungus and ferrotyping, and transported to Holland, to become part of the “remains” of a counterfeit rocket-firing site in the Rijkswijksche Bosch. The Dutch resistance will then “raid” this site, making a lot of commotion, 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 viewable. Von Göll, 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 Göll 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. . . .

  • • • • • • •

  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 Humber, no color or model he can pin down but something always present inside 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 appointments. He feels he’s being gently separated from the life he lived before going into St. Veronica’s. Even in movies there’s always someone behind him being careful not to talk, rattle paper, laugh too loud: Slothrop’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 flying in telltales, white wedgies clattering on cobblestone, an adorable tomato in a nurse uniform, and her name’s, uh, well, oh—Darlene. Golly, it’s 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 Darlene 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 district.

  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 pattern.

  “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 interior, 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 shadows, 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 Sèvres 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 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,” beaming 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 R
othschild 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 ingenue’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 confection 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.