Penguin books
Yüklə 3,05 Mb.
|
|
The outermost sentry peers from his rusty-boned cement ruin, and for two full pedal-swings they are both, he and Katje, out in the daylight, blending with packed earth, rust, blobbing perforations of sunlight cold gold and slick as glass, the fresh wind in the trees. Hyperthyroidal African eyes, their irises besieged as early cornflowers by the crowding fields of white . . . Ooga-booga! Gwine jump on dis drum hyah! Tell de res' ob de trahb back in de village, yowzah! So, DUMdumdumdum, DUMdumdumdum, O.K., but still there's no room in her demeanor for even curiosity (of course weren't there going to be drums, a chance for violence? A snake jumping off of a limb, a very large presence ahead among the thousand bowing tree-tops, a scream inside herself, a leap upward into primal terror, surrendering to it and so—she has dreamt—regaining her soul, her long-lost self. . .). Nor will she waste more than token glances now on the German lawns rushing so deeply away into green hazes or hills, the pale limbs of marble balusters beside sanitarium walks that curve restlessly, in a fever, a stifling, into thickets of penis-budded sprig and thorn so old, so without comfort that eyes are drawn, seized by the tear-glands and dragged to find, to find at all cost, the path that has disappeared so suddenly ... or to look behind to hold on to some trace of the spa, a corner of the Sprudelhof, the highest peak of the white-sugar bandstand, something to counteract Pan's whisper inside the dark grove Come in . . . forget them. Come in here. . . . No. Not Katje. She has been into the groves and thickets. She has danced naked and spread her cunt to the horns of grove-dwelling beasts. She has felt the moon in the soles of her feet, taken its tides with the surfaces of her brain. Pan was a lousy lover. Today, in public, they have no more than nervous glances for each other. What does happen now, and this is quite alarming, is that out of nowhere suddenly appear a full dancing-chorus of Herero men. They are dressed in white sailor suits designed to show off asses, crotches, slim waists and shapely pectorals, and they are carrying a girl all in silver lame, a loud brassy dame after the style of Diamond Lil or Texas Guinan. As they set her down, everyone begins to dance and sing: Pa—ra—nooooíiiia, Pa-ra-noia! Ain't it grand ta see, that good-time face, again! Pa-ra-noi-ya, boy oh boy, yer Just a bit of you-know-what From way back when! Even Goya, couldn't draw ya, Not the way you looked, just kickin' in that door— Call a lawyer, Paranoia, Lemme will my ass to you, for-ever-more! Then Andreas and Pavel come out in tap shoes (liberated from a rather insolent ENSA show that came through in July) to do one of those staccato tap-and-sing numbers: Pa- ra- noi— (clippety-clippety-clippety cl[ya,]op!) Pa- ra- noi— (shufflestomp! shufflestomp! shufflestomp! [and] cl[ya,]op! clickety cl[Ain't]ick) it grand (clop) ta (clop) see (clippyclop) yer good-time face again! etc. Well, Katje realizes long before the first 8 bars of all this that the brazen blonde bombshell is none other than herself: she is doing a dance routine with these black sailors-ashore. Having gathered also that she is the allegorical figure of Paranoia (a grand old dame, a little wacky but pure heart), she must say that she finds the jazzy vulgarity of this music a bit distressing. What she had in mind was more of an Isadora Duncan routine, classical and full of gauzes, and—well, white. What Pirate Prentice briefed her on was folklore, politics, Zonal strategies—but not blackness. When that was what she most needed to know about. How can she pass now through so much blackness to redeem herself? How can she expect to find Slothrop? among such blackness (subvocalizing the word as an old man might speak the name of a base public figure, letting it gutter out into real blackness: into being spoken no more). There is that stubborn, repressive heat to her thoughts. It is none of your heavy racist skin-prickling, no, but a feeling of one more burden, along with the scarcity of food in the Zone, the chicken-coop, cave or basement lodgings at sunfall, the armed-occupation phobias and skulkings as bad as Holland last year, comfortable in here at least, lotos-snuggly, but disastrous out in the World of Reality she still believes in and will never give up hoping to rejoin someday. All that's not bad enough, no, now she must also endure blackness. Her ignorance of it must see her through. With Andreas she is charming, she radiates that sensuality peculiar to women who are concerned with an absent lover's safety. But then she must see Enzian. Their first meeting. Each in a way has been loved by Captain Blicero. Each had to arrive at some way of making it bearable, just bearable, for just long enough, one day by one. . . . "Oberst. I am happy—" her voice breaks. Genuinely. Her head inclines across his desk no longer than is necessary to thank, to declare her passivity. The hell she's happy. He nods, angles his beard at a chair. This, then, is the Golden Bitch of Blicero's last letters from Holland. Enzian formed no image of her then, too taken up, too gagged with sorrow at what was happening to Weissmann. She seemed then only one of the expected forms of horror that must be populating his world. But, ethnic when he least wants to be, Enzian came after a while to think of her as the great Kalahari rock painting of the White Woman, white from the waist down, carrying bow and arrows, trailed by her black handmaiden through an erratic space, stone and deep, figures of all sizes moving to and fro. . . . But here is the true Golden Bitch. He's surprised at how young and slender she is—a paleness as of having begun to leak away from this world, likely to vanish entirely at any too-reckless grab. She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it. You must want her, but never indicate it—not by eyes or move—or she will clarify, dead gone as smoke above a trail moving into the desert, and you'll never have the chance again. "You must have seen him more recently than I." He speaks quietly. She is surprised at his politeness. Disappointed: she was expecting more force. Her lip has begun to lift. "How did he seem?" "Alone." Her brusque and sideways nod. Gazing back at him with the best neutrality she can be sure of in the circs. She means, You were not with him, when he needed you. "He was always alone." She understands then that it isn't timidity, she was wrong. It is decency. The man wants to be decent. He leaves himself open. (So does she, but only because everything that might hurt has long been numbed out. There's small risk for Katje.) But Enzian risks what former lovers risk whenever the Beloved is present, in fact or in word: deepest possibilities for shame, for sense of loss renewed, for humiliation and mockery. Shall she mock? Has he made that too easy—and then, turning, counted on her for fair play? Can she be as honest as he, without risking too much? "He was dying," she tells him, "he looked very old. I don't even know if he left Holland alive." "He—" and this hesitation may be (a) in consideration of her feelings, or (b) for reasons of Schwarzkommando security, or (c) both of the above . . . but then, hell, the Principle of Maximizing Risk takes over again: "he got as far as the Lüneberg Heath. If you didn't know, you ought to." "You've been looking for him." "Yes. So has Slothrop been, though I don't think Slothrop knows that." "Slothrop and I—" she looks around the room, her eyes skitter off metal surfaces, papers, facets of salt, cannot come to rest anywhere. As if making a desperate surprise confession: "Everything is so remote now. I don't really know why they sent me out here. I don't know any more who Slothrop really was. There's a failure in the light. I can't see. It's all going away from me. ..." It isn't yet time to touch her, but Enzian reaches out gives a friendly chin-up tap on the back of her hand, a military now-see-here. "There are things to hold to. None of it may look real, but some of it is. Really."
So she's only been talking with Enzian about a common friend. Is this how the Vacuum feels? "Slothrop and I" didn't work too well. Should she have said "Blicero and I"? What would that have got her into with the African? "Blicero and I," he begins softly, watching her over burnished cheekbones, cigarette smoldering in his curled right hand, "we were only close in certain ways. There were doors I did not open. Could not. Around here, I play an omniscient. I'd say don't give me away, but it wouldn't matter. Their minds are made up. I am the Berlin Snoot supreme, Oberhauptberlinerschnauze Enzian. I know it all, and they don't trust me. They gossip in a general way about me and Blicero, as yarns to be spun—the truth wouldn't change either their distrust or my Unlimited Access. They'd only be passing a story along, another story. But the truth must mean something to you. "The Blicero I loved was a very young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance. Those all must have been important to me once. What I am now grew from that. A former self is a fool, an insufferable ass, but he's still human, you'd no more turn him out than you'd turn out any other kind of cripple, would you?" He seems to be asking her for real advice. Are these the sorts of problems that occupy his time? What about the Rocket, the Empty Ones, the perilous infancy of his nation? "What can Blicero matter to you?" is what she finally asks. He doesn't have to think for long. He has often imagined the coming of a Questioner. "At this point, I would take you to a balcony. An observation deck. I would show you the Raketen-Stadt. Plexiglass maps of the webs we maintain across the Zone. Underground schools, systems for distributing food and medicine. . . . We would gaze down on staff-rooms, communications centers, laboratories, clinics. I would say—" "All this will I give you, if you will but—"
He is a lion, this man, ego-mad—but despite everything, Katje likes him. "But if he were still alive—" "No way to know. I have letters he wrote after he left your city. He was changing. Terribly. You ask what he could matter to me. My slender white adventurer, grown twenty years sick and old—the last heart in which I might have been granted some being—was changing, toad to prince, prince to fabulous monster. . . . 'If he is alive,' he may have changed by now past our recognition. We could have driven under him in the sky today and never seen. Whatever happened at the end, he has transcended. Even if he's only dead. He's gone beyond his pain, his sin—driven deep into Their province, into control, synthesis and control, further than—" well, he was about to say "we" but "I" seems better after all, "I haven't transcended. I've only been elevated. That must be as empty as things get: it's worse than being told you won't have to die by someone you can't believe in. ... "Yes he matters to me, very much. He is an old self, a dear albatross I cannot let go." "And me?" She gathers that he expects her to sound like a woman of the 1940s. "And me," indeed. But she can think of no other way offhand to help him, to allow him a moment of comfort. . . . "You, poor Katje. Your story is the saddest of all." She looks up to see exactly how his face will be mocking her. She is stunned to see tears instead running, running over his cheeks. "You've only been set free," his voice then breaking on the last word, his face brushing forward a moment into a cage of hands, then uncaging again for a try at her own gay waltztime gallows laugh. Oh, no, is he about to go goofy on her too? What she needs right now in her life, from some man in her life, is stability, mental health and strength of character. Not this. "I told Slothrop he was free, too. I tell anybody who might listen. I will tell them as I tell you: you are free. You are free. You are free. .. ." "How can my story be sadder than that?" Shameless girl, she isn't humoring him, she's actually flirting with him now, any technique her crepe-paper and spider-italics young ladyhood ever taught her, to keep from having to move into his blackness. Understand it isn't his blackness, but her own—an inadmissible darkness she is making believe for the moment is Enzian's, something beyond even the center of Pan's grove, something not pastoral at all, but of the city, a set of ways in which the natural forces are turned aside, stepped down, rectified or bled to ground and come out very like the malignant dead: the Qlip-poth that Weissmann has "transcended," souls whose journey across was so bad that they lost all their kindness back in the blue lightning (the long sea-furrows of it rippling), and turned to imbecile killers and jokers, making unintelligible honks in the emptiness, sinewed and stripped thin as rats—a city-darkness that is her own, a textured darkness in which flows go in all directions, and nothing begins, and nothing ends. But as time passes things get louder there. It is shaking itself into her consciousness. "Flirt if you want," Enzian now just as smooth as that Gary Grant, "but expect to be taken seriously." Oh, ho. Here's whatcha came for, folks. Not necessarily. His bitterness (all properly receipted in German archives which may, however, be destroyed now) runs too deep for her, really. He must have learned a thousand masks (as the City will continue to mask itself against invasions we often do not see, whose outcomes we never learn, silent and unnoticed revolutions in the warehouse districts where the walls are blank, in the lots where the weeds grow thick), and this, no doubt, this Suave Older Exotic, is one of them. "I don't know what to do." She gets up in a long, long shrug and begins to stalk gracefully in the room. Her old style: a girl about 16 who thinks everyone is staring at her. Her hair falls like a hood. Her arms often touch. "You don't have to come into this any further than locating Slothrop," he finally gets around to telling her. "All you have to do is tag along with us, and wait till he shows up again. Why bother yourself with the rest?" "Because I feel," her voice, perhaps by design, very small, "that 'the rest' is exactly what I ought to be doing. I don't want to get away with some shallow win. I don't just want to—I don't know, pay him back for the octopus, or something. Don't I have to know why he's out here, what I did to him, for Them? How can They be stopped? How long can I get away with easy work, cheap exits? Shouldn't I be going all the way in?" Her masochism [Weissmann wrote from The Hague] is reassurance for her. That she can still be hurt, that she is human and can cry at pain. Because, often, she will forget. I can only try to guess how terrible that must be. . . . So, she needs the whip. She raises her ass not in surrender, but in despair—like your fears of impotence, and mine: can it still. . . will it fail. . . . But of true submission, of letting go the self and passing into the All, there is nothing, not with Katje. She is not the victim I would have chosen to end this with. Perhaps, before the end, there will be another. Perhaps I dream. ... I am not here, am I, to devote myself to her fantasies! "You are meant to survive. Yes, probably. No matter how painful you want to make it for yourself, still you're always going to come through. You're free to choose exactly how pleasant each passage will be. Usually it's given as a reward. I won't ask for what. I'm sorry, but you seem really not to know. That's why your story is saddest of all." "Reward—" she's getting mad. "It's a life-sentence. If you call that a reward, then what are you calling me?" "Nothing political." "You black bastard." "Exactly." He has allowed her to speak the truth. A clock chimes in the stone corner. "We have someone who was with Blicero in May. Just before the end. You don't have to—" "Come and listen, yes, Oberst. But I will." He rises, crooks her his official and gentlemanly arm, smiling sideways and feeling like a clown. Her own smiling is upward like mischievous Ophelia just having glimpsed the country of the mad and itching now to get away from court. Feedback, smile-to-smile, adjustments, waverings: what it damps out to is we will never know each other. Beaming, strangers, la-la-la, off to listen to the end of a man we both loved and we're strangers at the films, condemned to separate rows, aisles, exits, homegoings. Far away in another corridor a loud drill-bit strains, smokes, just before snapping. Cafeteria trays and steelware rattle, an innocent and kind sound behind familiar regions of steam, fat at the edge of souring, cigarette smoke, washwater, disinfectant—a cafeteria in the middle of the day. There are things to hold on to. ... D D D D D D D You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver's, and a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He's a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could tell! What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one. Well, it's a matter of continuity. Most people's lives have ups and downs that are relatively gradual, a sinuous curve with first derivatives at every point. They're the ones who never get struck by lightning. No real idea of cataclysm at all. But the ones who do get hit experience a singular point, a discontinuity in the curve of life—do you know what the time rate of change is at a cusp? Infinity, that's what! A-and right across the point, it's minus infinity! How's that for sudden change, eh? Infinite miles per hour changing to the same speed in reverse, all in the gnat's-ass or red cunt hair of the Is he interested in all those other worlds who send their dwarf reps out on the backs of eagles? Nope. Nor does he want to write a classic of anthropology, with the lightning-struck grouped into a subculture, even secretly organized, handshakes with sharp cusp-flicks of fingernails, private monthly magazine A Nickel Saved (which looks perfectly innocent, old Ben Franklin after inflation, unless you know the other half of the proverb: "... is a stockpile of nickel. "Making the real quote nickel-magnate Mark Hanna's: "You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything." So the real tide is Long Enough, which Those Who Know, know. The text of each issue of the magazine, when transformed this way, yields many interesting messages). To outsiders it's just a pleasant little club newsletter—-Jed Plunkitt held a barbecue for the Iowa Chapter the last weekend in April. Heard about the Amperage Contest, Jed. Tough luck! But come next Barbecue, you'll be back good as new. . . . Minnie Calkins (Chapter 1.793) got married Easter Sunday to a screen-door salesman from California. Sorry to say he's not eligible for Membership—at least not yet. But with all those screen doors around, we'll sure keep our fingers crossed! . . . Your Editor has been receiving many, many "Wha hoppen?" 's concerning the Spring Convention in De-catur when all the lights failed during the blessing. Glad to report now that trouble was traced finally to a giant transient in the line, "Kind of an electrical tidal wave," sez Hank Faffner, our engineer-on-the-scene. "Every bulb in the place burned out, a ceilingful of sooty, sterile eggs." Quite a poet, Hank! Now if you can only find out where that spike came from— But does the Polish undertaker in the rowboat care about busting this code, about secret organizations or recognizable subcultures? No, he doesn't. The reason he is seeking these people out is that he thinks it will help him in his job. Can you dig that, gates? He wants to know how people behave before and after lightning bolts, so he'll know better how to handle bereaved families. Yüklə 3,05 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
|
across the point. That's getting hit by lightning, folks. You're 
. Little men with wicked eyebrows, pointed ears and bald heads, although some of them are wearing outlandish headgear, not at all the usual Robin Hood green fedoras, no these are Carmen Miranda hats, for example, bananas, papayas, bunches of grapes, pears, pineapples, mangoes, jeepers even watermelons—and there are World War I spiketop Wìlhelmets, and baby bonnets and crosswise Napoleon hats with and without Ns on them, not to mention little red suits and green capes, well here they are leaning forward into their cruel birds' ears, whispering like jockeys, out to nab you, buster, just like that sacrificial ape off of the Empire State Building, except that they won't let you fall, they'll carry you away, to the places they are agents of. It will look like the world you left, but it'll be different. Between congruent and identical there seems to be another class of look-alike that only finds the lightning-heads. Another world laid down on the previous one and to all appearances no different, Ha-ha! But the lightning-struck know, all right! Even if they may not know they know. And that's what this undertaker tonight has set out into the storm to find.