Penguin books

"You are perverting a great discovery to the uses of commerce," sez Thanatz, stepping ashore. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." He is no more than five minutes into the empty town at the edge of the marsh when nockle KKAHH-UHNN! nocklenockle nockle an enormous blast of light and sound hits the water back where the undertaker, peeved at what he takes to be no gratitude, is hauling away.

"Oh," comes his faint voice. "Oh, ho. Oh-ho-ho-ho!"

"Nobody lives here but us." A solid figure, a whispering silhouette, charcoal-colored, has materialized in Thanatz's path. "We do not harm visitors. But it would be better if you took another way."

They are 175s—homosexual prison-camp inmates. They have

come north from the Dora camp at Nordhausen, north till the land ended, and have set up an all-male community between this marsh and the Oder estuary. Ordinarily, this would be Thanatz's notion of paradise, except that none of the men can bear to be out of Dora—Dora was home, and they are homesick. Their "liberation" was a banishment. So here in a new location they have made up a hypothetical SS chain of command—no longer restricted to what Destiny allotted then for jailers, they have now managed to come up with some really mean ass imaginary Nazi playmates, Schutzhäftlingsführer to Blockführer, and chosen an internal hierarchy for themselves too: Lager and Block-ältester, Kapo, Vorarbeiter, Stubendienst, Läufer (who is a runner or messenger, but also happens to be the German name for a chess bishop ... if you have seen him, running across the wet meadows in very early morning, with his red vestments furling and fluttering darkened almost to tree-bark color among the watery downs, you will have some notion of his real purpose here inside the community—he is carrier of holy strategies, memoranda of conscience, and when he approaches over the reedy flats of morning you are taken by your bowed nape and brushed with the sidebands of a Great Moment—for the Läufer is the most sacred here, it is he who takes messages out to the ruinous interface between the visible Lager and the invisible SS).

At the top of the complex is Schutzhäftlingsführer Blicero. The name has found its way this far east, as if carrying on the man's retreat for him, past the last stand in the Lüneburg Heath. He is the Zone's worst specter. He is malignant, he pervades the lengthening summer nights. Like a cankered root he is changing, growing toward winter, growing whiter, toward the idleness and the famine. Who else could the 175s have chosen for their very highest oppressor? His power is absolute. And don't think he isn't really waiting, out by the shelled and rusty gasworks, under the winding staircases, behind the tanks and towers, waiting for the dawn's first carmine-skirted runner with news of how die night went. The night is his dearest interest, so he must be told.

This phantom SS command here is based not so much on the one the prisoners knew at Dora as on what they inferred to be the Rocket-structure next door at the Mittelwerke. The A4, in its way, was also concealed behind an uncrossable wall that separated real pain and terror from summoned deliverer. Weissmann/Blicero's presence crossed the wall, warping, shivering into the fetid bunkrooms, with the same reach toward another shape as words trying to make their way through dreams. What the 175s heard from their real SS guards there was enough to elevate Weissmann on the spot—they, his own brother-

elite, didn't know what this man was up to. When prisoners came in earshot, the guards stopped whispering. But their fear kept echoing: fear not of Weissmann personally, but of the time itself, a time so desperate that he could now move through the Mittelwerke as if he owned it, a time which was granting him a power different from that of Auschwitz or Buchenwald, a power they couldn't have borne themselves. . . .

On hearing the name of Blicero now, Thanatz's asshole tightens a notch. Not that he thinks the name was planted here or anything. Paranoia is not a major problem for Thanatz. What does bother him is being reminded at all—reminded that he's had no word, since the noon on the Heath when 00000 was fired, of Blicero's status—alive or dead, powerlord or fugitive. He isn't sure which he prefers. As long as the Anubis kept moving, there was no need to choose: the memory could have been left so far behind that one day its "reality" wouldn't matter any more. Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.

"We think he's out there," the town spokesman is telling Thanatz, "alive and on the run. Now and then we hear something—it could fit Blicero easily enough. So we wait. He will find us. He has a prefabricated power base here, waiting for him."

"What if he doesn't stay?" pure meanness, "what if he laughs at you, and passes by?"

"Then I can't explain," the other beginning to step backward, back out into the rain, "it's a matter of faith."

Thanatz, who has sworn that he will never seek out Blicero again, not after the 00000, feels the flat of terror's blade. "Who is your runner?" he cries.

"Go yourself," a filtered whisper.

"Where?"

"The gasworks."

"But I have a message for—"

"Take it yourself. ..."

The white Anubis, gone on to salvation. Back here, in her wake, are the preterite, swimming and drowning, mired and afoot, poor passengers at sundown who've lost the way, blundering across one another's flotsam, the scrapings, the dreary junking of memories—all they have to hold to—churning, mixing, rising, falling. Men overboard and our common debris. . . .

Thanatz remains shaking and furious in the well-established rain, under the sandstone arcade. I should have sailed on, he wants to scream, and presently does. "I wasn't supposed to be left with you dis-

cards. . . ." Where's the court of appeals that will hear his sad story? "I lost my footing!" Some mess cook slipped in a puddle of elite vomit and spilled a whole galvanized can full of creamed yellow chicken nausea all over that starboard weather deck, Thanatz didn't see it, he was looking for Margherita. . . . Too bad, les jeux sont faits, nobody's listening and the Anubis is gone. Better here with the swimming debris, Thanatz, no telling what'll come sunfishing by, ask that Oberst En-zian, he knows (there is a key, among the wastes of the World . . . and it won't be found on board the white Anubis because they throw everything of value over the side).

So—Thanatz is out by the gasworks, up against a tar wall, mackerel eyes bulging out of wet wool collar-shadows, all black and white, really scared, breath smoking out corners of his mouth as green dawn begins to grow back among the gassen. He won't be here, he's only dead only dead? Isn't this an "interface" here? a meeting surface for two worlds . . . sure, but which two? There's no counting on any positivism to save him, that didn't even work back in Berlin, before the War, at Peter Sachsa's sittings ... it only got in the way, made others impatient with him. A screen of words between himself and the numinous was always just a tactic ... it never let him feel any freer. These days there's even less point to it. He knows Blicero exists.

It wasn't a dream. Don't you wish it could be. Another fever that sooner or later will break, releasing you into the cool reality of a room . . . you don't have to perform that long and complicated mission after all, no, you see it was only the fever ... it wasn't real. . . .

This time it is real, Blicero, alive or dead, is real. Thanatz, a little crazy now with fear, wants to go provoke him, he can't wait any more, he has to see what it will take to get Blicero across the interface. What screaming ass-wiggling surrender might bring him back. . . .

All it brings is the Russian police. There's a working agreement about staying inside the limits of the 175-Stadt that of course no one told Thanatz about. The gasworks used to be a notorious hustling spot till the Russians made a series of mass busts. A last fading echo of the 175-Stadt Chorale goes skipping away down the road singing some horrible salute to faggotry such as

Yumsy-numsy 'n' poopsie-poo,

If I'm a degenerate, so are you. ...

"Nowadays all we get are you tourists," sez the natty civilian with the white handkerchief in his breast-pocket, snickering in the shadow of his hat brim. "And, of course, the odd spy."

"Not me," Thanatz sez.

"Not you, eh? Tell me about it."

Something of a quandary, all right. In less than half a day, Thanatz has moved from no need to worry or even think about Blicero, to always needing some formulation of him at hand to please any stray curious cop. This is one of his earlier lessons in being preterite: he won't escape any of the consequences he sets up for himself now, not unless it's by accident.

For example, at the outskirts of Stettin, by accident, a Polish guerrilla group, just arrived back from London, mistakes the police car for one transporting an anti-Lublin journalist to prison, shoots out the tires, roars in, kills the driver, wounds the civilian interrogator, and escapes lugging Thanatz like a sack of potatoes.

"Not me," Thanatz sez.

"Shit. He's right."

They roll him out the car door into a DP encampment a few miles farther on. He is herded into a wire enclosure along with 1,999 others being sent west to Berlin.

For weeks he rides the freights, hanging in shifts to the outside of his assigned car while inside someone else sleeps on the straw space he vacated. Later they change places. It helps to stay awake. Every day Thanatz sees half a dozen DPs go on the nod and fall off the train, and sometimes it's funny to watch, but too often it's not, though DP humor is a very dependent thing. He is rubber-stamped on hands, forehead, and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned, invoiced, misrouted, detained, ignored. He passes in and out the paper grasp of Russian, British, American and French body-jobbers, round and round the occupation circuit, getting to recognize faces, coughs, pairs of boots on new owners. Without a ration card or Soldbuch, you are doomed to be moved, in lots of 2,000, center to center, about the Zone, possibly forever. So, out among the ponds and fenceposts of Mecklenburg somewhere, Thanatz discovers that he is exempt from nothing. His second night on the rails his shoes are stolen. He comes down with a deep bronchial cough and a high fever. For a week no one comes to look at him. For two aspirins he has to suck off the orderly in charge, who has grown to enjoy rough-bearded cheeks flaming at 103° against his thighs, the furnace breath under his balls. In Mecklenburg Thanatz steals a cigarette butt from a sleeping one-armed veteran, and is beaten and kicked for half an hour by people whose language he has never heard before, whose faces he never gets a look at. Bugs crawl over him only slightly irritated that he's in

their way. His daily bread is taken away by another DP smaller than he is, but with the look of some right to it, a look Thanatz at best can only impersonate—and so he's afraid to go after the little rag-coated liver-colored back, the munching haystack head . . . and others are watching: the woman who tells everyone that Thanatz molests her little girl at night (Thanatz can never meet her eyes because yes he wants to, pull down the slender pretty pubescent's oversize GI trousers stuff penis between pale little buttocks reminding him so of Bianca take bites of soft-as-bread insides of thighs pull long hair throatback Bianca make her moan move her head how she loves it) and a beetlebrowed Slav too, who has forced Thanatz to go hunting cigarette butts for him after lights out, to give up his sleep not so much to the chance of finding a real butt as to the Slav's right to demand it—the Slav is watching too—in fact, a circle of enemies have all observed the taking of the bread and Thanatz's failure to go after it. Their judgment is clear, a clarity in their eyes Thanatz never saw back on the Anubis, an honesty he can't avoid, can't shrug off. . . finally, finally he has to face, literally with his own real face, the transparency, the real light of...

Little by little his memory of that last rocket-firing on the Heath grows clearer. The fevers fire-polish, the pain removes impurities. An image keeps recurring—a muddy brown almost black eyeball reflecting a windmill and a jagged reticule of tree-branches in silhouette ... doors at the sides of the windmill open and shut quickly, like loose shutters in a storm ... in the iris sky one cloud, the shape of a clamshell, rises very purple around the edges, the puff from an explosion, something light ocher at the horizon . . . closer in it seems snarling purple around a yellow that's brightening, intestines of yellow shadowed in violet spilling outward, outward in a bellying curve toward us. There are, oddly (not to cut this picturesque scene off, but) oddly enough, get this, no windmills on the Lüneburg Heath! Thanatz even checked around real fast just to make sure, nope, no windmills, O.K., so, how come Blicero's eye, looking out on the Heath, is reflecting a windmill, huh? Well, to be honest, now it isn't reflecting a windmill, it's reflecting a bottle of gin. No bottle of gin out here on the Heath either. But it was reflecting a windmill. What's this? Could it be that Blicero's eyes, in which Greta Erdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past? That would be strange. Whatever went on on those eyeballs when you weren't looking would just be lost. You'd only have fragments, now and then. Katje, looking back over her shoulder at fresh whip-marks. Gottfried in the morning lineup, body all Wandervogel-limp, wind blowing his uniform in great ripples back from the bough-curves of his

thighs, hair flying in the wind, saucy sideways smile, mouth a little open, jaw forward, eyelids down. Blicero's own reflection in the oval mirror, an old face—he is about to don a wig, a Dragon Lady pageboy with bangs, and he pauses, looking in, face asking what? what did you say? wig held to the side and slightly lower so as to be another face in heavy wig-shadows nearly invisible . . . but looking closer you can see bone-ridges and fat-fields begin to emerge now, an ice-glaze white bobbing, a mask hand-held, over the shadows in the hollow hood-space—two faces looking back now, and Thanatz, are you going to judge this man? Thanatz, haven't you loved the whip? Haven't you longed for the brush and sigh of ladies' clothes? Haven't you wanted to murder a child you loved, joyfully kill something so helpless and innocent? As he looks up at you, at the last possible minute, trusting you, and smiles, purses his lips to make a \dssjust as the blow falls across his skull . . . isn't that best of all? The cry that breaks in your chest then, the sudden, solid arrival of loss, loss forever, the irreversible end of love, of hope . . . no denying what you finally are ... (but so much fear at taking it in, the serpent face—at opening your arms and legs and letting it enter you, into your true face it'll kill you if it—)

He is telling the Schwarzkommando this now, all this and more. After a week of shouting I know, of crying I've seen the Schwarzgerät whenever a black face appears behind the flowing wire fences, at the cinderbanks or the crossings, word has got around. One day they come for him: he is lifted from the straw as black with coal-dust as they—lifted easy as an infant, a roach flicked in kindness off of his face—and transported shivering, gathered moaning south to the Erd-schweinhöhle where now they are all sitting around a fire, smoking and munching, eyes riveted on blue Thanatz, who has been gabbing for seven hours nonstop. He is the only one privileged, in a way, to tell this much of the story, he's the fella who lost out, the loser,

Just a fbol-who-never-wins, at love,

Though-he-plays, most-ev', ry night...

A loser-to-the-Ones, Above,

Who stack-the-cards, of wrong, and right. ...

Oh the loser never bets-it-all, and-he never-plays,

to win, He knows if-once, you don't-succeed, you can al-ways

lose-again!

Just a loser at-the-game, of love ... Spending night after night a-lo-o-o-one!

He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he's forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn't know which child he lost first, or even—hornet clouds of memory welling up—even if they aren't two names, different names, for the same child . . . but then in the crash of others' flotsam, sharp edges, and high-spin velocities you understand, he finds he can't hold on to this thought for long: soon he's floundering in the open water again. But he'll remember that he held it for a little, saw its texture and color, felt it against the side of his face as he woke from a space of sleeping near it—that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same. . . .

He lost Blicero, but it wasn't quite as real. After the last firing, the unremembered night-hours to Hamburg, the hop from Hamburg to Bydgoszcz in a purloined P-51 Mustang was so clearly Procalowski-down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine, that Thanatz came to imagine he had disposed of Blicero too only in that same very conditional, metallic way. And sure enough, the metal has given way to flesh, and sweat, and long chattering night encounters, Blicero cross-legged stammering down at his crotch I cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh—"Can't," Blicero? "Couldn't"? "Care"? "Cry"? Blicero that night was offering all his weapons, laying down all maps of his revetments and labyrinths.

Thanatz was really asking: when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?

And: "How can I love them?"

But there's no answer from Blicero. His eyes go casting runes with the windmill silhouettes. A number of contributed scenes do now flash by for Thanatz. From Ensign Morituri, a banana-leaf floor somewhere near Mabalacat in the Philippines, late '44, a baby squirms, rolls, kicks in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and the special-attack units roar away overhead, Zeros bearing comrades away, finally as fallen cherry-blossoms—that favorite Kamikaze image—in the spring . . . from Greta Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud—it crawls like mud, but cries like Earth, with layer-pressed generations of gravities and losses thereto—losses, failures, last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffocated layers, those forever lost. . . from someone, who'll ever know who? a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for . . .

will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love—

They'll help him through it. The Erdschweinhöhlers will sit up all night with this nonstop intelligence briefing. He is the angel they've hoped for, and it's logical he should come now, on the day when they have their Rocket all assembled at last, their single A4 scavenged all summer piece by piece clear across the Zone from Poland to the Low Countries. Whether you believed or not, Empty or Green, cunt-crazy or politically celibate, power-playing or neutral, you had a feeling— a suspicion, a latent wish, some hidden tithe out of your soul, something—for the Rocket. It is that "something" that the Angel Thanatz now illuminates, each in a different way, for everybody listening.

By the time he's done, they will all know what the Schwarzgerät was, how it was used, where the 00000 was fired from, and which way it was pointed. Enzian will smile grimly, and groan to his feet, the decision already made for him hours ago, and say, "Well, let's have a look at the timetables now." His Erdschweinhöhle rival, Empty One Josef Ombindi, grips him by the forearm—"If there's anything . . ." Enzian nods. "See if you can work us out a tight security watch, 'kurandye." He hasn't called Ombindi that for a while. Nor is it a small concession to give the Empty Ones control of the watch lists, at least for the duration of this journey . . .

. . . which has already begun, as one and a half levels below, men and women are busy with tackle, lines, and harness easing rocket sections each onto its dolly, more Schwarzkommando waiting in leather and blueflowered files up the ramps to the outside, along the present and future vectors strung between wood rails and grooves, Empty, Neutral and Green all together now, waiting or hauling or supervising, some talking for the first time since the dividing along lines of racial life and racial death began, how many years ago, reconciled for now in the only Event that could have brought them together (/ couldn't, Enzian knows, and shudders at what's going to happen after it's over—but maybe it's only meant to last its fraction of a day, and why can't that be enough? try to let it be enough . . .).

Christian comes past, downhill adjusting a web belt, not quite swaggering—night before last his sister Maria visited him in a dream to tell him she wished no revenge against anyone, and wanted him to trust and love the Nguarorerue—so their eyes now meet not quite amused nor quite yet in a challenge, but knowing more together than they ever have so far, and Christian's hand at the moment of passing cocks out half in salute, half in celebration, aimed toward the Heath,

northwesterly, Kingdom-of-Deathward, and Enzian's goes out the same way, iya, 'kurandye! as, at some point, the two palms do slide and brush, do touch, and it is touch and trust enough, for this moment. . . .

D D D D D D D

Unexpectedly, this country is pleasant, yes, once inside it, quite pleasant after all. Even though there is a villain here, serious as death. It is this typical American teenager's own Father, trying episode after episode to kill his son. And the kid knows it. Imagine that. So far he's managed to escape his father's daily little death-plots—but nobody has said he has to keep escaping.

He's a cheerful and a plucky enough lad, and doesn't hold any of this against his father particularly. That oP Broderick's just a mur-derin' fool, golly what'll he come up with next—

It's a giant factory-state here, a City of the Future full of extrapolated 1930s swoop-façaded and balconied skyscrapers, lean chrome caryatids with bobbed hairdos, classy airships of all descriptions drifting in the boom and hush of the city abysses, golden lovelies sunning in roof-gardens and turning to wave as you pass. It is the Raketen-Stadt.

Down below, thousands of kids are running in windy courtyards and areaways, up and down flights of steps, skullcaps on their heads with plastic propellers spinning in the wind rattling and blurred, kids running messages among the plastic herbage in and out of the different soft-plastic offices—Here's a memo for you Tyrone, go and find the Radiant Hour (Weepers! Didn't know it was lost! Sounds like oP Pop's up to somma those tricks again!), so it's out into the swarming corridors, full of larking dogs, bicycles, pretty subdeb secretaries on roller skates, produce carts, beanies whirling forever in the lights, cap-gun or water-pistol duels at each corner, kids dodging behind the sparkling fountains WAIT that's a real gun, this is a real bullet zinnnggg! good try, Pop, but you're not quite as keen as The Kid today!

Onward to rescue the Radiant Hour, which has been abstracted from the day's 24 by colleagues of the Father, for sinister reasons of their own. Travel here gets complicated—a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt's street-grid. You can also raise or lower the building itself, a dozen floors per second, to desired heights or levels underground, like a submarine