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About the paranoia often noted under the drug, there is nothing remarkable. Like other sorts of paranoia, it is nothing less than the onset, the leading edge, of the discovery that everything is connected, everything in the Creation, a secondary illumination—not yet blind-ingly One, but at least connected, and perhaps a route In for those like Tchitcherine who are held at the edge. ...

tchitcherine's haunting

As to whether the man is or isn't Nikolai Ripov: he does arrive the way Ripov is said to: heavy and inescapable. He wants to talk, only to talk. But somehow, as they progress, into the indoor corridor-confusions of words, again and again he will trick Tchitcherine into uttering heresy, into damning himself.

"I'm here to help you see clearly. If you have doubts, we should air them, honestly, man to man. No reprisals. Hell, don't you think I've had doubts? Even Stalin's had them. We all have."

"It's all right though. It isn't anything I can't handle."

"But you're not handling it, or they wouldn't have sent me out here. Don't you think they know when someone they care for is in trouble?"

Tchitcherine doesn't want to ask. He strains against it with the muscles of his heart-cage. The pain of cardiac neurosis goes throbbing down his left arm. But he asks, feeling his breath shift a little, "Was I supposed to die?"

"When, Vaslav?"

"In the War."

"Oh, Vaslav."

"You wanted to hear what was troubling me."

"But don't you see how they'll take that? Come, bring it all the way

out. We lost twenty million souls, Vaslav. It's not an accusation you can make lightly. They'd want documentation. Even your life might be in danger—"

"I'm not accusing anyone . . . please don't... I only want to know if I am supposed to die for them."

"No one wants you to die." Soothing. "Why do you think that?"

So it is coaxed out of him by the patient emissary, whining, desperate, too many words—paranoid suspicions, unappeasable fears, damning himself, growing the capsule around his person that will isolate him from the community forever. . . .

"Yet that's the very heart of History," the gentle voice talking across twilight, neither man having risen to light a lamp. "The inmost heart. How could everything you know, all you've seen and touched of it, be fed by a lie?"

"But life after death ..."

"There is no life after death."

Tchitcherine means he's had to fight to believe in his mortality. As his body fought to accept its steel. Fight down all his hopes, fight his way into that bitterest of freedoms. Not till recently did he come to look for comfort in the dialectical ballet of force, counterforce, collision, and new order—not till the War came and Death appeared across the ring, Tchitcherine's first glimpse after the years of training: taller, more beautifully muscled, less waste motion than he'd ever expected—only in the ring, feeling the terrible cold each blow brought with it, only then did he turn to a Theory of History—of all pathetic cold comforts—to try and make sense of it.

"The Americans say, 'There are no atheists in foxholes.' You were never of the faith, Vaslav. You had a deathbed conversion, out of fear."

"Is that why you want me dead now?"

"Not dead. You're not much use dead." Two more olive-drab agents have come in, and stand watching Tchitcherine. They have regular, unremarkable faces. This is, after all, an Oneirine haunting. Mellow, ordinary. The only tipoff to its unreality is—

The radical-though-plausible-violation-of-reality—

All three men are smiling at him now. There is no violation.

It's a scream, but it comes out as a roar. He leaps at Ripov, nearly nails him with his fist too, but the others, with faster reflexes than he counted on, have come up either side to hold him. He can't believe their strength. Through the nerves of hip and ass he feels his Nagant being slid from its holster, and feels his own cock sliding out of a Ger-

man girl he can't remember now, on the last sweetwine morning he saw her, in the last warm bed of the last morning departure. . . .

"You're a child, Vaslav. Only making believe that you understand ideas which are really beyond you. We have to speak very simply for you."

In Central Asia he was told of the functions of Moslem angels. One is to examine the recently dead. After the last mourner has gone, angels come to the grave and interrogate the dead one in his faith. . . .

There is another figure now, at the edge of the room. She is Tchitcherine's age, and in uniform. Her eyes don't want to say anything to Tchitcherine. She only watches. No music heard, no summer journey taken ... no horse seen against the steppe in the last daylight....

He doesn't recognize her. Not that it matters. Not at this level of things. But it's Galina, come back to the cities, out of the silences after all, in again to the chain-link fields of the Word, shining, running secure and always close enough, always tangible. . . .

"Why were you hunting your black brother?" Ripov manages to make the question sound courteous.

Oh. Nice of you to ask, Ripov. Why was I? "When it began ... a long time ago—at first ... I thought I was being punished. Passed over. I blamed him."

"Now?"

"I don't know."

"What made you think he was your target?"

"Who else's would he be?"

"Vaslav. Will you never rise above? These are old barbarisms. Blood lines, personal revenge. You think this has all been arranged for you, to ease your little, stupid lusts."

All right. All right. "Yes. Probably. What of it?"

"He isn't your target. Others want him."

"So you've been letting me—"

"So far. Yes."

Džabajev could have told you. That sodden Asiatic is first and last an enlisted man. He knew. Officers. Fucking officer mentality. You do all the work, then they come in, to wrap it up, to get the glory.

"You're taking it away from me."

"You can go home."

Tchitcherine has been watching the other two. He sees now that they are in American uniform, and probably haven't understood a word. He holds out his empty hands, his sunburned wrists, for a last application of steel. Ripov, in the act of turning to leave, appears surprised. "Oh. No, no. You have thirty days' survivor's leave. You have survived, Vaslav. You're to report to TsAGI when you get back to Moscow, that's all. There'll be another assignment. We'll be taking German rocket personnel out to the desert. To Central Asia. I imagine they'll need an old Central Asia hand out there."

Tchitcherine understands that in his dialectic, his own life's unfolding, to return to Central Asia is, operationally, to die.

They have gone. The woman's iron face, at the very last, did not turn back. He is alone in a gutted room, with the plastic family toothbrushes still in their holders on the wall, melted, strung downward in tendrils of many colors, bristles pointing to every black plane and corner and soot-blinded window.

D D D D D D D

The dearest nation of all is one that will survive no longer than you and I, a common movement at the mercy of death and time: the ad hoc adventure.

—Resolutions of the Gross Suckling Conference

North? What searcher has ever been directed north? What you're supposed to be looking for lies south—those dusky natives, right? For danger and enterprise they send you west, for visions, east. But what's north?

The escape route of the Anubis.

The Kirghiz Light.

The Herero country of death.

Ensign Morituri, Carroll Eventyr, Thomas Gwenhidwy, and Roger Mexico are sitting at a table on the redbrick terrace of Der Grob Säugling, an inn by the edge of a little blue Holstein lake. The sun makes the water sparkle. The housetops are red, the steeples are white. Everything is miniature, neat, gently pastoral, locked into the rise and fall of seasons. Contrasting wood x s on closed doors. The brink of autumn. A cow sez moo. The milkmaid farts at the milk pail, which echoes with a very slight clang, and the geese honk or hiss. The four envoys drink watered Moselle and talk mandalas.

The Rocket was fired southward, westward, eastward. But not northward—not so far. Fired south, at Antwerp, the bearing was about

173°. East, during testing at Peenemünde, 072°. Fired west, at London, about 260°. Working it out with the parallel rulers, the missing (or, if you want, "resultant") bearing comes out to something like 354°. This would be the firing implied by all the others, a ghost-firing which, in the logic of mandalas, either has occurred, most-secretly, or will occur.

So the conferees at the Gross Suckling Conference here, as it will come to be known, sit around a map with their instruments, cigarettes and speculations. Sneer not. Here is one of the great deductive moments in postwar intelligence. Mexico is holding out for a weighting system to make vector lengths proportional to the actual number of firings along each one. Thomas Gwenhidwy, ever sensitive to events in geographical space, wants to take the 1944 Blizna firings (also eastward) into account, which would pull the arrow northward from 3 54°—and even closer to true north if the firings at London and Norwich from Walcheren and Staveren are also included.

Evidence and intuition—and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror that lies inside us, every one—point to 000°: true North. What better direction to fire the 00000?

Trouble is, what good's a bearing, even a mythic-symmetric bearing, without knowing where the Rocket was fired from to begin with? You have a razor-edge, 280 km long, sweeping east/west across the Zone's pocked face, endlessly sweeping, obsessive, dithering, glittering, unbearable, never coming to rest. . . .

Well, Under The Sign Of The Gross Suckling. Swaying full-color picture of a loathsomely fat drooling infant. In one puddinglike fist the Gross Suckling clutches a dripping hamhock (sorry pigs, nothing personal), with the other he reaches out for a human Mother's Nipple that emerges out into the picture from the left-hand side, his gaze arrested by the approaching tit, his mouth open—a gleeful look teeth pointed and itching, a glaze of FOODmunchmunchyesgobblemmm over his eyes. Der Grob Säugling, 23rd card of the Zone's trumps major. . . .

Roger likes to think of it as a snap of Jeremy as a child. Jeremy, who Knows All, has forgiven Jessica her time with Roger. He's had an outing or two himself, and can understand, he's of liberal mind, the War after all has taken down certain barriers, Vìctorianisms you might say (a tale brought to you by the same jokers who invented the famous Polyvinyl Chloride Raincoat) . . . and what's this, Roger, he's trying to impress you? his eyelids make high, amiable crescents as he leans forward (smaller chap than Roger thought) clutching his glass, sucking

on the most tasteless Pipe Roger has ever seen, a reproduction in brier of Winston Churchill's head for a bowl, no detail is spared, even a cigar in its mouth with a little hole drilled down it so that some of the smoke can actually seep out the end ... it is a servicemen's pub in Cuxhaven here, the place used to be a marine salvage yard, so the lonesome soldiers sit dreaming and drinking among all that nautical junk, not at the same level as in one's usual outdoor cafe, no, some are up in tilted hatchways, or dangling in boatswain's chairs, crow's-nests, sitting over their bitter among the chain, tackle, strakework, black iron fittings. It's night. Lanterns have been brought out to the tables. Soft little nocturnal waves hush on the shingle. Late waterfowl cry out over the lake.

"But will it ever get us, Jeremy, you and me, that's the ques-shun. ..." Mexico has been uttering these oracular—often, as at the Club today for lunch, quite embarrassing—bits of his ever since he showed up.

"Er, will what ever get me, old chap?" It's been old chap all day.

"Haven't—ch'ever felt something wanted to gesh you, Jeremy?"

"Get me." He's drunk. He's insane. I obviously can't let him near Jessica these math chaps they're like oboe players it affects the brain or something. . . .

Aha, but, once a month, Jeremy, even Jeremy, dreams: about a gambling debt . . . different sorts of Collectors keep arriving ... he cannot remember the debt, the opponent he lost to, even the game. He senses a great organization behind these emissaries. Its threats are always left open, left for Jeremy to complete . . . each time, terror has come welling up through the gap, crystal terror. . . .

Good, good. The other sure-fire calibration test has already been sprung on Jeremy—at a prearranged spot in a park, two unemployed Augustes leap out in whiteface and working-clothes, and commence belting each other with gigantic (7 or 8 feet long) foam rubber penises, cunningly detailed, all in natural color. These phancy phalli have proven to be a good investment. Roger and Seaman Bodine (when he's in town) have outdrawn the ENSA shows. It is a fine source of spare change—multitudes will gather at the edges of these north German villages to watch the two zanies whack away. Granaries, mostly empty, poke up above the rooftops now and then, stretching a wood gallows-arm against the afternoon sky. Soldiers, civilians, and children. There is a lot of laughter.

Seems people can be reminded of Titans and Fathers, and laugh, It isn't as funny as a pie in the face, but it's at least as pure.

Yes, giant rubber cocks are here to stay as part of the arsenal. . . .

What Jessica said—hair much shorter, wearing a darker mouth of different outline, harder lipstick, her typewriter banking in a phalanx of letters between them—was: "We're going to be married. We're trying very hard to have a baby."

All at once there is nothing but his asshole between Gravity and Roger. "I don't care. Have his baby. I'll love you both—just come with me Jess, please ... I need you. . . ."

She flips a red lever on her intercom. Far away a buzzer goes off. "Security." Her voice is perfectly hard, the word still clap-echoing in the air as in through the screen door of the Quonset office with a smell of tide flats come the coppers, looking grim. Security. Her magic word, her spell against demons.

"Jess—" shit is he going to cry? he can feel it building like an orgasm—

Who saves him (or interferes with his orgasm)? Why, Jeremy himself. Old Beaver shows up and waves off the heat, who go surly, fangflashing back to masturbating into Crime Does Not Pay Comics, gazing dreamy at guardroom pinups of J. Edgar Hoover or whatever it was they were up to, and the romantic triangle are suddenly all to have lunch together at the Club. Lunch together? Is this Noel Coward or some shit? Jessica at the last minute is overcome by some fictitious female syndrome which both men guess to be morning-sickness, Roger figuring she'll do the most spiteful thing she can think of, Jeremy seeing it as a cute little private yoo-hoo for 2-hoo. So that leaves the fellas alone, to talk briskly about Operation Backfire, which is the British program to assemble some A4s and fire them out into the North Sea. What else are they going to talk about?

"Why?" Roger keeps asking, trying to piss Jeremy off. "Why do you want to put them together and fire them?"

"We've captured them, haven't we? What does one do with a

rocket?" .

"But why?"

"Why? Damn it, to see, obviously. Jessica tells me you're—ah—a math chap?"

"Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-sigma, equals one over the square root of two pi, times e to the minus s squared over two little-sigma squared."

"Good Lord." Laughing, hastily checking out the room.

"It is an old saying among my people."

Jeremy knows how to handle this. Roger is invited to dinner in the evening, an intimate informal party at the home of Stefan Ut-

garthaloki, an ex-member of management at the Krupp works here in Cuxhaven. "You're welcome to bring a guest, of course," gnaws the eager Beaver, "there're a lot of snazzy NAAFIs about, it wouldn't be too difficult for you to—"

"Informal means lounge suit, eh?" interrupts Roger. Too bad, he hasn't got one. The prospects of being nabbed tonight are good. A party that includes (a) an Operation Backfire figure, (b) a Krupp executive, must necessarily then include (c) at least one ear to the corporate grapevine that's heard of the Urinating Incident in Clive Mossmoon's office. If Roger only knew what Beaver and his friends really have in mind!

He does take a guest: Seaman Bodine, who has caused to be brought him from the Panama Canal Zone (where the lock workers wear them as a uniform, in amazing tropical-parrot combinations of yellow, green, lavender, vermilion) a zoot suit of unbelievable proportions—the pointed lapels have to be reinforced -with coat-hanger stays because they extend so far outboard of the rest of the suit—underneath his purple-on-purple satin shirt the natty tar is actually wearing a corset, squeezing his waist in to a sylphlike 42 inches to allow for the drastic suppression of the jacket, which then falls to Bodine's knees quintuple-vented in yards of kilt-style pleats that run clear back up over his ass. The pants are belted under his armpits and pegged down to something like ten inches, so he has to use hidden zippers to get his feet through. The whole suit is blue, not suit-blue, no—really BLUE: paint-blue. It is immediately noticed everywhere it goes. At gatherings it haunts the peripheral vision, making decent small-talk impossible. It is a suit that forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial. A subversive garment, all right.

"Just you and me, podner?" sez Bodine. "Ain't that kind of cutting it a little close?"

"Listen," Roger chuckling unhealthily at what's also just occurred to him, "we can't even bring those big rubber cocks along. Tonite, we're going to have to use our wits!"

"Tell you what, I'll just send a motorcycle out to Putzi's, round us up a goon squad, and—"

"You know what? You've lost your sense of adventure. Yeh. You didn't use to be like this, you know."

"Look old buddy," pronouncing it in Navy Dialect: buddih, "c'mon, buddih. Putcherself in my shoes."

"I might, if they weren't. . . that. . . shade of yellow—"

"Just a humble guy," the swarthy doughboy of the deep scratching

in his groin after an elusive crab with a horn finger, rippling the ballooning pleats and fabric of his trousers, "just a freckleface kid from Albert Lea, Minnesota, down there on Route 69 where the speed limit's lickety-split all night long, just tryin' t' make it in the Zone here, kind of a freckleface kid used a safety pin through a cork for a catwhisker and stayed up listened to the voices coast to coast before I was 10 and none of them ever recommended gettin' into any of them gang wars, buddih. Be glad you're still so fuckin' naïve, Rog, wait'll you see your first European-gangster hit, they like to use 3 rounds: head, stomach, and heart. You dig that stomach? Over here stomach's no second-class organ, podner 'n' that's a good autumn kind of thought to keep in mind."

"Bodine, didn't you desert? That's a death-sentence, isn't it?" "Shit, I can square that. But I'm only a cog. Don't go thinking I know everything. All I know is my trade. I can show you how to wash coke and assay it, I can feel a gem and tell you from the temperature if it's a fake—the fake won't suck as much heat from your body, 'glass is a reluctant vampire,' ancient dealers' saying, a-and I can spot funny-money easy as E on an eye chart, I got one of the best visual memories in the Zone—" So, Roger drags him off, monologuing, in his zoot suit, to the Krupp wingding.

Coming in the door, first thing Bodine notices is this string quartet that's playing tonight. The second violin happens to be Gustav Schlabone, Säure Bummer's frequent unwelcome doping partner, "Captain Horror," as he is affectionately but not inaccurately known around Der Platz—and playing viola is Gustav's accomplice in sui-cidally depressing everybody inside 100 meters' radius wherever they drop in (who's that tapping and giggling at your door, Fred and Phyllis?), Andre Omnopon, of the feathery Rilke mustaches and Porky Pig tattoo on stomach (which is becoming the "hep" thing lately: even back in the Zone of the Interior the American subdebs all think it's swoony). Gustav and Andre are the Inner Voices tonight. Which is especially odd because on the program is the suppressed quartet from the Haydn Op. 76, the so-called "Kazoo" Quartet in G-Flat Minor, which gets its name from the Largo, cantabik e mesto movement, in which the Inner Voices are called to play kazoos instead of their usual instruments, creating problems of dynamics for cello and first violin that are unique in the literature. "You actually need to shift in places from a spiccato to a détaché," Bodine rapidly talking a Corporate Wife of some sort across the room toward the free-lunch table piled with lobster hors d'oeuvres and capon sandwiches—"less bow, higher up

you understand, soften it—then there's also about a thousand ppp-to-fff blasts, but only the one, the notorious One, going the other way. ..." Indeed, one reason for the work's suppression is this subversive use of sudden fff quieting to ppp. It's the touch of the wandering sound-shadow, the Brennschluss of the Sun. They don't want you listening to too much of that stuff—at least not the way Haydn presents it (a strange lapse in the revered composer's behavior): cello, violin, alto and treble kazoos all rollicking along in a tune sounds like a song from the movie Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, "You Should See Me Dance the Polka," when suddenly in the middle of an odd bar the kazoos just stop completely, and the Outer Voices fall to plucking a non-melody that tradition sez represents two 18th-century Village Idiots vibrating their lower lips. At each other. It goes on for 20, 40 bars, this feeb's pizzicato, middle-line Kruppsters creak in the bowlegged velvet chairs, bibuhbuhbibuhbuh this does not sound like Haydn, Mutti! Reps from ICI and GE angle their heads trying to read in the candlelight the little programs lovingly hand-lettered by Utgarthaloki's partner in life, Frau Utgarthaloki, nobody is certain what her first name is (which is ever so much help to Stefan because it keeps them all on the defensive with her). She is a blonde image of your mother dead: if you have ever seen her travestied in beaten gold, the cheeks curving too far, deformed, the eyebrows too dark and whites too white, some zero indifference that in the end is truly evil in the way They've distorted her face, then you know the look: Nalline Slothrop just before her first martini is right here, in spirit, at this Kruppfest. So is her son Tyrone, but only because by now—early Virgo—he has become one plucked albatross. Plucked, hell—stripped. Scattered all over the Zone. It's doubtful if he can ever be "found" again, in the conventional sense of "positively identified and detained." Only feathers . . . redundant or regenerable organs, "which we would be tempted to classify under the 'Hydra-Phänomen' were it not for the complete absence of hostility. . . ."—Natasha Raum, "Regions of Indeterminacy in Albatross Anatomy," Proceedings of the International Society of Confessors to an Enthusiasm for Albatross Nosology, Winter 1936, great little magazine, they actually sent a correspondent to Spain that winter, to cover that, there are issues devoted entirely to analyses of world economics, all clearly relevant to problems of Albatross Nosology—does so-called "Night Worm" belong among the Pseudo-Goldstrassian Group, or is it properly considered—indications being almost identical—a more insidious form of Mopp's Hebdomeriasis?