Penguin books

No letters from London, not even news of ACHTUNG. All gone. Teddy Bloat one day just vanished: other conspirators, like a chorus line, will show up off and on behind Katje and Sir Stephen, dancing in, all with identical Corporate Smiles, the multiplication of whose glittering choppers is to dazzle him, they think, distract him from what they're taking away, his ID, his service dossier, his past. Well, fuck . . .

you know. He lets it happen. He's more interested, and sometimes a little anxious, about what they seem to be adding on. At some point, apparently on a whim, though how can a fellow be sure, Slothrop decides to raise a mustache. Last mustache he had was at age 13, he sent away to that Johnson Smith for a whole Mustache Kit, 20 different shapes from Fu Manchu to Groucho Marx. They were made of black cardboard, with hooks that fit into your nose. After a while snot would soak into these hooks, and they'd grow limp, and the mustache would fall off.

"What kind?" Katje wants to know, soon as this one is visible.

"Bad-guy," sez Slothrop. Meaning, he explains, trimmed, narrow, and villainous.

"No, that'll give you a negative attitude. Why not raise a good-guy mustache instead?"

"But good guys don't have—"

"Oh no? What about Wyatt Earp?"

To which one might've advanced the objection that Wyatt wasn't all that good. But this is still back in the Stuart Lake era here, before the revisionists moved in, and Slothrop believes in that Wyatt, all right. One day a General Wivern, of SHAEF Technical Staff, comes in and sees it. "The ends droop down," he observes.

"So did that Wyatt's," explains Slothrop. "So did John Wilkes Booth's," replies the general. "Eh?"

Slothrop ponders. "He was a bad guy."

"Precisely. Why don't you twist the ends up?"

"You mean English style. Well, I tried that. It must be the weather or something, the old duster just keeps droopin' down again, a-and I need to bite those ends off. It's really annoying."

"It's disgusting," sez Wivern. "Next time I come round I shall bring you some wax for it. They make it with a bitter taste to discourage, ah, end-chewers, you know."

So as the mustache waxes, Slothrop waxes the mustache. Every day there's something new like this. Katje's always there, slipped by Them into his bed like nickels under the pillow for his deciduous Americanism, innocent incisors 'n' Momworshiping molars just left in a clattering trail back down these days at the Casino. For some odd reason he finds himself with hardons right after study sessions. Hm, that's peculiar. There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German—brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss ... or memorizing

conversion factors, inches to centimeters, horsepower to Pferdestärke, drawing from memory schematics and isometrics of the snarled maze of fuel, oxidizer, steam, peroxide and permanganate lines, valves, vents, chambers—what's sexy about that? still he emerges from each lesson with great hardon, tremendous pressure inside . . . some of that temporary insanity, he reckons, and goes looking for Katje, hands to crabwalk his back and silk stockings squealing against his hipbones. . . .

During the lessons he will often look over and catch Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck consulting a stopwatch and taking notes. Jeepers. He wonders what that's all about. Never occurs to him it might have to do with these mysterious erections. The man's personality was chosen— or designed—to sidetrack suspicions before they have a chance to gather speed. Winter sunlight hitting half his face like a migraine, trouser cuffs out of press, wet and sandy because he's up every morning at six to walk along the strand, Sir Stephen makes perfectly accessible his disguise, if not his function in the conspiracy. For all Slothrop knows he's an agronomist, a brain surgeon, a concert oboist—in that London you saw all levels of command seething with these multidimensional geniuses. But as with Katje, there hangs about Dodson-Truck's well-informed zeal an unmistakable aura of the employee and loser. . . .

One day Slothrop gets a chance to check this out. Seems Dodson-Truck is a chess fanatic. Down in the bar one afternoon he gets around to asking Slothrop if he plays.

"Nope," lying, "not even checkers."

"Damn. I've hardly had time till now for a good game."

"I do know a game," has something of Tantivy been sheltering inside all this time? "a drinking game, it's called Prince, maybe the English even invented it, cause you have those princes, right? and we don't, not that that's wrong understand, but everybody takes a number, a-and you start off the Prince of Wales has lost his tails, no offense now, the numbers going clockwise around the table, and number two has found them, clockwise from that Prince, or whatever number he wants to call out actually, he, that's the Prince, six or anything, see, you pick a Prince first, he starts it off, then that number two, or whoever that Prince called, sez. but first he goes, the Prince does, Wales, tails, two sir, after saying that about how that Prince of Wales has lost his tails, and number two answers, not I, sir—"

"Yes yes but—" giving Slothrop a most odd look, "I mean I'm not quite sure I really see, you know, the point to it all. How does one win?"

Ha! How does one win, indeed. "One doesn't win," easing into it, thinking of Tantivy, one small impromptu counter-conspiracy here, "one loses. One by one. Whoever's left is the winner."

"It sounds rather negative."

"Garçon." Drinks here are always on the house for Slothrop— They are springing for it, he imagines. "Some of that champagne! Wantcha to just keep it coming, and any time we run out, go get more, comprendez?" Any number of slack-jawed subalterns, hearing the magic word, drift over and take seats while Slothrop explains the rules.

"I'm not sure—" Dodson-Truck begins.

"Baloney. Come on, do you good to get outa that chess rut."

"Right, right," agree the others.

Dodson-Truck stays in his seat, a bit tense.

"Bigger glasses," Slothrop hollers at the waiter. "How about those beer mugs over there! Yeah! They'd be just fine." The waiter unblasts a Jeroboam of Veuve Clicquot Brut, and fills everybody up.

"Well, the Prince o' Wales," Slothrop commences, "has lost his tails, and number three has found them. Wales, tails, three sir!"

"Not I, sir," replies Dodson-Truck, kind of defensive about it.

"Who, sir?"

"Five, sir."

"Say what?" inquires Five, a Highlander in parade trews, with a sly look.

"You fucked up," commands princely Slothrop, "so you got to drink up. All the way now, 'n' no stopping to breathe or anything."

On it goes. Slothrop loses Prince position to Four, and all the numbers change. The Scot is first to drop, making mistakes at first deliberate but soon inevitable. Jeroboams come and go, fat, green, tattered gray foil at the necks giving back the bar's electric radiance. Corks grow straighter, less mushroomy, dates of degorgement move further into the war years as the company gets drunker. The Scot has rolled chuckling from his chair, remaining ambulatory for some ten feet, where he goes to sleep against a potted palm. At once another junior officer slides beaming into his place. The word has osmosed out into the Casino, and there is presently a throng of kibitzers gathered around the table, waiting for casualties. Ice is being hauled in by the giant block, fern-faulted inside, breathing white off of its faces, to be sledged and chipped into a great wet tub for the procession of bottles being run up from the cellar now in relays. It soon becomes necessary for the harassed waiters to stack empty tankards in pyramids and pour fountain-style from the top, the bubble-shot cascades provoking

cheers from the crowd. Some joker is sure to reach in and grab one of the mugs on the bottom, sending the whole arrangement swaying, everybody else jumping to salvage what they can before it all comes down, crashing, soaking uniforms and shoes—so that it can be set up all over again. The game has switched to Rotating Prince, where each number called out immediately becomes Prince, and all the numbers shift accordingly. By this time it is impossible to tell who's making mistakes and who isn't. Arguments arise. Half the room are singing a vulgar song:

vulgar song

Last night I poked the Queen of Transylvan-ia,

Tonight I'll poke the Queen of Burgundee—

I'm bordering on the State of Schizophren-ia,

But Queenie is so very nice to me. ...

It's pink champagne and caviar for break-fast,

A spot of Chateaubriand wiv me tea—

Ten-shilling panatelas now are all that I can smoke,

I laugh so much you'd think the world was just a silly joke,

So call me what you will, m' lads, but make way for the bloke

That's poked the love-ly lit-tle Queen of Transyl-vaayn-yaa!

Slothrop's head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizontally, constantly across the room, whilst staying in one place. Each brain cell has become a bubble: he's been transmuted to black Epernay grapes, cool shadows, noble cuvées. He looks across at Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck, who is still miraculously upright though with a glaze about the eyes. Aha, right, s'posed to be counter-conspiring here, yes yes uh, now ... he gets involved watching another pyramidal fountain, this time of sweet Taittinger with no date on the label. Waiters and off-duty dealers sit like birds along the bar, staring. Noise in the place is incredible. A Welshman with an accordion stands on a table playing "Lady of Spain," in C, just zooming up and down that wheezebox like a maniac. Smoke hangs thick and swirling. Pipes glow in the murk. At least three fist-fights are in progress. The Prince game is difficult to locate any more. Girls crowd at the door, giggling and pointing. The light in the room has gone bear-brown with swarming uniforms. Slothrop, clutching his tankard, struggles to his feet, spins around once, falls with a crash into a floating crown-and-anchor game. Grace, he warns himself: grace. . . . Roisterers pick him up by the armpits and back pockets, and fling him in the direction of Sir Stephen Dodson-Truck. He makes his way on under a table, a lieutenant or two falling over him on route, through the odd pond of spilled bubbly, the odd slough of vomit, till he finds what he imagines to be Dodson-Truck's sand-filled cuffs.

"Hey," getting himself threaded among the legs of a chair, angling his head up to locate Dodson-Truck's face, haloed by a hanging fringe-shaded lamp. "Can you walk?"

Carefully swinging his eyes down on Slothrop, "Not sure, actually, that I can stand. . . ." They spend some time at the business of untangling Slothrop from the chair, then standing up, which is not without its complications—locating the door, aiming for it. ... Staggering, propping each other up, they push through a bottle-wielding, walleyed, unbuttoned, roaring, white-faced and stomach-clutching mob, in among the lithe and perfumed audience of girls at the exit, all sweetly high, a decompression lock for the outside.

"Holy shit." This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct. Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted ... of course Empire took its way westward, what other way was there but into those virgin sunsets to penetrate and to foul?

But out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing . . . these robed figures—perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall—their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha's, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over Lübeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction. It was the next-to-last step London took before her submission, before that liaison that would bring her at length to the eruption and scarring of the wasting pox noted on Roger Mexico's map, latent in this love she shares with the night-going rake Lord Death . . . because sending the RAF to make a terror raid against civilian Lübeck was the unmistakable long look that said hurry up and fuck me, that brought the rockets hard and screaming, the A4s, which were to've been fired anyway, a bit sooner instead. . . .

What have the watchmen of world's edge come tonight to look for? deepening on now, monumental beings, stoical, on toward slag,

toward ash the color the night will stabilize at, tonight . . . what is there grandiose enough to witness? only Slothrop here, and Sir Stephen, blithering along, crossing shadow after long prison-bar shadow cast by the tall trunks of palms lining the esplanade. The spaces between the shadows are washed a very warm sunset-red now, across grainy chocolate beach. There seems to be nothing happening of any moment. No traffic whispering in the circular driveways, no milliards of francs being wagered because of a woman or an entente of nations at any of the tables inside. Only the somewhat formal weeping of Sir Stephen, down now on one knee in the sand still warm from the day: soft and strangled cries of despair held in, so testifying to all the repression he ever underwent that even Slothrop can feel, in his own throat, sympathetic flashes of pain for the effort it is clearly costing the man. . . .

"Oh yes, yes you know, I, I, I can't. No. I assumed that you knew— but then why should they tell you? They all know. I'm an office joke. The people even know. Nora's been the sweetheart of the psychic crowd for years and years. That's always good for some bit of copy in the News of the World—

"Oh! Yeah! Nora—that's that dame that was caught that time with that kid who-who can change his color, right? Wow! Sure, that Nora Dodson-Truck! I knew your name was familiar—"

But Sir Stephen has gone on: "... had a son, yes we came complete with sensitive son, boy about your age. Frank ... I think they sent him to Indo-China. They're very polite when I ask, very polite but, they won't let me find out where he is. ... They're good chaps at Fitzmau-rice House, Slothrop. They mean well. It's been, most of it's been my fault. ... I did love Nora. I did. But there were other things. . . . Important things. I believed they were. I still do. I must. As she got along, you know . . . they do get that way. You know how they are, demanding, always trying to-to drag you into bed. I couldn't," shaking his head, his hair now incandescent orange in this twilight, "I couldn't. I'd climbed too far. Another branch. Couldn't climb back down to her. She-she might even have been happy with a, even a touch now and then. . . . Listen Slothrop, your girl, your Katje, sh-she's very lovely, you know."

"I know."

"Th-they think I don't care, any more. 'You can observe without passion.' Bastards . . . No I didn't mean that. . . . Slothrop, we're all such mechanical men. Doing our jobs. That's all we are. Listen—how do you think I feel? When you're off with her after every lesson. I'm an impotent man—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write ..."

"Hey, Ace—"

"Don't get angry. I'm harmless. Go ahead hit me, I'll only fall over and bounce right up again. Watch." He demonstrates. "I care about you, both of you. I do care, believe me, Slothrop."

"O.K. Tell me what's going on."

"I care!"

"Fine, fine ..."

"My 'function' is to observe you. That's my function. You like my function? You like it? Your 'function' ... is, learn the rocket, inch by inch, /have ... to send in a daily log of your progress. And that's all I know."

But that's not all. He's holding something back, something deep, and fool Slothrop is too drunk to get at it with any kind of style. "Me and Katje too? You looking through the keyhole?"

Sniffling, "What difference's it make? I'm the perfect man for it. Perfect. I can't even masturbate half the time ... no nasty jissom getting all over their reports, you know. Wouldn't want that. Just a neuter, just a recording eye. . . . They're so cruel. I don't think they even know, really. . . . They aren't even sadists. . . . There's just no passion at all. ..."

Slothrop puts a hand on his shoulder. The suit padding shifts and bunches over the warm bone beneath it. He doesn't know what to say, what to do: himself, he feels empty, and wants to sleep. . . . But Sir Stephen is on his knees, just about, quaking at the edge of it, to tell Slothrop a terrible secret, a fatal confidence concerning:

the penis he thought was His own

(lead tenor): 'Twas the penis, he thought-was, his own— Just a big playful boy of a bone . . . With a stout purple head, Sticking up from the bed, Where the girlies all played Telephone—

(bass): Te-le-phone. . . .

(inner voices): But They came through the hole in the night,

(bass): And They sweet-talked it clear out of sight—

(inner voices): Out of sight. . .

(tenor): Now he sighs all alone,

With a heartbroken moan,

For the pe-nis, he thought-was, his, owwwwn! (inner voices): Was, his, own!

The figures out to sea have been attending, growing now even more windy and remote as the light goes cold and out. . . . They are so difficult to reach across to—difficult to grasp. Carroll Eventyr, trying to confirm the Lübeck angel, learned how difficult—he and his control Peter Sachsa both, floundering in the swamp between the worlds. Later on, in London, came the visit from that most ubiquitous of double agents, Sammy Hilbert-Spaess, whom everyone had thought in Stockholm, or was it Paraguay?

"Here then," the kindly scombroid face scanning Eventyr, quick as a fire-control dish antenna and even less mercy, "I thought I'd—

"You thought you'd just check in."

"Telepathic too, God he's amazing i'n't he." But the fishy eyes will not let up. It is a rather bare room, the address behind Gallaho Mews ordinarily reserved for cash transactions. They have summoned Eventyr up from "The White Visitation." They know in London how to draw pentacles too, and cry conjurations, how to bring in exactly the ones they want. . . . The tabletop is crowded with glasses, smudged, whitish, emptied or with residues of deep brown and red drinks, with ashtrays and with debris from artificial flowers which old Sammy here has been plucking, unpeeling, twisting into mysterious curves and knots. Trainsmoke blows in a partly opened window. One wall of the room, though blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives, as certain mirrors in public eating-places have been by the images of customers: a surface gathering character, like an old face. . . .

"But then you don't actually talk to him," ah, Sammy's so good at this, softly-softly, "I mean it's none of your telegraphers in the middle of the night having a bit of a chat sort of thing. ..."

"No. No." Eventyr understanding now that they've been seeing transcripts of everything that comes through from Peter Sachsa—that what Eventyr himself gets to read is already censored. And that it may have been this way for a while now. ... So relax, grow passive, watch for a shape to develop out of Sammy's talking, a shape that really Eventyr knows already, as we do working out acrostics—he's called up to London, but they aren't asking to be put in touch with anyone, so it's Sachsa himself they're interested in, and the purpose of this meeting is not to commission Eventyr, but to warn him. To put a part of his own hidden life under interdiction. Bits, tones of voice, choices of phrasing now come flying together: "... must've been quite a shock to find himself over there . . . had a Zaxa or two of me own to worry about. . . keep you out of the street at least. . . see how you're holding

up, old Zaxa too of course, need to filter out personalities you see from the data, easier for us that way. ..."

Out of the street? Everyone knows how Sachsa died. But no one knows why he was out there that day, what led up to it. And what Sammy is telling Eventyr here is: Don't ask.

Then will they try to get to Nora too? If there are analogies here, if Eventyr does, somehow, map on to Peter Sachsa, then does Nora Dodson-Truck become the woman Sachsa loved, Leni Pokier? Will the interdiction extend to Nora's smoky voice and steady hands, and is Eventyr to be kept, for the duration, perhaps for his life, under some very sophisticated form of house arrest, for crimes that will never be told him?

Nora still carries on her Adventure, her "Ideology of the Zero," firm among the stoneswept hair of the last white guardians at the last stepoff into the black, into the radiant. . . . But where will Leni be now? Where will she have wandered off to, carrying her child, and her dreams that will not grow up? Either we didn't mean to lose her—either it was an ellipsis in our care, in what some of us will even swear is our love, or someone has taken her, deliberately, for reasons being kept secret, and Sachsa's death is part of it too. She has swept with her wings another life—not husband Franz, who dreamed of, prayed for exactly such a taking but instead is being kept for something quite different—Peter Sachsa, who was passive in a different way ... is there some mistake? Do They never make mistakes, or ... why is he here rushing with her toward her own end (as indeed Eventyr has been sucked along in Nora's furious wake) her body blocking from his sight everything that lies ahead, the slender girl strangely grown oaken, broad, maternal ... all he has to go by is the debris of their time sweeping in behind from either side, looping away in long helices, into the dusty invisible where a last bit of sunlight lies on the stones of the road. . . . Yes: however ridiculously, he is acting out Franz Pokler's fantasy for him, here crouched on her back, very small, being taken: taken forward into an aether-wind whose smell ... no not that smell last encountered just before his birth . . . the void long before he ought to be remembering . . . which means, if it's here again . . . then . . . then . . .

They are being pushed backward by a line of police. Peter Sachsa is jammed inside it, trying to keep his footing, no escape possible . . . Leni's face moving, restless, against the window of the Hamburg Flyer, concrete roads, pedestals, industrial towers of the Mark flying away at over a hundred miles an hour the perfect background, brown,

blurred, any least mistake, in the points, in the roadbed at this speed and they're done for . . . her skirt is pulled up in back, the bare bottoms of her thighs, marked red from the train seat, turn toward him . . . yes ... in the imminence of disaster, yes, whoever's watching yes. . . . "Leni, where are you?" She was at his elbow not ten seconds ago. They'd agreed beforehand to try and keep together. But there are two sorts of movement out here—as often as the chance displacements of strangers, across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will bring together people who'll remain that way for a time, in love that can even make the oppression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she's there, already last words—"Will Walter be bringing wine tonight? I forgot to—" it's a private joke, his forgetting, going around in some adolescent confusion, hopelessly in love too by now with the little girl, Use. She is his refuge from society, parties, clients . . . often she is his sanity. He's taken to sitting for a little while each night beside her bed, late at night, watching her sleep, with her bottom up in the air and face in the pillow . . . the purity, the Tightness of it... But her mother, in her own sleep, grinds her teeth often these nights, frowns, talks in a tongue he cannot admit he might, some time or place, know and speak fluently. Just in this past week . . . what does he know of politics? but he can see that she has crossed a threshold, found a branching of the time, where he might not be able to follow—