Gravity's Rainbow Read online

  “Serves me right,” Slothrop, wondering just what he means by this, sipping herb tea to remove the taste of the mayonnaise candy—oops but that’s a mistake, right, here’s his mouth filling once again with horrible alkaloid desolation, all the way back to the soft palate where it digs in. Darlene, pure Nightingale compassion, is handing him a hard red candy, molded like a stylized raspberry . . . mm, which oddly enough even tastes like a raspberry, though it can’t begin to take away that bitterness. Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he’s been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, “Oh mercy that’s really sour,” hardly able to get the words out he’s so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who’s supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can’t even see it’s up his nose and whatever it is won’t dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four. She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.

  “Now you’re getting the idea!” Mrs. Quoad waving at him a marbled conglomerate of ginger root, butterscotch, and aniseed, “you see, you also have to enjoy the way it looks. Why are Americans so impulsive?”

  “Well,” mumbling, “usually we don’t get any more complicated than Hershey bars, see. . . .”

  “Oh, try this,” hollers Darlene, clutching her throat and swaying against him.

  “Gosh, it must really be something,” doubtfully taking this nasty- looking brownish novelty, an exact quarter-scale replica of a Mills-type hand grenade, lever, pin and everything, one of a series of patriotic candies put out before sugar was quite so scarce, also including, he notices, peering into the jar, a .455 Webley cartridge of green and pink striped taffy, a six-ton earthquake bomb of some silver-flecked blue gelatin, and a licorice bazooka.

  “Go on then,” Darlene actually taking his hand with the candy in it and trying to shove it into his mouth.

  “Was just, you know, looking at it, the way Mrs. Quoad suggested.”

  “And no fair squeezing it, Tyrone.”

  Under its tamarind glaze, the Mills bomb turns out to be luscious pepsin-flavored nougat, chock-full of tangy candied cubeb berries, and a chewy camphor-gum center. It is unspeakably awful. Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust. Cubeb? He used to smoke that stuff. “Poisoned . . .” he is able to croak.

  “Show a little backbone,” advises Mrs. Quoad.

  “Yes,” Darlene through tongue-softened sheets of caramel, “don’t you know there’s a war on? Here now love, open your mouth.”

  Through the tears he can’t see it too well, but he can hear Mrs. Quoad across the table going “Yum, yum, yum,” and Darlene giggling. It is enormous and soft, like a marshmallow, but somehow—unless something is now going seriously wrong with his brain—it tastes like gin. “Wha’s ’is,” he inquires thickly.

  “A gin marshmallow,” sez Mrs. Quoad.

  “Awww . . .”

  “Oh that’s nothing, have one of these—” his teeth, in some perverse reflex, crunching now through a hard sour gooseberry shell into a wet spurting unpleasantness of, he hopes it’s tapioca, little glutinous chunks of something all saturated with powdered cloves.

  “More tea?” Darlene suggests. Slothrop is coughing violently, having inhaled some of that clove filling.

  “Nasty cough,” Mrs. Quoad offering a tin of that least believable of English coughdrops, the Meggezone. “Darlene, the tea is lovely, I can feel my scurvy going away, really I can.”

  The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth. Polar bears seek toenail-holds up the freezing frosty-grape alveolar clusters in his lungs. It hurts his teeth too much to breathe, even through his nose, even, necktie loosened, with his nose down inside the neck of his olive-drab T-shirt. Benzoin vapors seep into his brain. His head floats in a halo of ice.

  Even an hour later, the Meggezone still lingers, a mint ghost in the air. Slothrop lies with Darlene, the Disgusting English Candy Drill a thing of the past, his groin now against her warm bottom. The one candy he did not get to taste—one Mrs. Quoad withheld—was the Fire of Paradise, that famous confection of high price and protean taste—“salted plum” to one, “artificial cherry” to another . . . “sugared violets” . . . “Worcestershire sauce” . . . “spiced treacle” . . . any number of like descriptions, positive, terse—never exceeding two words in length—resembling the descriptions of poison and debilitating gases found in training manuals, “sweet-and-sour eggplant” being perhaps the lengthiest to date. The Fire of Paradise today is operationally extinct, and in 1945 can hardly be found: certainly nowhere among the sunlit shops and polished windows of Bond Street or waste Belgravia. But every now and then one will surface, in places which deal usually other merchandise than sweets: at rest, back inside big glass jars clouded by the days, along with objects like itself, sometimes only one candy to a whole jar, nearly hidden in the ambient tourmalines in German gold, carved ebony finger-stalls from the last century, pegs, valve-pieces, threaded hardware from obscure musical instruments, electronic components of resin and copper that the War, in its glutton, ever-nibbling intake, has not yet found and licked back into its darkness. . . . Places where the motors never come close enough to be loud, and there are trees outside along the street. Inner rooms and older faces developing under light falling through a skylight, yellower, later in the year. . . .

  Hunting across the zero between waking and sleep, his halfway limp cock still inside her, their strengthless legs bent the same angle . . . The bedroom deepens into water and coolness. Somewhere the sun is going down. Just enough light to see the darker freckles on her back. In the parlor Mrs. Quoad is dreaming she’s back in the gardens at Bournemouth, among the rhododendrons, and a sudden rain, Austin crying Touch her throat, Majesty. Touch! and Yrjö—a pretender but the true king, for a very doubtful branch of the family usurped the throne in 1878 during the intrigues over Bessarabia—Yrjö in an old-fashioned frock coat with golden galloons shining at the sleeves, bending toward her in the rain to cure her forever of King’s Evil, looking exactly as he does in the rotogravure, his lovely Hrisoula a step or two behind kindly, seriously waiting, around them the rain thundering down, the King’s white ungloved hand bending like a butterfly to touch the hollow of Mrs. Quoad’s throat, the miracle touch, gently . . . touch . . .

  The lightning—

  And Slothrop is yawning “What time is it?” and Darlene is swimming up from sleep. When, with no warning, the room is full of noon, blinding white, every hair flowing up from her nape clear as day, as the concussion drives in on them, rattling the building to its poor bones, beating in the windowshade, gone all to white and black lattice of mourning-cards. Overhead, catching up, the rocket’s rush comes swelling, elevated express down, away into ringing silence. Outside glass has been breaking, long, dissonant cymbals up the street. The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop’s penis has sprung erect, aching. To Darlene, suddenly awake, heart pounding very fast, palms and fingers in fear’s pain, this hardon has s
eemed reasonably part of the white light, the loud blast. By the time the explosion has died to red strong flickering on the shade, she’s begun to wonder . . . about the two together . . . but they’re fucking now, and what does it matter, but God’s sake why shouldn’t this stupid Blitz be good for something?

  And who’s that, through the crack in the orange shade, breathing carefully? Watching? And where, keepers of maps, specialists at surveillance, would you say the next one will fall?

  • • • • • • •

  The very first touch: he’d been saying something mean, a bit of the usual Mexico self-reproach—ah you don’t know me I’m really a bastard sort of thing—“No,” she went to put her fingers to his lips, “don’t say that. . . .” As she reached, without thinking he grabbed her wrist, moved her hand away, pure defense—but kept holding her, by the wrist. They were eyes-to-eyes, and neither would look away. Roger brought her hand to his lips and kissed it then, still watching her eyes. A pause, his heart in sharp knocks against the front of his chest . . . “Ohh . . .” the sound rushing out of her, and she came in to hug him, completely let-go, open, shivering as they held each other. She told him later that as soon as he took her wrist that night, she came. And the first time he touched her cunt, squeezed Jessica’s soft cunt through her knickers, the trembling began again high in her thighs, growing, taking her over. She came twice before cock was ever officially put inside cunt, and this is important to both of them though neither has figured out why, exactly.

  Whenever it happens, though, the light always gets very red for them.

  Once they met at a teashop: she was wearing a red sweater with short sleeves, and her bare arms glowed red by her sides. She hadn’t any make-up on, the first time he’d seen her so. Walking to the car, she takes his hand and puts it, for a moment, lightly between her moving legs. Roger’s heart grows erect, and comes. That’s really how it feels. Up sharply to skin level in a V around his centerline, washing over his nipples . . . it is love, it is amazing. Even when she isn’t there, after a dream, at a face in the street that might against chance be Jessica’s, Roger can never control it, he’s in its grasp.

  About Beaver, or Jeremy, as he is known to his mother, Roger tries not to think any more than he has to. Of course he agonizes over technical matters. She cannot possibly—can she?—be Doing The Same Things with Jeremy. Does Jeremy ever kiss her cunt, for example? Could that prig actually—does she reach around as they’re fucking a-and slide a mischievous finger, his English rose, into Jeremy’s asshole? Stop, stop this (but does she suck his cock? Has he ever had his habitually insolent face between her lovely buttocks?) no use, it’s youthful folly time here and you’re better off up at the Tivoli watching Maria Montez and Jon Hall, or looking for leopards or peccaries in Regents Park Zoo, and wondering if it’ll rain before 4:30.

  The time Roger and Jessica have spent together, totaled up, still only comes to hours. And all their spoken words to less than one average SHAEF memorandum. And there is no way, first time in his career, that the statistician can make these figures mean anything.

  Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his.

  Apart is for all their flip film-dialogue, scenarios they make up to play alone for themselves in the nights with the Bofors door-knocking against her sky, with his wind humming among the loops of barbed wire down along the beach. The Mayfair Hotel. “We are quite the jet-propelled one aren’t we, only half an hour late.”

  “Well,” Wrens and NAAFI girls, jeweled young widows side-glancing on by, “I’m sure you’ve put the time to good use.”

  “Time enough for several assignations,” he replies, looking elaborately at his watch, worn WW II style on the inside of his wrist, “and by now, I should say, a confirmed pregnancy or two, if not indeed—”

  “Ah,” she blithely jumps (but upward, not on), “that reminds me . . .”

  “Yaaahhh!” Roger reeling back to a potted plant, among the lilting saxophones of Roland Peachey and his Orchestra playing “There, I Said It Again,” and cowering.

  “So, that’s on your mind. If mind is the word I want.”

  They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica are there. It’s all shortages, songs and boy friends, films and blouses . . .

  With her hair pulled back of her ears, her soft chin in profile, she looks only 9 or 10, alone by windows, blinking into the sun, turning her head on the light counterpane, coming in tears, child’s reddening wrinkling face about to cry, going oh, oh . . .

  One night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall. Trees outside sifting the wind, out of her sight the lorries forever rushing down the streets and roads, behind houses, across canals or river, beyond the simple park. Oh and the dogs and cats who went padding in the fine snow. . . .

  “. . . pictures, well scenes, keep flashing in, Roger. By themselves, I mean I’m not making them. . . .” A bright swarm of them is passing by, against the low isotonic glimmer of the ceiling. He and she lie and breathe mouth-up. His soft cock drools down around his thigh, the downhill one, closest to Jessica. The night room heaves a sigh, yes Heaves, a Sigh—old-fashioned comical room, oh me I’m hopeless, born a joker never change, flirting away through the mirrorframe in something green-striped, pantalooned, and ruffled—meantime though, it is quaint, most rooms today hum you know, have been known also to “breathe,” yes even wait in hushed expectancy and that ought to be the rather sinister tradition here, long slender creatures, heavy perfume and capes in rooms assailed by midnight, pierced with spiral stairways, blue-petaled pergolas, an ambience in which no one, however provoked or out of touch, my dear young lady, ever, Heaves, a Sigh. It is not done.

  But here. Oh, this young lady. Checked gingham. Ragged eyebrows, grown wild. Red velvet. On a dare once, she took off her blouse, motoring up on the trunk road near Lower Beeding.

  “My God she’s gone insane, what is this, why do they all come to me?”

  “Well, ha, ha,” Jessica twirling the necktie of her Army blouse like a stripper, “you uh, said I was afraid to. Di’n’t you. Called me ‘cowardly, cowardly custard’ or something, ’s I recall—” No brassiere of course, she never wears one.

  “Look here,” glaring sideways, “do you know you can get arrested? Never mind you,” just occurring to him, here, “I’ll get arrested!”

  “They’ll blame it all on you, la, la.” Lower teeth edging out in a mean-girl’s smile. “I’m just an innocent lamb and this—” flinging a little arm out, striking light from the fair hairs on her forearm, her small breasts bouncing free, “this Roger-the-rake! here, this awful beast! makes me perform, these degrading . . .”

  Meantime, the most gigantic lorry Roger has ever seen in his life has manoeuvred steel-shuddering nearby, and now not only the driver, but also several—well, what appear to be horrid . . . midgets, in strange operetta uniforms actually, some sort of Central European government-in-exile, all of them crammed somehow into the high-set cab, all are staring down, scuffling like piglets on a sow for position, eyes popping, swarthy, mouths leaking spit, to take in the spectacle of his Jessica Swanlake scandalously bare-breasted and himself desperately looking to slow down and drop behind the lorry—except that now, behind Roger, pressing him on, in fact, at a speed identical with the lorry’s, has appeared, oh shit it is, a military police car. He can’t slow down, and if he speeds up, they’ll really get suspicious. . . .

  “Uh, Jessie, please get dressed, um, would you love?�
�� Making a show of looking for his comb which is, as usual, lost, suspect is known as a notorious ctenophile . . .

  The driver of the huge, loud lorry now tries to get Roger’s attention, the other midgets crowding at the windows calling, “Hey! Hey!” and emitting oily, guttural laughs. Their leader speaks English with some liquid, unspeakably nasty European accent. Lot of winking and nudging up there now, too: “Meester! Ay, zhu! Wet a meeneh’, eh?” More laughter. Roger in the rearview mirror sees English cop-faces pink with rectitude, red insignia leaning, bobbing, consulting, turning sharply now and then to stare ahead at the couple in the Jaguar who’re acting so—“What are they doing, Prigsbury, can you make it out?”

  “Appears to be a man and a woman, sir.”

  “Ass.” And it’s out with the black binoculars.

  Through rain . . . then through dreaming glass, green with the evening. And herself in a chair, old-fashioned bonneted, looking west over the deck of Earth, inferno red at its edges, and further in the brown and gold clouds. . . .

  Then, suddenly, night: The empty rocking chair lit staring chalk blue by—is it the moon, or some other light from the sky? just the hard chair, empty now, in the very clear night, and this cold light coming down. . . .

  The images go, flowering, in and out, some lovely, some just awful . . . but she’s snuggled in here with her lamb, her Roger, and how she loves the line of his neck all at once so—why there it is right there, the back of his bumpy head like a boy of ten’s. She kisses him up and down the sour salt reach of skin that’s taken her so, taken her nightlit along this high tendoning, kisses him as if kisses were flowing breath itself, and never ending.

  One morning—he had not seen her for about a fortnight—he woke in his hermit’s cell at “The White Visitation” with a hardon, scratchy eyelids and a long pale brown hair tangled in his mouth. It wasn’t one of his own hairs. It wasn’t anybody’s he could think of but Jessica’s. But it couldn’t be—he hadn’t seen her. He sniffled a couple of times, then sneezed. Morning developed out the window. His right canine ached. He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth-breather’s morning fur, and stared at it. How’d it get here? Eerie, dearie. A bit of the je ne sais quoi de sinistre, all right. He had to piss. Shuffling to the lavatory, his graying government flannel tucked limply inside the cord of his pajamas, it came to him: what if it’s some mauve turn-of-the-century tale of ghostly revenge and this hair here’s some First Step . . . Oh, paranoia? You should’ve seen him going through all the combinations as he moved around doing lavatory things among the stumbling, farting, razor-scraping, hacking, sneezing and snot-crusted inmates of Psi Section. Only later in this did he even begin to think of Jessica—of her safety. Thoughtful Roger. What if, if she’d died in the night, an accident at the magazines . . . with this hair the only good-by her ghostly love had been able to push back through to this side, to the only one who’d ever mattered. . . . Some spider-statistician: his eyes had actually filled with tears before the Next Idea—oh. Oboy. Turn off that faucet, Dorset, and get hep to this. He stood, half-stooped, over the washbasin, paralyzed, putting his worry for Jessica on Hold for a bit, wanting very much to look back over his shoulder, even into the, the old mirror, you know, see what they’re up to, but too frozen to risk even that . . . now . . . oh yes a most superb possibility has found seedbed in his brain, and here it is. What if they are all, all these Psi Section freaks here, ganged up on him in secret? O.K.? Yes: suppose they can see into your mind! a-and how about—what if it’s hypnotism? Eh? Jesus: then a whole number of other occult things such as: astral projection, brain control (nothing occult about that), secret curses for impotence, boils, madness, yaaahhh—potions! (as he straightens at last and back in his mind’s eyes to his office now glances, very gingerly, at the coffee mess, oh God . . .), psychic-unity-with-the-Controlling-Agency such that Roger would be he and he Roger, yes yes a number of these notions rambling through his mind here, none of them really pleasant, either—especially inside this staff latrine, with Gavin Trefoil’s face this morning colored bright magenta, a clover blossom flashing in the wind, Ronald Cherrycoke hawking fine-marbled amber phlegm into the basin—what’s all this, who are all these people. . . . Freaks! Freeeeaks! He’s surrounded! they’ve been out there night and day all the war long tapping his brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions tuning in on everything—even when he and Jessica are in bed fucking—