Penguin books

XXX jug-clutching hillbillies, comic-book cats dogs and mice, prizefighters and mountaineers, radio stars, midgets, ten-in-one freaks, railroad hobos, marathon dancers, swing bands, high-society partygoers, racehorses and jockeys, taxidancers, Indianapolis drivers, sailors ashore and wahines in hula skirts, sinewed Olympic runners, tycoons holding big round bags with dollar signs, all join in on a second grand chorus of the song, all the boards of the pinball machines flashing on and off, primary colors with a touch of acid to them, flippers flipping, bells ringing, nickels pouring out of the coinboxes of the more enthusiastic, each sound and move exactly in its place in the complex ensemble.

Outside the temple, the organization reps from Chicago lurk, play morra, drink Canadian blends out of silver hip-flasks, oil and clean .38s and generally carry on in their loathsome ethnic way, Popish inscrutability in every sharp crease and shadowy jowl. No way to tell if someplace in the wood file cabinets exists a set of real blueprints telling exactly how all these pinball machines were rewired—a randomness deliberately simulated—or if it has happened at real random, preserving at least our faith in Malfunction as still something beyond Their grasp ... a faith that each machine, individually, has simply, in innocence, gone on the blink, after the thousands of roadhouse nights, end-of-the-world Wyoming thunderstorms that come straight down on your hatless head, truckstop amphetamines, tobacco smoke clawing at insides of eyelids, homicidal grabs after some way out of the year's never-slackening shit. . . have players forever strangers brought about, separately, alone, each of these bum machines? believe it: they've sweated, kicked, cried, smashed, lost their balance forever—a single Mobility you never heard, a unity unaware of itself, a silence the encyclopedia histories have blandly filled up with agencies, initials, spokesmen and deficits enough to keep us from finding them again . . . but for the moment, through the elaborate theatrical foofooraw of Mob 'n' Masons, it has concentrated here, in the back of the Mouthorgan

temple, an elegant chaos to bend the ingenuity of Eland's bought expert, Silver-Streaking Bert Fibel.

Last we saw of Fibel he was hooking, stretching, and running shock cord for that Horst Achtfaden back in his gliding days, Fibel who stayed on the ground, and saw his friend on to Peenemünde—saw him on? isn't that a slice of surplus paranoia there, not quite justified is it—well, call it Toward a Case for Eland's Involvement with Achtfaden Too, if you want. Fibel worked for Siemens back when it was still part of the Stinnes trust. Along with his design work he also put in some time as a Stinnes intelligence agent. There are also still loyalties to Vereinigte Stahlwerke in effect, though Fibel happens to be working now at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It's in Eland's interest to have an agent in the Berkshires, can you guess why? Yup! to keep an eye on adolescent Tyrone Slothrop, is why. Nearly ten years after the original deal was closed, IG Farben is still finding it easier to subcontract the surveillance of young Tyrone back to Lyle Bland.

This stonefaced kraut Fibel is a genius with solenoids and switches. How all this machinery got "out of the glue," as they say over there, is a sinful waste of time even to think about—he dives into topologies and color-codes, the odor of rosin flux goes seeping into the poolrooms and saloons, a Schnipsel here and there, a muttered also or two, and before you know it he's got most of them working again. You can bet there's a lotta happy Masons in Mouthorgan, Missouri.

In return for his good deed, Lyle Bland, who couldn't care less, is made a Mason. He finds good fellowship, all kinds of comforts designed to remind him of his virility, and even a number of useful business contacts. Beyond this, all is just as tight as that Business Advisory Council. Non-Masons stay pretty much in the dark about What Goes On, though now and then something jumps out, exposes itself, jumps giggling back again, leaving you with few details but a lot of Awful Suspicions. Some of the American Founding Fathers were Masons, for instance. There is a theory going around that the U.S.A. was and still is a gigantic Masonic plot under the ultimate control of the group known as the Illuminati. It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little. Too many anarchists in 19th-century Europe—Bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons for it to be pure chance. Lovers of global conspiracy, not all of them Catholic, can count on the Masons for a few good shivers and voids when all else fails. One of the best of the classic Weird Mason Stories has Doctor Livingstone (living stone? oh, yes) come wandering into a native village in, not even the heart, but the subconscious of Darkest Africa, a place, a tribe he's never seen before: fires in the silence, unfathomable stares, Livingstone ambles up to the village chief and flashes him a Masonic high sign—the chief recognizes it, returns it, all smiles, and orders every fraternal hospitality laid on for the white stranger. But recall that Dr. Livingstone, like Wernher von Braun, was born close to the Spring Equinox, and so had to confront the world from that most singular of the Zodiac's singular points. . . . Well, and keep in mind where those Masonic Mysteries came from in the first place. (Check out Ishmael Reed. He knows more about it than you'll ever find here.)

We must also never forget famous Missouri Mason Harry Truman: sitting by virtue of death in office, this very August 1945, with his control-finger poised right on Miss Enola Gay's atomic clit, making ready to tickle 100,000 little yellow folks into what will come down as a fine vapor-deposit of fat-cracklings wrinkled into the fused rubble of their city on the Inland Sea. . . .

By the time Bland joined up, the Masons had long, long degenerated into just another businessmen's club. A real shame. Business of all kinds, over the centuries, had atrophied certain sense-receptors and areas of the human brain, so that for most of the fellows taking part, the present-day rituals were no more, and even maybe a little less, than hollow mummery. Not for all of them, though. Now and then you found a throwback. Lyle Bland happened to be one.

The magic in these Masonic rituals is very, very old. And way back in those days, it worked. As time went on, and it started being used for spectacle, to consolidate what were only secular appearances of power, it began to lose its zip. But the words, moves, and machinery have been more or less faithfully carried down over the millennia, through the grim rationalizing of the World, and so the magic is still there, though latent, needing only to touch the right sensitive head to reassert itself.

Bland found himself coming home to Beacon Hill after meetings late at night, unable to sleep. He would lie down in his study on the davenport, not thinking about anything in particular, and come back with a jolt, his heart pounding terribly, knowing he'd just been somewhere, but unable to account for the passage of time. The old American Empire clock beat in the resonant hallway. The Girandole mirror, passed on by generations of Blands, gathered images in its quicksilver

pool that Lyle couldn't bring himself to face. In another room his wife, varicose and religious, groaned in her sleep. What was happening to him?

Next meeting night, home on his back on the accustomed davenport, Wall Street Journal with nothing in it he didn't already know, Lyle Bland rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh! whoosh back in again. He lay there, more terrified than he'd ever been, even at Belleau Wood—not so much because he'd left his body, but because he knew that this was only a first step. The next step would be to roll over in mid-air and look back. Old magic had found him. He was off on a journey. He knew he couldn't keep from going on with it.

It took him a month or two before he could make the turn. When it happened, he felt it as a turn not so much in space as in his own history. Irreversible. The Bland who came back to rejoin the inert white container he'd seen belly-up on the sofa, thousands of years beneath him, had changed forever.

Before very long, he was spending most of his time on that davenport, and hardly any at all down on State Street. His wife, who never questioned anything, moved vaguely through the rooms, discussing only household affairs, sometimes getting an answer if Bland happened to be inside his body, but most often not. Odd-looking people began to show up at the door, without phoning. Creeps, foreigners with tinted, oily skin, wens, sties, cysts, wheezes, bad teeth, limps, staring or—worse—with Strange Faraway Smiles. She let them in the house, all of them, and the study doors were closed gently behind them, in her face. She could hear nothing but a murmur of voices, in what she guessed to be some foreign tongue. They were instructing her husband in techniques of voyage.

There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice. Our judgment lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned—and worse, we named what they did "success," though they failed. Because they came back, back to fame, to praise, they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.

What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?

Bland, still an apprentice, hadn't yet shaken off his fondness for hallucinating. He knows where he is when he's there, but when he comes back, he imagines that he has been journeying underneath history: that history is Earth's mind, and that there are layers, set very deep, layers of history analogous to layers of coal and oil in Earth's body. The foreigners sit in his parlor, hissing over him, leaving offensive films of sebum on everything they touch, trying to see him through this phase, clearly impatient with what they feel are the tastes of a loafer and vulgarian. He comes back raving about the presences he has found out there, members of an astral IG, whose mission—as indeed Rathenau implied through the medium of Peter Sachsa—is past secular good and evil: distinctions like that are meaningless out there. . . .

"Yess, yess," all staring at him, "but then why keep saying 'mind and body'? Why make that distinction?"

Because it's hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche, he feels like a child again, he knows that in theory he must not attach himself, but still he is in love with his sense of wonder, with having found it again, even this late, even knowing he must soon let it go. . . . To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth's mindbody . . . having hugged to its holy center the wastes of dead species, gathered, packed, transmuted, realigned, and rewoven molecules to be taken up again by the coal-tar Kabbalists of the other side, the ones Bland on his voyages has noted, taken boiled off, teased apart, explicated to every last permutation of useful magic, centuries past exhaustion still finding new molecular pieces, combining and recombining them into new synthetics—"Forget them, they are no better than the Qlippoth, the shells of the dead, you must not waste your time with them. ..."

The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here—kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of

God, cannot be spoken . . . plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert . . . but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition . . . to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste. . . .

Lucky Bland, to be free of it. One night he called his whole family together around the davenport in the study. Lyle, Jr. came in from Houston, shivering with first-stage grippe from contact with a world where air-conditioning is not so essential to life. Clara drove down from Bennington and Buddy rode the MTA in from Cambridge. "As you know," Bland announced, "I have been taking these little trips lately." He was wearing a simple white smock, and holding a red rose. He looked unearthly, all were later to agree: his skin and eyes had a clarity which is seldom encountered, except on certain spring days, at certain latitudes, just before sunrise. "I have found," he continued, "that each time out, I have been traveling farther and farther. Tonight, I am going out for good. That is, I am not coming back. So I wanted to say good-by to you all, and let you know that you'll be provided for." He'd been to see his friend Coolidge ("Hot") Short, of the State Street law firm of Salitieri, Poore, Nash, De Brutus, and Short, and made sure all the family finances were in perfect order. "I want you to know that I love you all. I'd stay here if I could, but I have to go. I hope you can understand."

One by one, his family came up to say good-by. Hugs, kisses, handshakes done, Bland sank back into that davenport's last embrace, closed his eyes with a dim smile. . . . After a bit he felt himself beginning to rise. Those watching disagreed about the exact moment. Around 9:30 Buddy left to see The Bride of Frankenstein, and Mrs. Bland covered the serene face with a dusty chintz drape she'd received from a cousin who had never understood her taste.

D D D D D D D

A windy night. The lids of GI cans blow clanging across the parade ground. Sentries in their idleness are practicing Queen Anne salutes. Sometimes gusts of wind come that rock the jeeps on their springs,

even the empty deuce 'n' a halfs and civilian bobtail rigs—shock absorbers groan, deeply, in discomfort ... in the peaks of wind, living pine trees move, lined above the last sand dropoff into the North Sea. . . .

Walking at a brisk pace, but out of step, across the lorry-scarred spaces of the old Krupp works here, Doctors Muffage and Spontoon look anything but conspiratorial. You take them immediately for what they seem: a tiny beachhead of London respectability here in benighted Cuxhaven—tourists in this semicivilized colony of sulfa shaken into the wells of blood, syrettes and tourniquets, junkie M.O.s and sadistic corpsmen, a colony they were spared for the Duration, thank heaven, Muffage's brother being highly placed in a certain Ministry, Spontoon having been technically disqualified because of a strange hysterical stigma, shaped like the ace of spades and nearly the same color, which would appear on his left cheek at moments of high stress, accompanied by severe migraine. Only a few months ago they felt themselves as fully mobilized as any British civilian, and thus amenable to most Government requests. About the present mission, though, both now are deep in peacetime second thoughts. How quickly history passes these days.

"I can't think why he asked us," Muffage stroking his full Imperial (a gesture that manages only to look compulsive), speaking in a voice perhaps too melodious for a man of his mass, "he must know I haven't done one of these since '27."

"I assisted at a few whilst I was interning," Spontoon recalls. "That was during the great vogue they had at mental institutions, you know."

"I can name you a few National Institutions where it's still in vogue." The medicos share a chuckle, full of that British Weltschmerz that looks so uncomfortable on the faces of the afflicted. "See here, then, Spontoon, you'd rather assist me, is that it?"

"Oh, either way you know. I mean it's not as if there'll be some chap with a book standing there, you know, writing it all down."

"I wouldn't be too sure. Weren't you listening? Didn't you notice anything ..."

"Enthusiastic."

"Obsessional. I wonder if Pointsman isn't losing his grip," sounding here remarkably like James Mason: "L(h)oo-ssing(?) hiss khríp."

They are looking at each other now, separate night scapes of Marston shelters and parked vehicles flowing darkly by together behind each face. The wind carries smells of brine, of beach, of petrol. A distant radio tuned to the General Forces Programme features Sandy MacPherson at the Organ.

"Oh, all of us . . ." Spontoon begins, but lets it lapse.

"Here we are."

The bright office is hung with crimson-lipped, sausage-limbed Petty Girl pin-ups. A coffee mess hisses in the corner. There's also a smell of rancid shoe-dubbing. A corporal sits with his feet on a desk, absorbed in an American Bugs Bunny comic book.

"Slothrop," in answer to Muffage's inquiry, "yes yes the Yank in the, the pig suit. Well, he's in and out all the time. Completely dotty. What are you lot then, M.I. 6 or something?"

"Can't discuss it," raps Spontoon. Fancies himself a bit of a Nay-land Smith, Spontoon does. "D'you know where we might find a General Wivern?"

"This time of night? Down at the alcohol dump, most likely. Follow the tracks, head for all the noise. If I weren't on duty, I'd be there m'self."

"Pig suit," frowns Muffage.

"Big bloody pig suit, yellow, pink, and blue, on my oath," replies the corporal. "You'll know him when you see him. You wouldn't have a cigarette, one of you gentlemen, by any chance."

Sounds of carousing reach them as they trudge along the tracks, past empty triple flats and tank cars. "Alcohol dump."

"Fuel for their Nazi rockets, I'm told. If they ever get one in working order."

Under a cold umbrella of naked light bulbs are gathered a crowd of Army personnel, American sailors, NAAFI girls, and German fräuleins. Fraternizing, every last one of them, shamefully, amid noise which becomes, as Muffage and Spontoon reach the edge of the gathering, a song, at whose center, with a good snootful, each arm circling a smiling and disheveled young tootsie, ruddy face under these lights gone an apoplectic mauve, and leading the glee, is the same General Wivern they last saw in Pointsman's office back at Twelfth House. From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn. Ukuleles, kazoos, harmonicas, and any number of makeshift metal noisemakers accompany the song, which is an innocent salute to Postwar, a hope that the end of shortages, the end of Austerity, is near:

It's—

Mouth trip-ping time!

Mouth trip-ping time!

Time to open up that icebox door—

Oh yes it's

Mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time,

And once you've eaten some, you'll come, for more!

Ah, mouthtrip-ping time,

Mouthtrip-ping time!

It's something old, but also very new-w-w—

Life's so sublime,

In mouthtrip-ping time—

We hope you're all mouthírzp-ping, toooooo!

Next chorus is soldiers 'n' sailors all together for the first eight bars, girls for the second, General Wivern singing the next eight solo, and tutti to finish it up. Then comes a chorus for ukuleles and kazoos and so on while everyone dances, black neckerchiefs whipping about like the mustaches of epileptic villains, delicate snoods unloosening to allow stray locks of hair to escape their tight rolls, skirt-hems raised to expose flashing knees and slips edged in prewar Cluny lace a frail flight of smoky bat-wings here under the white electricity ... on the final chorus the boys circle clockwise, girls anticlockwise, the ensemble opening out into a rose-pattern, from the middle of which dissipatedly leering tosspot General Wivern, tankard aloft, is hoisted briefly, like an erect stamen.

About the only one not participating here, aside from the two prowling surgeons, is Seaman Bodine, whom we left, you recall, carrying on in the bathtub at Säure Bummer's place back in Berlin. Impeccable tonight in dress whites, straight-faced and sober, he trudges among the merrymakers, thickly sprouting hair from jumper sleeves and V-neck, so much of it that last week he spooked and lost a connection just in from the CBI theatre with close to a ton of bhang, who mistook him for a seagoing version of the legendary yeti or abominable snowman. To make up some of what he blew on that one, Bo-dine is tonight promoting the First International Runcible Spoon Fight, between his shipmate Avery Purfle and an English Commando named St. John Bladdery. "Place yer bets, yes yes the odds are even, 50/50," announces suave croupier Bodine, pushing through the gathered bodies, many of them far from upright, one shaggy hand clutching a wad of occupation scrip. With the other, from time to time, he will tug the big collar of his jumper around and blow his nose on it, grommets on the hem of his T-shirt blinking, light bulbs dancing overhead in the wind he's raised, his own several shadows thrashing in all directions and merging with others.

"Greetings, gate, need an opiate?" Tiny red eyes in a vast pink Jell-o of a face, and an avaricious smile. It is Albert Krypton, corpsman striker of the U.S.S. John E. Badass, who now produces from inside a secret jumper pocket a glass vial full of white tablets. "Codeine, Jackson, it's beautiful—here."

Bodine sneezes violently and wipes the snot away with his sleeve. "Not for any fucking cold, Krypton. Thanks. You seen Avery?"

"He's in great shape. He was getting in some last-minute practice down the goat hole when I came over."

"Listen, old buddy," begins the enterprising tar. This decrypts into 3 ounces of cocaine. Bodine comes up with a few squashed notes. "Midnight, if you can. Told him I'd see him out at Putzi's after the fight."

"Solid. Hey, you checked under the barracks lately?" Seems the CBI returnees get together to play marbles with opium balls. You can pick up hundreds if you're any good. Corpsman Krypton pockets his money and leaves Bodine flexing his thumb and thinking about it, moves on copping feels, pausing to drink from a shell case of grain alcohol and grapefruit juice, whilst dealing the odd tablet of codeine. He has a brief paranoid episode as two red-hatted MPs show up, stroking their billy clubs and giving him, he fancies, pregnant looks. He slides into the night, peeling away, banking through dark sky. He is coming on to a proprietary mixture known as the Krypton Blue, and so it is a giddy passage to the dispensary, not without moments of deep inattention.

Inside, his connection, Pharmacist Birdbury, is conducting the last act of La Forza del Destino crackling in from Radio Luxembourg, and singing along. His mouth snaps shut as Krypton comes taxiing in. With him is what appears to be a gigantic, multicolored pig, the plush nap of its coat reversed here and there, which widens the possible range of colors. "Micrograms," Krypton striking his head dramatically, "that's right, micrograms, not milligrams. Birdbury, gimme something, I've OD'd."