Gravity's Rainbow Page 18

  Try to hold it down old man, panic if you must but later, not here. . . . Faint washroom light bulbs deepen the thousands of old clustered water and soap spots on the mirrors to an interfeathering of clouds, of skin and smoke as he swings his head past, lemon and beige, oilsmoke black and twilight brown in here, very loosely crumbled, that’s the texture. . . .

  Lovely morning, World War Two. All he can keep in front of his mind are the words I want a transfer, kind of humming tunelessly at the mirror, yes sir got to put in a chit right away. I’ll volunteer for duty in Germany’s what I’ll do. Dum de dum, de dum. Right, there was an ad only Wednesday in the classified section of Nazis in the News, sandwiched between a Merseyside Labour branch that was looking for a publicist, and a London advertising agency with positions open immediately on demob, they said. This ad in the middle was placed by some arm of the G-5-to-be, trying to round up a few “re-education” experts. Vital, vital stuff. Teach the German Beast about the Magna Carta, sportsmanship, that sort of thing, eh? Out inside the works of some neurotic Bavarian cuckoo clock of a village, were-elves streaking in out of the forests at night to leave subversive handbills at door and window—“Anything!” Roger groping back to his narrow quarters, “anything at all’s better than this. . . .”

  That’s how bad it was. He knew he’d feel more at home in mad Germany with the Enemy than here in Psi Section. The time of year makes it even worse. Christmas. Bwweeeaaaagghh, clutching to his stomach. Jessica was all that made it human or tolerable. Jessica . . .

  He was taken over then, for half a minute, shivering and yawning in his long underwear, soft, nearly invisible in the December-dawn enclosure, among so many sharp edges of books, sheafs and flimsies, charts and maps (and the chief one, red pockmarks on the pure white skin of lady London, watching over all . . . wait . . . disease on skin . . . does she carry the fatal infection inside herself? are the sites predestined, and does the flight of the rocket actually follow from the fated eruption latent in the city . . . but he can’t hold it, no more than he understands Pointsman’s obsession with the reversal of sound stimuli and please, please can’t we just drop it for a bit . . .), visited, not knowing till it passed how clearly he was seeing the honest half of his life that Jessica was now, how fanatically his mother the War must disapprove of her beauty, her cheeky indifference to death-institutions he’d not so long ago believed in—her unflappable hope (though she hated to make plans), her exile from childhood (though she refused ever to hold on to memories). . . .

  His life had been tied to the past. He’d seen himself a point on a moving wavefront, propagating through sterile history—a known past, a projectable future. But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable . . . new life. Past and future stopped at the beach: that was how he’d set it out. But he wanted to believe it too, the same way he loved her, past all words—believe that no matter how bad the time, nothing was fixed, everything could be changed and she could always deny the dark sea at his back, love it away. And (selfishly) that from a somber youth, squarely founded on Death—along for Death’s ride—he might, with her, find his way to life and to joy. He’d never told her, he avoided telling himself, but that was the measure of his faith, as this seventh Christmas of the War came wheeling in another charge at his skinny, shivering flank. . . .

  She trips fussing about the dormitory, bothering other girls for puffs off of stale Woodbines, nylon-repair kits, sparrow-bright war-wisecracks passing for sympathy. Tonight she’ll be with Jeremy, her lieutenant, but she wants to be with Roger. Except that, really, she doesn’t. Does she? She can’t remember ever being so confused. When she’s with Roger it’s all love, but at any distance—any at all, Jack—she finds that he depresses and even frightens her. Why? On top of him in the wild nights riding up and down his cock her axis, trying herself to stay rigid enough not to turn to cream taper-wax and fall away melting to the coverlet coming there’s only room for Roger, Roger, oh love to the end of breath. But out of bed, walking talking, his bitterness, his darkness, run deeper than the War, the winter: he hates England so, hates “the System,” gripes endlessly, says he’ll emigrate when the War’s over, stays inside his paper cynic’s cave hating himself . . . and does she want to bring him out, really? Isn’t it safer with Jeremy? She tries not to allow this question in too often, but it’s there. Three years with Jeremy. They might as well be married. Three years ought to count for something. Daily, small stitches and easings. She’s worn old Beaver’s bathrobes, brewed his tea and coffee, sought his eye across lorry-parks, day rooms and rainy mud fields when all the day’s mean, dismal losses could be rescued in the one look—familiar, full of trust, in a season when the word is invoked for quaintness or a minor laugh. And to rip it all out? three years? for this erratic, self-centered—boy, really. Weepers, he’s supposed to be past thirty, he’s years older than she. He ought to’ve learned something, surely? A man of experience?

  The worst of it’s that she has no one to talk to. The politics of this mixed battery, the professional incest, the unwholesome obsessions with who said what to whom in the spring of 1942 for God’s sake, outside of Grafty Green, Kent, or someplace, and who ought to have answered what but didn’t but told someone else instead thus provoking hatreds that have thrived wonderfully down to the present day—six years of slander, ambition and hysteria make confiding anything to anyone around here an act of pure masochism.

  “Girl in distress, Jess?” Maggie Dunkirk on the way by, smoothing her gauntlets. On the Tannoy a BBC swing band is blaring hotly syncopated Christmas music.

  “Got a fag, Mag?” pretty automatic by now, you guess, Jess?

  Well— “Thought it looked somewhat like a bloody Garbo film around here, not at all the usual nicotine starvation, sorry wrong again, ta-ta. . . .”

  Oh be on your way. “Thinking about me Xmas shopping.”

  “What’re you getting the Beaver then.”

  Concentrating on gartering her nylons, the older pair, up-in-front-down-in-back mnemonically stirring in wafts among her fingers, laundry-white puckered elastic being stretched fine and tangent now to the gentle front curve of her thigh, suspender-clips glittering silver under or behind her lacquered red fingernails, passing like distant fountains behind red topiary trees, Jessica replies, “Oh. Mm. A Pipe, I suppose. . . .”

  Near her battery one night, driving Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon a church, a hummock in the dark upland, lamp-lit, growing out of the earth. It was Sunday evening, and shortly before vespers. Men in greatcoats, in oilskins, in dark berets they slipped off at the entrance, American fliers in leather lined with sheep’s wool, a few women in clinking boots and wide-shouldered swagger coats, but no children, not a child in sight, just grownups, trudging in from their bomber fields, balloon-bivouacs, pillboxes over the beach, through the Norman doorway shaggy with wintering vines. Jessica said, “Oh, I remember . . .” but didn’t go on. She was remembering other Advents, and hedges snowy as sheep from her window, and the Star ready to be pasted up on the sky again.

  Roger pulled over, and they watched the scuffed and dun military going in to evensong. The wind smelled of fresh snow.

  “We ought to be home,” she said, after a bit, “it’s late.”

  “We could just pop in here for a moment.”

  Well, that surprised her, but def, after weeks of his snide comments? His unbeliever’s annoyance with the others in Psi Section he thought were out to drive him dotty as they were, and his Scroogery growing as shopping days till Xmas dwindled—“You’re not supposed to be the sort,” she told him. But she did want to go in, nostalgia was heavy in tonight’s snow-sky, her own voice ready to betray her and run to join the waits whose carols we’re so apt to hear now in the distances, these days of Advent dropping one by one, voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding . . . often above sounds of melt
ing snow, winds that must blow not through Christmas air but through the substance of time would bring her those child-voices, singing for sixpences, and if her heart wasn’t ready to take on quite all the stresses of her mortality and theirs, at least there was the fear that she was beginning to lose them—that one winter she would go running to look, out to the gate to find them, run as far as the trees but in vain, their voices fading. . . .

  They walked through the tracks of all the others in the snow, she gravely on his arm, wind blowing her hair to snarls, heels slipping once on ice. “To hear the music,” he explained.

  Tonight’s scratch choir was all male, epauletted shoulders visible under the wide necks of the white robes, and many faces nearly as white with the exhaustion of soaked and muddy fields, midwatches, cables strummed by the nervous balloons sunfishing in the clouds, tents whose lights inside shone nuclear at twilight, soullike, through the crosshatched walls, turning canvas to fine gauze, while the wind drummed there. Yet there was one black face, the counter-tenor, a Jamaican corporal, taken from his warm island to this—from singing his childhood along the rum-smoky saloons of High Holborn Street where the sailors throw mammoth red firecrackers, quarter of a stick of dynamite man, over the swinging doors and run across the street giggling, or come walking out with high-skirted girls, girls of the island, Chinese and French girls . . . lemon peels crushed in the gutters of the streets scented the early mornings where he used to sing, O have you seen my darlin’ Lola, with a shape like a bottle of Coca-Cola, sailors running up and down in the brown shadows of alleys, flapping at neckerchief and pants-leg, and the girls whispering together and laughing . . . each morning he counted out half a pocket full of coins of all nations. From palmy Kingston, the intricate needs of the Anglo-American Empire (1939–1945) had brought him to this cold fieldmouse church, nearly in earshot of a northern sea he’d hardly glimpsed in crossing, to a compline service, a program tonight of plainsong in English, forays now and then into polyphony: Thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, even a German macaronic from the fifteenth century, attributed to Heinrich Suso:

  In dulci jubilo

  Nun singet und seid froh!

  Unsers Herzens Wonne

  Leit in praesipio,

  Leuchtet vor die Sonne

  Matris in gremio.

  Alpha es et O.

  With the high voice of the black man riding above the others, no head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast, a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this range . . . he was bringing brown girls to sashay among these nervous Protestants, down the ancient paths the music had set, Big and Little Anita, Stiletto May, Plongette who loves it between her tits and will do it that way for free—not to mention the Latin, the German? in an English church? These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man’s presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s doing. . . . So the pure counter-tenor voice was soaring, finding its way in to buoy Jessica’s heart and even Roger’s she guessed, risking glances at his face sideways and up through brown ghosts of her hair, during recitatives or releases. He wasn’t looking nihilistic, not even cheaply so. He was . . .

  No, Jessica’s never seen his face exactly like this, in the light of a few hanging oil lamps, the flames unguttering and very yellow, on the nearest the verger’s two long fingerprints in fine, pollen V-for-victory up around the belly of the glass, Roger’s skin more child-pink, his eyes more glowing than the lamplight alone can account for—isn’t it? or is that how she wants it to be? The church is as cold as the night outside. There’s the smell of damp wool, of bitter on the breaths of these professionals, of candle smoke and melting wax, of smothered farting, of hair tonic, of the burning oil itself, folding the other odors in a maternal way, more closely belonging to Earth, to deep strata, other times, and listen . . . listen: this is the War’s evensong, the War’s canonical hour, and the night is real. Black greatcoats crowd together, empty hoods full of dense, church-interior shadows. Over on the coast the Wrens work late, down inside cold and gutted shells, their blue torches are newborn stars in the tidal evening. Hullplates swing in the sky, like great iron leaves, on cables that creak in splinters of sound. At ease, on standby, the flames of the torches, softened, fill the round glass faces of the gauges with apricot light. In the pipefitters’ sheds, icicled, rattling when the gales are in the Straits, here’s thousands of old used toothpaste tubes, heaped often to the ceilings, thousands of somber man-mornings made tolerable, transformed to mint fumes and bleak song that left white spots across the quicksilver mirrors from Harrow to Gravesend, thousands of children who pestled foam up out of soft mortars of mouths, who lost easily a thousand times as many words among the chalky bubbles—bed-going complaints, timid announcements of love, news of fat or translucent, fuzzy or gentle beings from the country under the counterpane—uncounted soapy-liquorice moments spat and flushed down to sewers and the slow-scumming gray estuary, the morning mouths growing with the day tobacco and fish-furred, dry with fear, foul with idleness, flooded at thoughts of impossible meals, settling instead for the week’s offal in gland pies, Household Milk, broken biscuits at half the usual points, and isn’t menthol a marvelous invention to take just enough of it away each morning, down to become dusty oversize bubbles tessellating tough and stagnant among the tar shorelines, the intricate draftsmanship of outlets feeding, multiplying out to sea, as one by one these old toothpaste tubes are emptied and returned to the War, heaps of dimly fragrant metal, phantoms of peppermint in the winter shacks, each tube wrinkled or embossed by the unconscious hands of London, written over in interference-patterns, hand against hand, waiting now—it is true return—to be melted for solder, for plate, alloyed for castings, bearings, gasketry, hidden smokeshriek linings the children of that other domestic incarnation will never see. Yet the continuity, flesh to kindred metals, home to hedgeless sea, has persisted. It is not death that separates these incarnations, but paper: paper specialties, paper routines. The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . . Yet who can presume to say what the War wants, so vast and aloof is it . . . so absentee. Perhaps the War isn’t even an awareness—not a life at all, really. There may only be some cruel, accidental resemblance to life. At “The White Visitation” there’s a longtime schiz, you know, who believes that he is World War II. He gets no newspapers, refuses to listen to the wireless, but still, the day of the Normandy invasion somehow his temperature shot up to 104°. Now, as the pincers east and west continue their slow reflex contraction, he speaks of darkness invading his mind, of an attrition of self. . . . The Rundstedt offensive perked him up though, gave him a new lease on life—“A beautiful Christmas gift,” he confessed to the resident on his ward, “it’s the season of birth, of fresh beginnings.” Whenever the rockets fall—those which are audible—he smiles, turns out to pace the ward, tears about to splash from the corners of his merry eyes, caught up in a ruddy high tonicity that can’t help cheering his fellow patients. His days are numbered. He’s to die on V-E Day. If he’s not in fact the War then he’s its child-surrogate, living high for a certain term but come the ceremonial day, look out. The true king only dies a mock death. Remember. Any number of young men may be selected to die in his place while the real king, foxy old bastard, goes on. Will he show up under the Star, slyly genuflecting with the other kings as this winter solstice draws on us? Bring to the serai gifts of tungsten, cordite, high-octane? Will the child gaze up from his ground of golden
straw then, gaze into the eyes of the old king who bends long and unfurling overhead, leans to proffer his gift, will the eyes meet, and what message, what possible greeting or entente will flow between the king and the infant prince? Is the baby smiling, or is it just gas? Which do you want it to be?