Gravity's Rainbow Page 5

  “More Ouspenskian nonsense,” whispers a lady brushing by on the arm of a dock worker. Odors of Diesel fuel and Sous le Vent mingle as they pass. Jessica Swanlake, a young rosy girl in the uniform of an ATS private, noticing the prewar perfume, looks up, hmm, the frock she imagines is about 15 guineas and who knows how many coupons, probably from Harrods and would do more for me, she’s also sure. The lady, suddenly looking back over her shoulder, smiles oh, yes? My gosh, did she hear? Around this place almost certainly.

  Jessica’s been standing near the séance table with a handful of darts idly plucked from the board on the wall, her head bent, pale nape and top vertebra visible above the brown wool collar and through some of her lighter brown hair, fallen either side along her cheeks. Brass throats and breasts warm to her blood, quake in the hollow of her hand. She seems herself, gentling their feathered crosses, brushing with fingertips, to have slid into a shallow trance. . . .

  Outside, rolling from the east, comes the muffled rip of another rocket bomb. The windows rattle, the floor shakes. The sensitive flame dives for shelter, shadows across the table sent adance, darkening toward the other room—then it leaps high, the shadows drawing inward again, fully two feet, and disappears completely. Gas hisses on in the dim room. Milton Gloaming, who achieved perfect tripos at Cambridge ten years ago, abandons his shorthand to rise and go shut the gas off.

  It seems the right moment now for Jessica to throw a dart: one dart. Hair swinging, breasts bobbing marvelously beneath each heavy wool lapel. A hiss of air, whack: into the sticky fibers, into the dead center. Milton Gloaming cocks an eyebrow. His mind, always gathering correspondences, thinks it has found a new one.

  The medium, irritable now, has begun to drift back out of his trance. Anybody’s guess what’s happening over on the other side. This sitting, like any, needs not only its congenial circle here and secular, but also a basic, four-way entente which oughtn’t, any link of it, be broken: Roland Feldspath (the spirit), Peter Sachsa (the control), Carroll Eventyr (the medium), Selena (the wife and survivor). Somewhere, through exhaustion, redirection, gusts of white noise out in the aether, this arrangement has begun now to dissolve. Relaxation, chairs squeaking, sighs and throatclearings . . . Milton Gloaming fusses with his notebook, shuts it abruptly.

  Presently Jessica comes wandering over. No sign of Roger and she’s not sure he wants her to come looking for him, and Gloaming, though shy, isn’t as horrid as some of Roger’s other friends. . . .

  “Roger says that now you’ll count up all those words you copied and graph them or something,” brightly to head off any comment on the dart incident, which she’d rather avoid. “Do you do it only for séances?”

  “Automatic texts,” girl-nervous Gloaming frowns, nods, “one or two Ouija-board episodes, yes yes . . . we-we’re trying to develop a vocabulary of curves—certain pathologies, certain characteristic shapes you see—”

  “I’m not sure that I—”

  “Well. Recall Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort: if we plot the frequency of a word P sub n against its rank-order n on logarithmic axes,” babbling into her silence, even her bewilderment graceful, “we should of course get something like a straight line . . . however we’ve data that suggest the curves for certain—conditions, well they’re actually quite different—schizophrenics for example tend to run a bit flatter in the upper part then progressively steeper—a sort of bow shape . . . I think with this chap, this Roland, that we’re on to a classical paranoiac—”

  “Ha.” That’s a word she knows. “Thought I saw you brighten up there when he said ‘turned against.’”

  “‘Against,’ ‘opposite,’ yes you’d be amazed at the frequency with this one.”

  “What’s the most frequent word?” asks Jessica. “Your number one.”

  “The same as it’s always been at these affairs,” replies the statistician, as if everyone knew: “death.”

  An elderly air-raid warden, starchy and frail as organdy, stands on tiptoe to relight the sensitive flame.

  “Incidentally, ah, where’s your mad young gentleman gone off to?”

  “Roger’s with Captain Prentice.” Waving vaguely. “The usual Mysterious Microfilm Drill.” Being transacted in some distant room, across a crown-and-anchor game with which chance has very little to do, billows of smoke and chatter, Falkman and His Apache Band subdued over the BBC, chunky pints and slender sherry glasses, winter rain at the windows. Time for closeting, gas logs, shawls against the cold night, snug with your young lady or old dutch or, as here at Snoxall’s, in good company. Here’s a shelter—perhaps a real node of tranquillity among several scattered throughout this long wartime, where they’re gathering for purposes not entirely in the martial interest.

  Pirate Prentice feels something of this, obliquely, by way of class nervousness really: he bears his grin among these people here like a phalanx. He learned it at the films—it is the exact mischievous Irish grin your Dennis Morgan chap goes about cocking down at the black smoke vomiting from each and every little bucktooth yellow rat he shoots down.

  It’s as useful to him as he is to the Firm—who, it is well known, will use anyone, traitors, murderers, perverts, Negroes, even women, to get what They want. They may not’ve been that sure of Pirate’s usefulness at first, but later, as it developed, They were to grow very sure, indeed.

  “Major-General, you can’t actually give your support to this.”

  “We’re watching him around the clock. He certainly isn’t leaving the premises physically.”

  “Then he has a confederate. Somehow—hypnosis, drugs, I don’t know—they’re getting to his man and tranquilizing him. For God’s sake, next you’ll be consulting horoscopes.”

  “Hitler does.”

  “Hitler is an inspired man. But you and I are employees, remember. . . .”

  After that first surge of interest, the number of clients assigned to Pirate tapered off some. At the moment he carries what he feels is a comfortable case load. But it’s not what he really wants. They will not understand, the gently bred maniacs of S.O.E. ah very good, Captain rattling sitreps, shuffling boots, echoes off of Government eyeglasses jolly good and why not do it actually for us sometime at the Club. . . .

  Pirate wants Their trust, the good-whisky-and-cured-Latakia scent of Their rough love. He wants understanding from his own lot, not these bookish sods and rationalized freaks here at Snoxall’s so dedicated to Science, so awfully tolerant that this (he regrets it with all his heart) may be the only place in the reach of war’s empire that he does feel less than a stranger. . . .

  “It’s not at all clear,” Roger Mexico’s been saying, “what they have in mind, not at all, the Witchcraft Act’s more than 200 years old, it’s a relic of an entirely different age, another way of thinking. Suddenly here we are 1944 being hit with convictions right and left. Our Mr. Eventyr,” motioning at the medium who’s across the room chatting with young Gavin Trefoil, “could be fallen upon at any moment—pouring in the windows, hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present my God what imbecile Fascist rot . . .”

  “Careful, Mexico, you’re losing the old objectivity again—a man of science shouldn’t want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific, is it.”

  “Ass. You’re on their side. Couldn’t you feel it tonight, coming in the door? It’s a great swamp of paranoia.”

  “That’s my talent, all right,” Pirate as he speaks knowing it’s too abrupt, tries to file off the flash with: “I don’t know that I’m really up to the multiple sort of thing. . . .”

  “Ah. Prentice.” Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.

 
“You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it out on his EEG.”

  “Oh, if I’m in town,” vaguely. There’s a security problem here. Loose talk sinks ships and he can’t be sure, even about Mexico. There are too many circles to the current operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists growing narrower as we move ring by ring toward the bull’s eye, Instructions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap, idle memo, typewriter ribbon.

  His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm’s latest mania, known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way—analyzing what foreign-morale data may come in, for instance—but someplace out at the fringes of the enterprise, as indeed Pirate finds himself here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his own roommate Teddy Bloat.

  He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then transfers it, via Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down to “The White Visitation,” which houses a catchall agency known as PISCES—Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender. Whose surrender is not made clear.

  Pirate wonders if Mexico isn’t into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London since the Americans, and a dozen governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance. Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors, Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically drunk or opiated for getting through the day’s reverses, most somehow losing, losing what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game’s unending chatter, its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention . . . and what foreigner is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn’t that stateless lascar across his own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles. . . .

  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 gently, 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 whining 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—”