Penguin books

"Here. Listen. I want you to have it. Understand? It's yours." Does he even hear any more? Can he see this cloth, this stain? "Look, I was there, in Chicago, when they ambushed him. I was there that night, right down the street from the Biograph, I heard the gunfire, everything. Shit, I was just a boot, I thought this was what liberty was all about, so I went running. Me and half Chicago. Out of the bars, the toilets, the alleys, dames holding their skirts up so they could run faster, Missus Krodobbly who's drinking her way through the Big Depression, waitin' till the sun shines thru, and whatta you know, there's half my graduating class from Great Lakes, in dress blues with the same bedspring marks as mine, and there's longtime hookers and pockmark fags with breath smelling like the inside of a motorman's

glove, old ladies from Back of the Yards, subdebs just out the movies with the sweat still cold on their thighs, gate, everybody was there. They were taking off clothes, tearing checks out of checkbooks, ripping off pieces of each others' newspaper, just so they could soak up some of John Dillinger's blood. We went crazy. The Agents didn't stop us. Just stood with smoke still curling out of their muzzles while the people all went down on that blood in the street. Maybe I went along without thinking. But there was something else. Something I must've needed ... if you can hear me . . . that's why I'm giving this to you. O.K.? That's Dillinger's blood there. Still warm when I got to it. They wouldn't want you thinking he was anything but a 'common criminal'—but Their head's so far up Their ass—he still did what he did. He went out socked Them right in the toilet privacy of Their banks. Who cares what he was thinking about, long as it didn't get in the way? A-and it doesn't even matter why we're doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we need isn't right reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working. Courage, brains, sure, O.K., but without that grace? forget it. Do you—please, are you listening? This thing here works. Really does. It worked for me, but I'm out of the Dumbo stage now, I can fly without it. But you. Rocky. You. . . ."

It wasn't their last meeting, but later on there were always others around, doper-crises, resentments about burns real or intended, and by then, as he'd feared, Bodine was beginning, helpless, in shame, to let Slothrop go. In certain rushes now, when he sees white network being cast all directions on his field of vision, he understands it as an emblem of pain or death. He's begun to spend more of his time with Trudi. Their friend Magda was picked up on first-degree mopery and taken back to Leverkusen, and an overgrown back court where electric lines spit overhead, the dusty bricks sprout weeds from the cracks, shutters are always closed, grass and weeds turn to bitterest autumn floor. On certain days the wind brings aspirin-dust from the Bayer factory. The people inhale it, and grow more tranquil.

They both feel her absence. Bodine finds presently that his characteristic gross laugh, hyeugh, hyeugh, has grown more German, tjachz, tjachz. He's also taking on some of Magda's old disguises. Good-natured and penetrable disguises, as at a masked ball. It is a transvestism of caring, and the first time in his life it's happened. Though nobody asks, being too busy dealing, he reckons it's all right.

Light in the sky is stretched and clear, exactly like taffy after no more than the first two pulls.

"Dying a weird death," Slothrop's Visitor by this time may be

scrawled lines of carbon on a wall, voices down a chimney, some human being out on the road, "the object of life is to make sure you die a weird death. To make sure that however it finds you, it will find you under very weird circumstances. To live that kind of life. . . ."

Item S-1729.06, Bottle containing 7 cc. of May wine. Analysis indicates presence of woodruff herb, lemon and orange peel.

Sprigs of woodruff, also known as Master of the Woods, were carried by the early Teutonic warriors. It gives success in battle. It appears that some part of Slothrop ran into the AWOL Džabajev one night in the heart of downtown Niederschaumdorf. (Some believe that fragments of Slothrop have grown into consistent personae of their own. If so, there's no telling which of the Zone's present-day population are offshoots of his original scattering. There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by The Fool, an English rock group—seven musicians posed, in the arrogant style of the early Stones, near an old rocket-bomb site, out in the East End, or South of the River. It is spring, and French thyme blossoms in amazing white lacework across the cape of green that now hides and softens the true shape of the old rubble. There is no way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo—a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea. . . .)

Now there's only a long cat's-eye of bleak sunset left over the plain tonight, bright gray against a purple ceiling of clouds, with an iris of darker gray. It is displayed above, more than looking down on, this gathering of Džabajev and his friends. Inside the town, a strange convention is under way. Village idiots from villages throughout Germany are streaming in (streaming from mouth as well as leaving behind high-pitched trails of color for the folks to point at in their absence). They are expected to pass a resolution tonight asking Great Britain for Commonwealth status, and perhaps even to apply for membership in the UNO. Children in the parish schools are being asked to pray for their success. Can 13 years of Vatican collaboration have clarified the difference between what's holy and what is not? Another State is forming in the night, not without theatre and festivity. So tonight's prevalence of Maitrinke, which Džabajev has managed to score several liters of. Let the village idiots celebrate. Let their holiness ripple into interference-patterns till it clog the lantern-light of the meeting hall.

Let the chorus line perform heroically: 16 ragged staring oldtimers who shuffle aimlessly about the stage, jerking off in unison, waggling penises in mock quarter-staffing, brandishing in twos and threes their green-leaved poles, exposing amazing chancres and lesions, going off in fountains of sperm strung with blood that splash over glazed trouser-pleats, dirt-colored jackets with pockets dangling like 60-year-old breasts, sockless ankles permanently stained with the dust of the little squares and the depopulated streets. Let them cheer and pound their seats, let the brotherly spit flow: Tonight the Džabajev circle have acquired, through an ill-coordinated smash-and-grab at the home of Niederschaumdorf's only doctor, a gigantic hypodermic syringe and needle. Tonight they will shoot wine. If the police are on the way, if far down the road certain savage ears can already pick up the rumble of an occupation convoy across the night kilometers, signaling past sight, past the first headlamp's faintest scattering, the approach of danger, still no one here is likely to break the circle. The wine will operate on whatever happens. Didn't you wake up to find a knife in your hand, your head down a toilet, the blur of a long sap about to smash your upper lip, and sink back down to the old red and capillaried nap where none of this could possibly be happening? and wake again to a woman screaming, again to the water of the canal freezing your drowned eye and ear, again to too many Fortresses diving down the sky, again, again. . . . But no, never real.

A wine rush: a wine rush is defying gravity, finding yourself on the elevator ceiling as it rockets upward, and no way to get down. You separate in two, the basic Two, and each self is aware of the other.

the occupation of mingeborough

The trucks come rolling down the hill, where the State highway narrows, at about three in the afternoon. All their headlights are on. Electric stare after stare topping the crest of the hill, between the maple trees. The noise is terrific. Gearboxes chatter as each truck hits the end of the grade, weary cries of "Double-clutch it, idiot!" come from under the canvas. An apple tree by the road is in blossom. The limbs are wet with this morning's rain, dark and wet. Sitting under it, with anyone else but Slothrop, is a barelegged girl, blonde and brown as honey. Her name is Marjorie. Hogan will come home from the Pacific and court her, but he'll lose out to Pete Dufay. She and Dufay will have a daughter named Kim, and Kim will have her braids dipped in the school ink-wells by young Hogan, Jr. It will all go on, occupation or not, with or without Uncle Tyrone.

There's more rain in the air. The soldiers are mustering by Hicks's Garage. In the back lot is a greasy dump, a pit, full of ball-bearings, clutch plates, and pieces of transmission. In the parking lot below— shared with the green-trimmed candy store, where he waited for the first slice of very yellow schoolbus to appear each 3:15 around the corner, and knew which high-school kids were easy marks for pennies— are six or seven old Cord automobiles, in different stages of dustiness and breakdown. Souvenirs of young empire, they shine like hearses now in the premonition of rain. Work details are already putting up barricades, and a scavenging party has invaded the gray clapboards of Pizzini's Store, standing big as a barn on the corner. Kids hanging around the loading platform, eating sunflower seeds out of burlap sacks, listen to the soldiers liberating sides of beef from Pizzini's freezer. If Slothrop wants to get home from here, he has to slide into a pathway next to the two-story brick wall of Hicks's Garage, a green path whose entrance is concealed behind the trash-fire of the store, and the frame shed where Pizzini keeps his delivery truck. You cut through two lots which aren't platted exactly back to back, so that actually you're skirting one fence and using a driveway. They are both amber and black old ladies' houses, full of cats alive or stuffed, stained lampshades, antimacassars and doilies on all the chairs and tables, and a terminal gloom. You have to cross a street then, go down Mrs. Snodd's driveway beside the hollyhocks, through a wire gate and San-tora's back yard, over the rail fence where the hedge stops, across your own street, and home. . . .

But there is the occupation. They may already have interdicted the kids' short cuts along with the grown-up routes. It may be too late to get home.

back in der platz

Gustav and Andre, back from Cuxhaven, have unscrewed the reed-holder and reed from Andre's kazoo and replaced them with tinfoil— punched holes in the tinfoil, and are now smoking hashish out of the kazoo, finger-valving the small end pa-pa-pah to carburete the smoke—turns out sly Säure has had ex-Peenemünde engineers, propulsion-group people, working on a long-term study of optimum hashpipe design, and guess what—in terms of flow rate, heat-transfer, control of air-to-smoke ratio, the perfect shape turns out to be that of the classical kazoo!

Yeah, another odd thing about the kazoo: the knuckle-thread above the reed there is exactly the same as a thread in a light-bulb

socket. Gustav, good old Captain Horror, wearing a liberated pair of very yellow English shooting-glasses ("Helps you find the vein easier, I guess"), likes to proclaim this as the clear signature of Phoebus. "You fools think the kazoo is a subversive instrument? Here—" he always packs a light bulb on his daily rounds, no use passing up an opportunity to depress the odd dopefiend . . . deftly screwing the light bulb flush against the reed, muting it out, "You see? Phoebus is even behind the kazoo. Ha! ha! ha!" Schadenfreude, worse than a prolonged onion fart, seeps through the room.

But what Gustav's light bulb—none other than our friend Byron— wants to say is no, it's not that way at all, it's a declaration of brotherhood by the Kazoo for all the captive and oppressed light bulbs. . . .

There is a movie going on, under the rug. On the floor, 24 hours a day, pull back the rug sure enough there's that damn movie! A really offensive and tasteless film by Gerhardt von Göll, daily rushes in fact from a project which will never be completed. Springer just plans to keep it going indefinitely there, under the rug. The title is New Dope, and that's what it's about, a brand new kind of dope that nobody's ever heard of. One of the most annoying characteristics of the shit is that the minute you take it you are rendered incapable of ever telling anybody what it's like, or worse, where to get any. Dealers are as in the dark as anybody. All you can hope is that you'll come across somebody in the act of taking (shooting? smoking? swallowing?) some. It is the dope that finds you, apparently. Part of a reverse world whose agents run around with guns which are like vacuum cleaners operating in the direction of life—pull the trigger and bullets are sucked back out of the recently dead into the barrel, and the Great Irreversible is actually reversed as the corpse comes to life to the accompaniment of a backwards gunshot (you can imagine what drug-ravaged and mindless idea of fun the daily sound editing on this turns out to be). Titles flash on such as

And here he is himself, the big ham, sitting on the toilet, a ... well what appears to be an unusually large infant's training toilet, up between the sitter's legs rises the porcelain head of a jackal with what, embarrassingly, proves to be a reefer, in its rather loosely smiling mouth— "Through evil and eagles," blithers the Springer, "the climate blondes its way, for they are no strength under the coarse war. No not for roguery until the monitors are there in Washing sheets of earth to mate and say medoshnicka bleelar medoometnozz in berg-

arnot and playful fantasy under the throne and nose of the least merciful king. ..." well, there is a good deal of this sort of thing, and a good time to nip out for popcorn, which in the Platz turn out to be morning-glory seeds popped into little stilled brown explosions. None of the regular company here actually watch the movie under the rug much—only visitors passing through: friends of Magda, defectors from the great aspirin factory in Leverkusen, over in the corner there dribbling liberated cornstarch and water on each other's naked bodies, giggling unhealthily . . . devotees of the I Ching who have a favorite hexagram tattooed on each toe, who can never stay in one place for long, can you guess why? Because they always have I Ching feet! also stumblebum magicians who can't help leaving themselves wide open for disastrous visits from Qlippoth, Ouija-board jokesters, poltergeists, all kinds of astral-plane tankers and feebs—yeah they're all showing up at Der Platz these days. But the alternative is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody's ready for that. . . . Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high, watching us at our many perversities, crawling across black satin, gagging on whip-handles, licking the blood from a lover's vein-hit, all of it, every lost giggle or sigh, being carried on under a sentence of death whose deep beauty the angel has never been close to. ...

weissmann's tarot

Weissmann's Tarot is better than Slothrop's. Here are the real cards, exactly as they came up.

Significator: Knight of Swords

Covered by: The Tower

Crossed by: Queen of Swords

Crowning: King of Cups

Beneath: Ace of Swords

Before: 4 of Cups

Behind: 4 of Pentacles

Self: Page of Pentacles

House: 8 of Cups

Hopes and Fears: 2 of Swords

What will come: The World

He appears first with boots and insignia shining as the rider on a black horse, charging in a gallop neither he nor horse can control, across the heath over the giant grave-mounds, scattering the black-faced sheep, while dark stands of juniper move dreamily, death-loving, across his path in a parallax of unhurrying fatality, presiding as

monuments do over the green and tan departure of summer, the dust-colored lowlands and at last the field-gray sea, a prairie of sea darkening to purple where the sunlight comes through, in great circles, spotlights on a dancing-floor.

He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible. There is no dignity. The mothers have been masculinized to old worn moneybags of no sexual interest to anyone, and yet here are their sons, still trapped inside inertias of lust that are 40 years out of date. The fathers have no power today and never did, but because 40 years ago we could not kill them, we are condemned now to the same passivity, the same masochist fantasies they cherished in secret, and worse, we are condemned in our weakness to impersonate men of power our own infant children must hate, and wish to usurp the place of, and fail. ... So generation after generation of men in love with pain and passivity serve out their time in the Zone, silent, redolent of faded sperm, terrified of dying, desperately addicted to the comforts others sell them, however useless, ugly or shallow, willing to have life defined for them by men whose only talent is for death.

Of 77 cards that could have come up, Weissmann is "covered," that is his present condition is set forth, by The Tower. It is a puzzling card, and everybody has a different story on it. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall phallic structure, and two figures, one wearing a crown, falling from it. Some read ejaculation, and leave it at that. Others see a Gnostic or Cathar symbol for the Church of Rome, and this is generalized to mean any System which cannot tolerate heresy: a system which, by its nature, must sooner or later fall. We know by now that it is also the Rocket.

Members of the Order of the Golden Dawn believe The Tower represents victory over splendor, and avenging force. As Goebbels, beyond all his professional verbalizing, believed in the Rocket as an avenger.

On the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the path of The Tower connects the sephira Netzach, victory, with Hod, glory or splendor. Hence the Golden Dawn interpretation. Netzach is fiery and emotional, Hod is watery and logical. On the body of God, these two Sephiroth are the thighs, the pillars of the Temple, resolving together in Yesod, the sex and excretory organs.

But each of the Sephiroth is also haunted by its proper demons or Qlippoth. Netzach by the Ghorab Tzerek, the Ravens of Death, and Hod by the Samael, the Poison of God. No one has asked the demons

at either level, but there may be just the wee vulnerability here to a sensation of falling, the kind of very steep and out-of-scale fall we find in dreams, a falling more through space than among objects. Though the different Qlippoth can only work each his own sort of evil, activity on the path of The Tower, from Netzach to Hod, seems to've resulted in the emergence of a new kind of demon (what, a dialectical Tarot? Yes indeedyfoax! A-and if you don't think there are Marxist-Leninist magicians around, well you better think again!). The Ravens of Death have now tasted of the Poison of God . . . but in doses small enough not to sicken but to bring on, like the Amanita muscaria, a very peculiar state of mind. . . . They have no official name, but they are the Rocket's guardian demons.

Weissmann is crossed by the Queen of his suit. Perhaps himself, in drag. She is the chief obstacle in his way. At his foundation is the single sword flaming inside the crown: again, Netzach, victory. In the American deck this card has come down to us as the ace of spades, which is a bit more sinister: you know the silence that falls on the room when it comes up, whatever the game. Behind him, moving out of his life as an influence, is the 4 or Four of Pentacles, which shows a figure of modest property desperately clutching on to what he owns, four gold coins—this feeb is holding two of them down with his feet, balancing another on his head and holding the fourth tightly against his stomach, which is ulcerous. It is the stationary witch trying to hold her candy house against the host of nibblers out there in the dark. Moving in, before him, comes a feast of cups, a satiety. Lotta booze and broads for Weissmann coming soon. Good for him—although in his house he is seen walking away, renouncing eight stacked gold chalices. Perhaps he is to be given only what he must walk away from. Perhaps it is because in the lees of the night's last cup is the bitter presence of a woman sitting by a rocky shore, the Two of Swords, alone at the Baltic edge, blindfolded in the moonlight, holding the two blades crossed upon her breasts . . . the meaning is usually taken as "concord in a state of arms," a good enough description of the Zone nowadays, and it describes his deepest hopes, or fears.

Himself, as the World sees him: the scholarly young Page of Pentacles, meditating on his magic gold talisman. The Page may also be used to stand for a young girl. But Pentacles describe people of very dark complexion, and so the card almost certainly is Enzian as a young man. And Weissmann may at last, in this limited pasteboard way, have become what he first loved.

The King of Cups, crowning his hopes, is the fair intellectual-king.

If you're wondering where he's gone, look among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost surely there. Look high, not low. His future card, the card of what will come, is The World.

the last green and magenta

The Heath grows green and magenta in all directions, earth and heather, coming of age— No. It was spring.

the horse

In a field, beyond the clearing and the trees, the last horse is standing, tarnished silver-gray, hardly more than an assembling of shadows. The heathen Germans who lived here sacrificed horses once, in their old ceremonies. Later the horse's role changed from holy offering to servant of power. By then a great change was working on the Heath, kneading, turning, stirring with fingers strong as wind.

Now that sacrifice has become a political act, an act of Caesar, the last horse cares only about how the wind starts up this afternoon: rises at first, and tries to stick, to catch, but fails . . . each time, the horse feels a similar rising in his heart, at the edges of eye, ear, brain. . . . Finally, at the sure catching of the wind, which is also a turning in the day, his head rises, and a shiver comes over him—possesses him. His tail lashes at the clear elusive flesh of the wind. The sacrifice in the grove is beginning.

isaac

There is an Aggadic tradition from around the 4th century that Isaac, at the moment Abraham was about to sacrifice him on Moriah, saw the antechambers of the Throne. For the working mystic, having the vision and passing through the chambers one by one, is terrible and complex. You must have not only the schooling in countersigns and seals, not only the physical readiness through exercise and abstinence, but also a hardon of resolution that will never go limp on you. The angels at the doorways will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel practical jokes, to turn you aside. The Qlippoth, shells of the dead, will use all your love for friends who have passed across against you. You have chosen the active way, and there is no faltering without finding the most mortal danger.

The other way is dark and female, passive, self-abandoning. Isaac

under the blade. The glittering edge widening to a hallway, down, up which the soul is borne by an irresistible Aether. Gerhardt von Göll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrel-assing down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport, in his innocence. . . .) The numinous light grows ahead, almost blue among all this gilt and glass. The gilders worked naked and had their heads shaved bald—to get a static charge to hold the fluttering leaf they had first to run the brush through their pubic hair: genital electricity would shine forever down these gold vistas. But we have long left mad Ludwig and his Spanish dancer guttering, fading scarlet across the marble, shining so treacherously like sweet water ... already that lies behind. The ascent to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last gestures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route. ...