Gravity's Rainbow

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into—they go in under archways, secret entrances of rotted concrete that only looked like loops of an underpass...

Screaming holds across the sky. When it comes, will it come in darkness, or will it bring its own light?

The great power station, and the gasworks beyond, stand precisely: crystals grown in morning’s beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and smoke....

God has plucked it for him, out of its airless sky, like a steel banana.

Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night’s old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror’s secret by which—though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off—the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations...

The phone call, when it comes, rips easily across the room, the hangovers, the grabassing, the clatter of dishes, the shoptalk, the bitter chuckles, like a rude metal double-fart, and Pirate knows it’s got to be for him.

Yes—I’m—the— Fellow that’s hav-ing other peop-le’s fan-tasies, Suffering what they ought to be themselves—

It was a giant Adenoid. At least as big as St. Paul’s, and growing hour by hour. London, perhaps all England, was in mortal peril!

Wipes out an entire observation post with a deluge of some disgusting orange mucus in which the unfortunate men are digested—not screaming but actually laughing, enjoying themselves.

It is the dark, hard, tobacco-starved, headachy, sour-stomach middle of the day, a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it.

The stars tacked up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled “Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and to Hampstead Heath—in every direction goes this multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Marias, Annes, Susans, Elizabeths.

Soft, faded berets against the slate clouds, Mark III Stens set on automatic, mustaches mouth-wide covering enormous upper lips, humorless—no chance for any American lieutenant to get a look, not today.

But then last September the rockets came, Them fucking rockets. You couldn’t adjust to the bastards. No way.

But these things explode first, a-and then you hear them coming in. Except that, if you’re dead, you don’t hear them.

The city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling and no surprises inside ever again.

This smoke is more than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence that lives and moves.

The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word.

Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?

The wind’ had been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind ... he means, only his wind.

‘What’s the most frequent word?’ asks Jessica. ‘Your number one.’ ‘The same as it’s always been at these affairs,’ — the statistician, as if everyone knew: ‘death.’

It’s a great swamp of paranoia.

Wasn’t Mexico’s face tonight, as he took the envelope, averted? eyes boxing the corners of the room at top speed, a pornography customer's reflex...

Scorpia’s talc-white face, through the last window, across the last gate, was a blow to his heart.

They’re both of them gaerisl tonight, whippy as sheets of glass improperly annealed, ready to go smash at any indefinite touch in a whining matrix of stresses—

The city he visits nowadays is Death’s antechamber: where all the paperwork’s done, the contracts signed, the days numbered.

That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

The doctor steps into the white waiting throat of a toilet bowl he has not, so intent on his prey, seen.

Taking the wet sponge between two fingers, he staggers toward the dog, shining the light up from under his chin to highlight the vampire face he thinks he’s making.

But sometimes—Roger glances again across Jessica’s dark wool bosom at the knitted head, the naked nose and eyes—he thinks the doctor wants more than his good will, his collaboration. But wants him. As one wants a fine specimen of dog. . . .

Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder, come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal.

Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out...a few feet of film run backwards...

And those who do let go at last: out of each catharsis rise new children, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between... tablet erased, new writing about to begin, hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests

What finally irritated him out of all tolerance was that the dog didn’t know how to reverse its behavior.

Everything, even the explosions in the distances might stay as long as they were to no purpose... as long as no one had to die... couldn’t it be that way?

The rockets are distributing about London just as Poisson’s equation in the textbooks predicts.

What will you do with the sieve you've laid over London? How will you use the things that grow in your network of death?

Hands that could as well torture people as dogs and never feel their pain.

Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

There’s no calling it back. Either he lets the harp go, his silver chances of song, or he has to follow.

‘Yardbird’ Parker is finding out how he can use the notes at the higher ends of these very chords to break up the melody into have mercy what is it a fucking machine gun or something man he must be out of his mind

In its blunt, reluctant touches along the wall (which speak the reverse of its own cohesion) he can, uncannily shit-sensitized now, read old agonies inside poor Dumpster, who'd tried suicide last semester.

Decline and fall works silently on this landscape. No sun, no moon, only a long smooth sinewaving of the light.

One of each of everything’s not so bad. Half an Ark’s better than none.

The country can best support only one of each.

Slowly then, a revelation through the nacreous film of his seed, in Negro-brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition whose keywords he can almost guess.

“I can hear the Lord of the Sea,” cries Le Froyd, in wonder.

Now he stays up past the curfews, and watches his stepfather while he sleeps, invisible, protected by the night which is his own colour.

Fallen trees, dead, smooth gray, swirling grain of tree like frozen smoke . . . ginger . . . thunder . . . no use, no bleeding use, it’s gone, another gone, another, oh dear .

Ernest Pudding was brought up to believe in a literal Chain of Command, as clergymen of earlier centuries believed in the Chain of Being.

The metronome at 80 per second breaks out in wooden echoes, and Dog Vanya, bound atop the test stand, begins to salivate.

The mud of Flanders gathered into the curd-clumped, mildly jellied textures of human shit, piled, duck-boarded, trenched and shell-pocked leagues of shit in all directions.

But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from fin-ding what we need to know. We, are in control. He cannot help, him-self.

One of the libraries served, for a time, as a wallow, the floor dropped three feet and replaced with mud up to the thresholds for giant Gloucestershire Old Spots to frolic, oink, and cool their summers in.

Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue.

When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul.

And how much of the pretty victim straining against her bonds does Ned Pointsman see in each dog that visits his test stands...and aren’t scalpel and probe as decorative, as fine extensions as whip and cane?

The next great breakthrough may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely, and strike off at some other angle.

When we shut off the metronome, oh then he'll turn to it, sniff, try to lick it, bite it—seek, in the silence, for the stimulus that is not there.

Their footprints behind them a long freezing progress of exhausted stars, the overcast reflecting from the glazed beach nearly white.

Outside, the long rain in silicon and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against the mediaeval windows, curtaining like smoke the river's far shore.

Inside herself, enclosed in the soignée surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven...

Often the rockets, crazed, turn at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable.

It’s he, Blicero, who climbs the mountain, has been so climbing for nearly 20 years, since long before he embraced the Reich’s flame, since Südwest ... alone.

He only wants now “to be out of the’ winter, inside the Oven’s warmth, darkness, steel shelter, the door behind him in a narrowing rectangle of kitchen-light gonging shut, forever.

The peril of buggering the boy under the resonance of the sacred Name fills him insanely with lust, lust in the face—the mask—of instant talion from outside the fire.

Perhaps the black girl is a genius of meta-solutions—knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee.

He knows, like everyone, that captive children are always freed in the moment of maximum danger.

The half-moon shines among hazy clouds, its dark half the color of aged meat.

The true war is a celebration of markets.

But now and then, players in a game will, lull or crisis, be reminded how it is, after all, really play—and be unable then to continue in the same spirit.

There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer.

The act of ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.

Sanctified now they will feed us, sanctified their remains and droppings fertilize our crops.

The reel is threaded, the lights are switched off, Grigori’s attention is directed to the screen, where an image already walks.

He feels he’s being gently separated from the life he lived ‘before going into St. Veronica’s.

But just as he’s biting in, Darlene gives him, and it, a peculiar look, great timing this girl, sez, “Oh, I thought we got rid of all those—”

Slothrop’s head begins to reel with camphor fumes, his eyes are running, his tongue’s a hopeless holocaust.

The Meggezone is like being belted in the head with a Swiss Alp. Menthol icicles immediately begin to grow from the roof of Slothrop’s mouth.

The floor has twitched like a shaken carpet, and the bed with it. Slothrop’s penis has sprung erect, aching.

They confuse everyone. They look so innocent. People immediately want to protect them: censoring themselves away from talk of death, business, duplicity when Roger and Jessica are there.

He unreeled the long hair, beaded with saliva, tooth-tartar, mouth-breather’s morning fur, and stared at it.

He’s surrounded! they’ve been out there night and day all the war long tapping his brain, telepaths, witches, Satanic operators of all descriptions tuning in on everything—even when he and Jessica are in bed.

But Jessica was the breaking of the wave. Suddenly there was a beach, the unpredictable... new life.

Voices piping across frozen downs where the sown mines crowd thick as plums in a pudding.

These are not heresies so much as imperial outcomes, necessary as the black man’s presence, from acts of minor surrealism—which, taken in the mass, are an act of suicide, but which in its pathology, in its dreamless version of the real, the Empire commits by the thousands every day, completely unaware of what it’s doing... .

The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fiihrer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity.

In the stations of the city the prisoners are back from Indo-China, wandering their poor visible bones, light as dreamers or men on the moon.

It is the Night’s Mad Carnival. There is merriment under the shadows of the minute-hands. Hysteria in the pale faces between the numerals.

Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart?

For the moment not caring who you're supposed to be registered as. For the moment anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.

The rocket’s ghost calling to ghosts it newly made.

The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro... auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living...

Oh yes once you know, he did believe in a Minotaur waiting for him: used-to dream himself rushing into the last room, burnished sword at the ready, screaming like a Commando, letting it all out at last—some true marvelous peaking of life inside him for the first and last time.

But out in this late English winter the dogs, thrown over, are still ranging the back-streets and mews, sniffing the dustbins, skidding on carpets of snow, fighting, fleeing, shivering in their wet pools of Prussian blue...

The thought of him lost in the world of men, after the war, fills me with a deep dread I cannot extinguish.

What gathers among them all, that each in his own freak way can testify to but not in language, not even the lingua franca of the offices?

It’s as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter.

This connoisseuse of “splendid weaknesses,” run not by any lust or even velleity but by vacuum: by the absence of human hope.

The eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven.

Sachsa’s table was like a deep pool in the forest. Beneath the surface things were rolling, slipping, beginning to rise....

Does he know what it means for a woman born under the Crab, a mother, to have all her home in a valise?

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night.

Leni’s fair skin, her look of innocence, and the Jewess’s darker coloring, her rawness, contrasting with Leni’s delicacy of structure and skin, pelvic bones stretching cobwebs smoothly down groins and around belly, the two women sliding, snarling, gasping...

The President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with his familiar clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down suddenly: “Oh, fuck it...”

Not produce, she tried, not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms.

These were the kinds of revenants that found Franz, not persons but forms of energy, abstractions.

Destiny will betray you, crush your ideals, deliver you into the same detestable Bürgerlichkeit as your father, sucking at his pipe on Sunday strolls after church past the row houses by the river.

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don’t know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.

But somehow they're never to have this again, this sudden tropics in the held breath of war and English December, this moment of perfect peace.

His singing voice is incredible, in his spare time he strolls out past the wire-mesh fighter runways looking for bigger planes—for he loves to practice the bass part to “Diadem” as the Flying Fortresses take off at full power.

Some unaccustomed wind or thermocline along the sky is bringing them down the deep choral hum of American bombers: Death’s white Gymanfa Ganu.

But what if the Ci-ty were a growing neo-plasm, across the centuries, always chang-ing, to meet exactly the chang-ing shape of its very worst, se-cret fears?

The crying of the infant reached you, perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance, nearly unsensed, often ignored. Your savior, you see....

And those voices you hear, Boy and Girl of the Year, Are of children who are learning to die.

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands.

Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe / As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz....

Gulls begin to wail, the garment on Slothrop blazes into a refulgent life of its own.

Holy shit it’s moving—an octopus? Yes it is the biggest fucking octopus Slothrop has ever seen outside of the movies, Jackson, and it has just risen up out of the water and squirmed halfway onto one of the black rocks.

The octopus gazes at Slothrop, triumphant, while he, in the presence of certain death, can’t quit staring at her hand, cloth furrowing in tangents to her terror, a shirt button straining at a single, last thread.

Structure and detail come later, but the conniving around him now he feels instantly, in his heart.

For it might, after all, be only another episode in some huge pathological dream of Stalin’s.

He raises his wineglass and announces, “The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick.”

Either what you've got is contagious, or else they've an eye on me too.

He opens her closet, and in moonlight reflected from the mirror finds a crowded maze of satins, taffetas, lawn, and pongee, dark fur collars and trimming, buttons, sashes, passementerie, soft, confusing, womanly tunnel-systems that must stretch back for miles—he could be lost inside of half a minute.

This is suddenly a struggle, vicious and real—she will not surrender her face—and out of nowhere she does begin to come, and so does Slothrop.

The pillow bursts against one marble hip, moonlight in the room is choked with feathers and down and soon with hanging spray from jets of Seltzer.

About then the point of the tree cracks through, and with a great rustle and whoosh, a whirl of dark branches and needles breaking him up into a few thousand sharp falling pieces, down topples Slothrop.

The answer's in Bloat’s stare, the room become rationalized, nothing to it of holiday, only Savile Row uniforms, silver hairbrushes and razor arranged at right angles.

Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical... but, but...

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all.

How did this all turn against him so fast? His friends old and new, every last bit of paper and clothing connecting him to what he’s been, have just, fucking, vanished.

But now and then... too insubstantial to get a fix on, there'll be in her face a look, something not in her control, that depresses him, that he’s even dreamed about and so found amplified there to honest fright: the terrible chance that she might have been conned too.

The odds They played here belonged to the past, the past only. Their odds were never probabilities, but frequencies already observed.

They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return.

There is nothing specially erotic about reading manuals hastily translated from the German—brokenly mimeographed, even a few salvaged by the Polish underground from the latrines at the training site at Blizna, stained with genuine SS shit and piss...

Slothrop’s head is a balloon, which rises not vertically but horizontally, constantly across the room, whilst staying in one place.

Here it thunders now over the Mediterranean, high and lonely, this anachronism in primal red, in yellow purer than can be found anywhere today, a purity begging to be polluted . . .

I’m an impotent man—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write...

One wall of the room, though blank, has been eroded at, over years, by shadows of operatives, as certain mirrors in public easing-places have been by the images of customers: a surface gathering character, like an old face.

‘Mother,’ that’s a civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They're the policemen of the soul...

The Schutzmann’s first clear shot all day ...oh, his timing is perfect, he feels it in arm and out the club no longer flabby at his side but tensed back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of his swing, peak of potential energy...

If you hear the explosion, you know you must be alive.

Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm...

But her whisper is lethal and bright as sudden wire: 'Maybe you'll find out. Maybe in one of their bombed-out Cities beside one of their rivers or forests, even one day in the rain, it will come to you.'

Each light, winking out . . . Except at last for one bright, stubborn bloom / The Wardens cannot quench, Or not this time.

By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy.

I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn’t free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.

Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don’t want them, or when we are suffocating.

Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood.

They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet.

The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.

If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised—none of them made the connection, at least not while alive.

Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities . . . or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening.

Scales and claws, and footfalls no one else seems to hear. . .

Who'd know better than an outfit like Shell, with no real country, no side in any war, no specific face or heritage: tapping instead out of that global stratum, most deeply laid, from which all the appearances of corporate ownership really spring?

The horse is leaving turds on the Bokhara rug, also on the odd supine guest.

Its 75 mm cannon swivels until it’s pointing through the French windows right down into the room.

The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain’s there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutiérrez.

The target property most often seemed to be strength—first among Plasticity’s virtuous triad of Strength, Stability and Whiteness.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

Just for the knife-edge, ‘here in the Rue Rossini, there comes to Slothrop the best feeling dusk in a foreign city can bring: just where the sky’s light balances the electric lamplight in the street, just before the first star, some promise ‘of events without cause, surprises, a direction at right angles to every direction his life has been able to find up till now.

She thumbs him upstairs and then gives him either the V-for-victory sign or some spell from distant countryside against the evil eye that sours the milk.

For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American.

Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

Our brains at the cleaners, our souls at the Fair, Just freaks on a fur-lough, away from the blues, As daffy and sharp as—the taps on our shoes!

They see themselves at the end of a long European dialectic, generations of blighted grain, ergotism, witches on broomsticks, community orgies, cantons lost up there in folds of mountain that haven’t known an unhallucinated day in the last 500 years—keepers of a tradition, aristocrats—

Whatever it was they all had in common: whatever they'd come to this vantage to score... perhaps it had to do with the people somehow, with pedestrian mortality, restless crisscrossing of needs or desperations in one fateful piece of street.

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.

He appears to be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being.

But now the screen has gone dark, and there is absolutely no more time left. The agents are here for you at last....

The first night he was afraid to fall asleep, afraid of a visit from Jamf, whose German-scientist mind would be battered by Death to only the most brute reflexes, no way to appeal to the dumb and grinning evil of the shell that was left.

The absence of Jamf surrounds him like an odor, one he knows but can’t quite name, an aura that threatens to go epileptic any second.

Pointsman sees it immediately. But he “sees” it in the way you would walking into your bedroom to be jumped on, out of a bit of penumbra on your ceiling, by a gigantic moray eel, its teeth in full imbecile death-smile, breathing, in its fall onto your open face, a long human sound that you know, horribly, to be a sexual sigh....

Pointsman is finding it much easier of late to slip into a l’état c'est moi frame of mind—who else is doing anything? isn’t he holding it all together, often with nothing beyond his own raw will...?

Is it possible for this woman to be in love? Love? Oh, it’s enough to make you scream.

That a story made up to scare last year’s enemy should prove to be literally true—and no way now to stuff them back in the bottle or even say the spell backward: no one ever knew the complete spell—different people knew different parts of it, that’s what teamwork is.

Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control.

Whoever it was left a red tulip between Slothrop’s toes. He has taken it for a sign.

Their feet moved over clouded, crumbled old glass, torn silks, bones of dead rabbits and kittens.

It is the breath of the Forbidden Wing...essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive.

I’ve been sold, Jesus Christ I’ve been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef.

A foot from his face, this double row of shiny bright teeth hangs in the air, Just what he needs.

Old people in black are bat-flittering among the walls.

Even G-5, living its fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the arrangement for being victorious, is all.

Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

Forget frontiers now. Forget subdivisions. There aren’t any.

At first you may be alarmed, on noticing that they appear to be fashioned from skulls.

No, this Rocket-City, so whitely lit against the calm dimness of space, is set up deliberately To Avoid Symmetry, Allow Complexity, Introduce Terror.

As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia.

The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless.

There’s a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it.

The status of the name you miss, love, and search for now has grown ambiguous and remote, but this is even more than the bureaucracy of mass absence—some still live, some have died, but many, many have forgotten which they are.

Slothrop moseys along looking at his face in them, watching it warp and slide by, just a big underground fun house here folks.

The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop’s hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in among fun-seekers around the beer keg.

A sergeant with a boy’s face and gray hair, dozing with a grease gun cradled against him, wakes up crying, “Krauts!” lets loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight into the beer barrel.

The phantom voices inside it gain confidence from the dark. The bundle of Monel falls with a great crash.

Slothrop feels a terrible familiarity here, a center he has been skirting, avoiding as long as he can remember—never has he been as close as now to the true momentum of his time.

Slothrop has the inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions, and anyhow he’s jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head aswarm with souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling Thunderbolts.

How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket’s own?

The woman feels power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and toes.

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit, Where he can — fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.

The Eternal Center can easily be seen as the Final Zero.

The trouble with it is that by Gödel’s Theorem there is bound to be some item around that one has omitted from the list, and such an item is not easy to think of off the top of one’s head, so that what one does most likely is go back over the whole thing.

North is death’s region. There may be no gods, but there is a pattern: names by themselves may have no magic, but the act of naming, the physical utterance, obeys the pattern.

The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.

Did you ever, in the street, see a man that you knew, in the instant, must be Jesus Christ—not hoped he was, or caught some resemblance—but knew.

He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader.

If choices have never been our own, if the Zone-Hereros are meant to live in the bosom of the Angel who tried to destroy us in Südwest . . . then: have we been passed over, or have we been chosen for something even more terrible?

The arm-shadow trails rainbows behind as it moves reaching eastward for a grab at Gottingen.

The spectra wash red to indigo, tidal, immense, at all their edges. Under the clouds out there it’s as still, and lost, as Atlantis.

Slothrop feels his heart, out of control, inflate with love and rise quick as a balloon.

He flings it, perfect shot, the plane peeling slowly past and blop gets Marvy right in the face.

The godawful blasts go drumming over the farmland, horns, hide and hamburger come showering down all over the place, the dented bells lie quiet in the clover.

In and out of all the vibrant flesh moves the mad scavenger Tchitcherine, who is more metal than anything else.

He will not come to love this sky or plain, these people, their animals. Nor look back, no not even in the worst marsh-bivouacs of his soul, in naked Leningrad encounters with the certainty of his death, of the deaths of comrades, ever keep any memory of Seven Rivers to shelter with.

She had to come out here to learn what an earthquake felt like, and how to wait out a sandstorm.

Didn’t the look say, “Nothing you do, nothing he does, will help you in your mortality”?

Waiting, out in sunlight which is not theirs yet, is the . . . The . . . Waiting for them, the unimagined creature of height, and burning . . .

Each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen, 'the Great Catherine of the periodic table,' down to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns.

He is a giant supermolecule with so many open bonds available at any given time, and in the drift of things . . . in the dance of things . . . howsoever . . . others latch on.

The two opiomaniacs crouch behind a bit of wall wrecked and tilted from the last earthquake.

We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously . . . machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy.

He only wanted a rest from the working parties, and from the way it looked ... from what the black and white of coal and arc-light were about to say...no color, and the unreality to go with it—but a familiar unreality, that warms This Is All Being Staged To See What I'll Do So I Mustn’t Make One Wrong Move...

By the time he left, they had learned each other’s names and a few words in the respective languages—afraid, happy, sleep, love... the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin which they were perhaps the only two speakers of in the world.

It occurs to him that he is, in reality, locked up in some military nut ward back in Moscow, and only hallucinating this plenary session.

Time for retrospection here, for refining the recent history that’s being pumped up fetid and black from other strata of Earth’s mind.

Printed posters go up in the cities, in Samarkand and Pishpek, Verney and Tashkent... the first kill-the-police-commissioner signs (and somebody does! this alphabet is really something!)

The roar of Its voice is deafness, / The flash of Its light is blindness. / The floor of the desert rumbles, / And Its face cannot be borne.

For a minute he has the truly unbalanced idea of running out in the street and asking them to take him back, requesting political asylum in America.

We have a word that we whisper, a mantra for times that threaten to be bad. Mba-kayere. It means ‘I am passed over.’

Birds swirl upward, round and black, grains of coarse-cut pepper on this bouillabaisse sky.

The Schwarzgerat is no Grail, Ace, that’s not what the G in Imipolex G stands for.

“Raketemensch!” screams Saeure, grabbing the helmet and unscrewing the horns off of it. Names by themselves may be empty, but the act of naming. . .

On closer inspection, the crouching monster turns out to be the Reichstag building, shelled out, airbrushed, fire-brushed powdery black on all blastward curves and projections.

They are rising, they are transubstantiated, and who knows, with summer over and hungry winter coming down, what we'll be feeding on by Xmas?

Saure begins to crank his clattering wheel, and sheets of Reichsmarks do indeed come fluttering off into the holder, thousands on thousands.

The straight-ruled boulevards built to be marched along are now winding pathways through the waste-piles, their shapes organic now, responding, like goat trails, to laws of least discomfort.

Whoever it was, posing in the black cape at Yalta with the other leaders, conveyed beautifully the sense of Death’s wings, rich, soft and black as the winter cape, prepared a nation of starers for the passing of Roosevelt, a being They assembled, a being They would dismantle.

An anti-target. Certainly not the A4’s idea of one, eh, Rocketman.

He is the knight who leaps perpetually—across the chessboard of the Zone, is who he is.

Wrecks poke up out of the water, red lead and rust ripening in this light, bashed gray hullplates, flaking rivets, unlaid cable pointing hysterical strands to all points of the compass, vibrating below any hearing in the breeze.

They don’t now about Rocketman. here. They keep passing him and he ‘Temains alone, blotted to evening by velvet and buckskin— if they do see him his image is shunted immediately out to the boondocks of the brain where it remains in exile with other critters of the night.

The folds of his cape are gone to corroded bronze under the arc-lighting.

Slothrop recognizes him on sight, Judge Hardy’s freckled madcap son, three-dimensional, flesh, in a tux and am-I-losing-my-mind face.

The conversation in the steel space that night was full of quiet damped ss and palatal ys, the peculiar, reluctant poignancy of Argentine Spanish, brought along through years of frustrations, self-censorship, long roundabout evasions of political truth.

“You look more like a Gaucho Marx,” Graciela drawls, and leaves Felipe to go back to the treatment he’s working on for von Göll, using El Nato’s copy of Martin Fierro, which has long been thumbed into separate loose pages, and smells of horses.

My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation.

So, out in the mellow sea-return tonight, the two fatal courses do intersect in space, but not in time.

Or has he by way of the language caught the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named, even to bringing in the mathematics of combination, tacking together established nouns to get new ones, the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are words.

There is an invisible kingdom of flab, a million cells-at-large, and they all know who he is—soon as he’s unconscious, they start up, every one, piping in high horrible little Mickey Mouse voices, hey fellas! hey c’mon, let’s all go over to Slothrop’s, the big sap ain’t doing anything but laying on his ass, cmon, oboy!

Highlights are painted on to the sets, which is disturbing to Slothrop, who keeps finding these feeble yellow streaks, looking up sharply, then all around, for sources of light that were never there.

The light came from above and below at the same time, so that everyone had two shadows: Cain’s and Abel’s.

It’s easy for non-fetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any underwear enthusiast worth his unwholesome giggle can tell you there is much more here—there is a cosmology: of nodes and cusps and points of osculation, mathematical kisses... singularities!

A film. How else? Isn’t that what they made of my child, a film?

Pökler knew how to find safety among the indoor abscissas and ordinates of graphs: finding the points he needed not by running the curve itself, not up on high stone and vulnerability, but instead tracing patiently the xs and ys.

He went to switch on a light—but in the act of throwing the switch he knew the room had really been lit to begin with, and he had just turned everything out, everything.

Integral signs weaved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash.

In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity.

They were invading Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down.

So he hunted, as a servo valve with a noisy input will, across the Zero, between the two desires, personal identity and impersonal salvation.

The vacuum of his life threatened to be broken in one strong inrush of love. He tried to maintain it with seals of suspicion, looking for resemblances to the face he’d last seen years ago.

At any moment the illusion they stood on would dissolve and they would fall to earth.

Should he have told her what the “seas” of the Moon really were? Told her there was nothing to breathe?

Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide... though he’s amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker.

Who sent this new serpent to our ruinous garden, already too fouled, too crowded to qualify as any locus of innocence—unless innocence be our age’s neutral, our silent passing into the machineries of indifference?

When she left him she left an unemployed servant who'd go with the first master that called, just a VICTIM IN A Vacuum!

He found the SS man on guard behind eyeglasses like Wagnerian shields, ready for unacceptable maxima—anger, accusation, a moment of office-violence.

The Opponent knew that Pökler’s suspicion would always be stronger than any fears about real incest.

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses.

A number of uncertainties shifted then for Pékler and locked into sense.

The only continuity has been her name, and Zwolfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter.

A strange gradient of death and wreckage, south to north, in which the poorest and most helpless got it worst—as, indeed, the gradient was to run east to west, in London a year later when the rockets began to fall.

It is after all his own personal ass whose quivering sphincter is centered right on Ground Zero.

But inside Pékler’s life, on no record but his soul, his poor harassed German soul, the time base has lengthened, and slowed: the Perfect Rocket is still up there, still descending.

Weissmann’s cruelty was no less resourceful than Pékler’s own engineering skill, the gift of Daedalus that allowed him to put as much labyrinth as required between himself and the inconveniences of caring.

Ilse gazed back at him, no tears, eyes room after room strung into the shadows of an old prewar house he could wander for years, hearing voices and finding doors, hunting himself, his life as it might have been....

He veered into the wind of his long isolation, shuddering terribly.

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging, their toes clustering white and round as pearls.

If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

The smooth-faced Custodian of the Night hovers behind neutral eyes and smile; coiled and pale over the city, humming its hoarse lullabies.

Chunks of the Gate still lie around in the street—leaning shell-spalled up in the rainy sky, its silence is colossal, haggard as he pads by flanking it, the Chariot gleaming like coal, driven and still, it is the 30th century and swashbuckling Rocketman has just landed here to tour the ruins, the high-desert traces of an ancient European order....

If you kill us, don’t eat us. If you eat, don’t digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers....

The point is, a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland.

The young barbarians coming in to murder the Last European, standing at the far end of what’d been going on since Bach, an expansion of music’s polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly equal at last.

The truth is they are both so blitzed that neither one knows what he’s talking about, which is just as well, for at this point comes a godawful hammering at the door and a lot of achtungs from the other side.

The dark stain steams into the wood planks. Faraway clover rises, disperses: a ghost....

It is the warm, romantic summer of ’45, and surrender or not, the culture of death still prevails.

This dream will not leave him. He baits his hook, hunkers by the bank, drops his line into the Spree.

The Riicksichtslos itself is the issue of another kind of fanaticism: that of the specialist.

Ship’s company actually lived each man inside his stall, each with his own key and locker, pin-ups and library shelves decorating the partitions.

If tensor analysis is good enough for turbulence, it ought to be good enough for history.

“They pray not only for their daily bread,” Stresemann had said, “but also for their daily illusion.”

Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity is till he reaches the interface of the thunder?

Telephone jacks on black rubber cords dangle from brackets overhead, each connection hanging over its own desk, all the desks perfectly empty, covered with salt-dust sifted from the ceiling, no phones to plug in, no more words to be said.

In the ruins lilacs bleed their color, their surplus life out over the broken stone and brick.

It is a moving village: all summer it has been sailing these lowlands just as Viking ships did a thousand years ago, though passively, not marauding: seeking an escape it has not yet defined clearly.

He looks down, observes sticking out a porthole two slender wrists in silver and sapphires, lighted from inside like ice, and the oily river rushing by underneath.

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

I think of the A4 as a baby Jesus, with endless committees of Herods out to destroy it in infancy.

He had left 1945, wired his nerves back into the pre-Christian earth we fled across, into the Urstoff of the primitive German, God’s poorest and most panicked creature.

Not masturbating or anything, just watching, watching the river, the night...

Under the bowsprit, the golden jackal, the only being aboard that can see through the fog, stares ahead, down the river, toward Swinemünde.

He was somehow, actually, well, inside his own cock. If you can imagine such a thing.

He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites... but coming back is something he’s already forgotten about.

“You think I am a voyeur. Yes you do. But it isn’t that. There is no thrill, I mean, But when I watch people, I feel less alone.”

Wars have a way of overriding the days just before them. In the looking back, there is such noise and gravity.

At night they watched the fireworks—fountains, spark-foaming rockets, yellow starbursts high over Poland.

Twilight came down on Bad Karma that night pallid and violent: the horizon was a Biblical disaster.

I am the Shekhinah, queen, daughter, bride, and mother of God. And I will take you back, you fragment of smashed vessel, even if I must pull you by your nasty little circumcised penis—

I'm a child, I know how to hide, and I can hide you.

She lay down beside it and put her arms around it. There was frost. The body rolled toward her and the wrinkles stayed frozen in the cloth.

Thanatz would sit with her lying across his knees, and read the scars down her back, as a gypsy reads a palm.

It was not Germany he moved through. It was his own space. But he was taking us along with him!

The mouth smiled quickly, but absent: the wrinkled wolf-eyes had gone even beyond these domestic moments of telepathy, on into its animal north, to a persistence on the hard edge of death I can’t imagine.

Someone said ‘butadiene,’ and I heard beauty dying.

The white ship settles, like the soul of a kerosene lamp just lit, into its evening routine.

He hits, without a call for help, just a meek tearful oh fuck, tears that will add nothing to the whipped white desolation that passes for the Oder Haff tonight.

“My mother,” the pink boy crouching beside him with an apologetic and helpless look. “The terror of the high seas.”

No dramatic call to the front office—just waking up one day, and knowing that Queen, Bishop, and King are only splendid cripples, and pawns, even those that reach the final row, are condemned to creep in two dimensions, and no Tower will ever rise or descend—no: flight has been given only to the Springer!

Elite and preterite, we move through a cosmic design of darkness and light, and in all humility, I am one of the very few who can comprehend it in toto.

“Really! Ja. A gigantic clummmp of -felsitic debris, last year, off the coast of Denmark, she criticized its,” just about to fall into one of those mirthless laughs we edge away from, “its crystalline structure, for twenty minutes. Incredible.”

Tchitcherine is a complex man. It’s almost as if...he thinks of Enzian as... another part of him—a black version of something inside himself. A something he needs to—... liquidate.

There’s a late time of day when all shadows are thrown along the same east-northeast bearing as the test rockets were always fired out to sea from Peenemünde.

Barracks have had their roofs blown away: spinal and ribwise and sunwhite the bones of these creatures that must have held in their time half the Jonahs of falling Europe.

The Russians have thrown back a tarp to reveal the chimps, who are covered with vomit, and have also broken into the vodka.

They put the traditional flowered hat on her head, and hand her the orb and scepter, which in this case are a gilded pot roast and a whip, and the orchestra plays Tristan und Isolde.

A sharp sickle of moon has risen, Apes scuttle along in the bonelight, arms dangling.

The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona.

Forgive him his numbness, his glozing neutrality. Forgive the fist that doesn’t tighten in his chest, the heart that can’t stiffen in any greeting...

“Hand over that gun there, Ivan, or I turn you into a human flare!”

Mine’s always trying to destroy me. We should be exchanging those, instead of uniforms.

When searchlights move by, pine trunks uphill flare, deeply shining, terrible...and at everyone's back, the Baltic shakes and streams.

Die like ya live—all of a sudden, don’t drag it out— even as bitchy little Melvin Purvis, staked outside the Biograph Theatre, lit up the fatal cigar and felt already between his lips the penis of official commendation.

How could you've kept from lapsing, up here, into that radiant inattention, so caught up in the wind, the sheer altitude...the unimaginable fires at your feet?

Each alternative Zone speeds away from all the others, in fated acceleration, red-shifting, fleeing the Center.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted... secretly, it was being dictated instead by the needs of technology.

Up here, on the surface, coaltars, hydrogenation, synthesis were always phony, dummy functions to hide the real, the planetary mission yes perhaps centuries in the unrolling.

Suddenly, this awful branching; the two possibilities already beginning to fly apart at the speed of thought—a new Zone in any case, now, whether Christian fires or refrains—jump, choose—

And if he dies before they find the True Text to study, then there'll have to be machinery for others to carry it on....

Someday, when the film is fast enough, the equipment pocket-size and burdenless and selling at people’s prices, the lights and booms no longer necessary, then...then...

Gleeful Frau Gnahb, humming through her teeth, spins the wheel, spokes blurring, prow swinging over aiming for midships.

It feels like the pointed toe of a dancing-pump, in out of nowhere to hover a second and stroke the soft underside of his chin—then it flicks up, slamming his teeth shut on his tongue.

Icy little thighs in wet silk swing against his face.

She sees a white-haired girl in Pirate Prentice’s Chelsea maisonette, a face so strange that she has recognized the mediaeval rooms before she does herself.

Joint hallucination is not unknown in our world, podner.

In the Parliament of Life, the time comes, simply, for a division. We are in the corridors we have chosen, moving toward the door.

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.

We have to carry on under the possibility that we die only because They want us to: because They need our terror for Their survival.

I’ve been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose.

“I can’t even trust myself? can I. How much freer than that can a man be? If he’s to be sold out by anyone? even by himself you see?”

He tries to face it, though it fills him with a terror so pure, so cold, he thinks for a minute he'll pass out.

But that’s the only medium we've got now, he cries, a gift for bad faith. We'll have to build everything with it, as the prosecutors deal you your freedom.

“But the People will never love you,” she whispers, “or me. However bad and good are arranged for them, we will always be bad.

Slothrop wakes up in a burned-out locksmith’s shop, under racks of sooty keys whose locks have all been lost.

So the populations move, across the open meadow, limping, marching, shuffling, carried, hauling along the detritus of an order, a European and bourgeois order they don’t yet know is destroyed forever.

He is smiling: but his serenity and distance are the stretch of an impotent cry past Slothrop’s reach.

Slothrop’s family actually made its money killing trees, amputating them from their roots, chopping them up, grinding them to pulp, bleaching that to paper and getting paid for this with more paper.

Without the millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle.

Could he have been the fork in the road America never took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way from?

He dreams of the generations of cannon fodder, struggling forward on their knees, one by one, to kiss his stomach while he gobbles turkey legs and ice-cream cones and wipes his fingers off in the polliwogs’ hair.

Forget-me-nots are growing violent blue violent yellow among the snarl of cables and hoses.

I spint all day today cleanin’ my Colt’s,” caressing the sidearm in its holster. “Goam make me a coonskin cap outa one o’ thim ’suckers, ’n’ I don’t have to tell you what part’s goam be danglin’ down there in back, do I? Hah?

The four fins of the Rocket made a cross, another mandala.

Tchitcherine, bureauless, carries it around in his brain. Every chip and scrap belongs.

Oh, a State begins to take form in the Stateless German night, a State that spans oceans and surface politics, sovereign as the International or the Church of Rome, and the Rocket is its soul.

This analytic legacy has been handed down intact—it brought the technicians at Peenemünde to peer at the Askania films of Rocket flights, frame by frame, Δx by Δy, flightless themselves... film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.

Wobbling, grinning hugely, Slothrop hollers his line: “I am the wrath of Donar—and this day you shall be my anvil!”

Beneath the efficiency and glee is nostalgia for the old days.

It touches Slothrop’s own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made printer’s ink, dwelling along with antibodies and iron-bound breath in a good man’s blood.

He puts on the pig mask. She stares for a minute, then moves up to Slothrop and kisses him, snout-to-snout.

The pig and Slothrop settled down to sleep among pines thick with shreds of tinfoil, a cloud of British window dumped to fox the German radars in some long-ago raid, a whole forest of Christmas trees, tinsel rippling in the wind, catching the starlight, silent, ice-cold crownfire acres wild over their heads all night.

That something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation.

He found delight not unlike a razor sweeping his skin and nerves, scalp to soles, in ritual submissions to the Master of this night space and of himself, the male embodiment of a technologique that embraced power not for its social uses but for just those chances of surrender, personal and dark surrender, to the Void, to delicious and screaming collapse.

Silicon, boron, phosphorus—these can replace carbon, and can bond to nitrogen instead of hydrogen—move beyond life, toward the inorganic.

Who do you think sat on top of the patent for that 100-miles-per-gallon carburetor, eh? sure you've heard that story—maybe even snickered along with paid anthropologists who called it Automotive Age Myth or some shit—well, turns out the item was real, all right.

Those like Slothrop, with the greatest interest in discovering the truth, were thrown back on dreams, psychic flashes, omens, cryptographies, drug-epistemologies, all dancing on a ground of terror, contradiction, absurdity.

Third ball gets stuck somehow against a solenoid and (helphelp, it’s hollering, wounded high little voice, oh I’m being electrocuted...)

looked into the heart of the solenoid, seen the magnetic serpent and energy in its nakedness, long enough to be changed, to bring back from the writhing lines of force down in that pit an intimacy with power, with glazed badlands of soul, that set them apart forever

It is difficult to look for long at the strange single eye crowning the pyramid which is found on every dollar bill and not begin to believe the story, a little.

Lyle Bland rose up out of his body, about a foot, face-up, realized where he was and gaahh! whoosh back in again.

To find that Gravity, taken so for granted, is really something eerie, Messianic, extrasensory in Earth’s mindbody ...

Tonight, I am going out for good. That is, I am not coming back.

From a tank car whose contents, ethanol, 75% solution, are announced in stark white stenciling along the side, spigots protrude here and there, under which an incredible number of mess cups, china mugs, coffeepots, wastebaskets, and other containers are being advanced and withdrawn.

Impeccable tonight in dress whites, straight-faced and sober, he trudges among the merrymakers, thickly sprouting hair from jumper sleeves and V-neck, so much of it that last week he spooked and lost a connection just in from the CBI theatre with close to a ton of bhang, who mistook him for a seagoing version of the legendary yeti or abominable snowman.

Cocaine suspicions, nagging and mean as rats... shining bottles of a thousand voices from the radio, the drape and hand of the pig’s shag coat as Krypton reaches out to stroke...

And still they linger in their embrace, Death in all its potency humming them romantic tunes, chiding them for moderate little men...

Slothrop with a great clank and crunch rolls out of the garbage and at a dead run follows Bodine and Krypton, chickenfat flowing away, eggshells flying off behind him.

“What's it, a Red Cross gearbox, you got to put a nickel in someplace to get it in gear, hey Shirley?”

It’s a floating celebration no one’s thought to adjourn: a victory party so permanent, so easy at gathering newcomer and old regular to itself, that who can say for sure which victory? which war?

Often enough to matter, the current will be there—piranha-raid and salmon-climb up the gold glittering fall of piss, your treacherous ladder of salts and acids, bringing you back into touch with Mother Ground.

She watches Marvy’s face as he pays Monika, watches him in this primal American act, paying, more deeply himself than when coming, or asleep, or maybe even dying.

He checks out this plush or velvet rig, finds it to be a pig costume complete with mask, considers slyly that no MP would bother an innocent funseeking pig.

Panic strikes him, deeper than the sedative has reached, and he begins to buck truly in terror against the straps, feeling small muscles along his chest stretch into useless twinges of pain, oh God; beginning to scream now with all his might, no words, only cries.

As if they are musical strings he might, a trifle moon-mad, strum here on the empty beach into appropriate music, his hand hesitates: but then, reluctantly bowing to duty, he severs them at the proper distances from the slippery stone.

Usefulness out here ends as quickly as a communiqué.

Rock’s time scale is a lot more stretched out. 'We're talking frames per century,' Felipe like everybody else here lately has been using a bit of movie language, 'per millennium!'

If there are heresiarchs among the dogs, they are careful about suggesting out loud any extra-canine source for these sudden eruptions of lust to kill that take them over.

In this latest War, death was no enemy, but a collaborator. Homosexuality in high places is just a camal afterthought now, and the real and only fucking is done on paper.

Gray was for the War. Let them chase. Catch me if you can.

Each wind had its own cross-in-motion, materially there or implied, each cross a unique mandala, bringing opposites together in the spin.

It happens to be the same one he lost in 1938 or -9 down the toilet at the Roseland Ballroom, but that’s too long ago for him to remember.

Might be he was starting to implicate himself, some yesterday version of himself, in the Combination against who he was right then.

Slothrop sees a very thick rainbow here, a stout rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth, green wet valleyed Earth, and his chest fills and he stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural.

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted.

The day the rockets stopped falling, it began to end for Roger and Jessica.

The sun is so bright today that the shadows by her Achilles tendon are drawn sharp and black as seams up the heel of a silk stocking.

Cheerio boing out the door without another word, leaving Roger alone with a most disagreeable light beginning to grow, the leading edge of a revelation, blinding, crescent, at the periphery of his brain.

Pointsman had only looked apologetic, not for himself but to something for Rézsavélgyi, and said gently; 'This is one spot in the room where I feel alive.'

The walls—they don’t appear to be... well, solid, actually. They flow: a coarse, a viscous passage, rippling like a standing piece of silk or nylon.

Roger has unbuttoned his fly, taken his cock out, and is now busy pissing on the shiny table, the papers, in the ashtrays and pretty soon on these poker-faced men themselves.

I'll stalk you room to room till I corner you in the last. You'll have the last room, Pointsman, and you'll have to live in it the rest of your scum, prostituted life.

“That’s exactly it,” Osbie screams, belly-dancing Porky into a wide alarming grin, “They're the rational ones. We piss on Their rational arrangements.”

They’ve been paying you to love it, / But the time has come to shove it, / And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.

It’s only that the wire inside the bulb unbrightens slow enough before the next peak shows up that fools us into seeing a steady light.

Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your life.

The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people.

This bulb is immortal! It’s been around, in fact, since the twenties, has that old-timery point at the tip and is less pear-shaped than more contemporary bulbs.

One way or another, these Bulb folks are in the business of providing the appearance of power, power against the night, without the reality.

But on through the burning hours he starts to learn about the transience of others: learns that loving them while they’re here becomes easier, and also more intense—to love as if each design-hour will be the last.

The word goes out along the Grid. At something close to the speed of light, every bulb, Azos looking down the empty black Bakelite streets, Nitralampen and Wotan Gs at night soccer matches, Just-Wolframs, Monowatts and Siriuses, every bulb in Europe knows what’s happened.

Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin.

Bulb can penetrate the sleeping eye, and operate among the dreams of men.

He is condemned to go on forever, knowing the truth and powerless to change anything.

Pan was a lousy lover. Today, in public, they have no more than nervous glances for each other.

She knows her own precarious thinness, her leukemia of soul, and she teases with it.

There is no heart, anywhere now, no human soul left in which I exist. Do you know what that feels like?

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.

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.

You're way up there on the needle-peak of a mountain, and don’t think there aren't lammergeiers cruising there in the lurid red altitudes around, waiting for a chance to snatch you off.

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.

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.

He is rubber-stamped on hands, forehead, and ass, deloused, poked, palpated, named, numbered, consigned, invoiced, misrouted, detained, ignored.

Could it be that Blicero’s eyes, in which Greta Erdmann saw maps of his Kingdom, are for Thanatz reflecting the past?

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.

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.

Travel here gets complicated—a system of buildings that move, by right angles, along the grooves of the Raketen-Stadt’s street-grid.

Decisions are never really made—at best they manage to emerge, from a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery.

The Grid’s big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness.

Little kids boil up like ants on the webby arches of viaducts high over the city dripping stone like Spanish moss petrified in mid-collapse, kids up over the airy railings and onto the friendly back of the sleek city-cruising monster.

Outside and Inside interpiercing one another too fast, too finely labyrinthine, for either category to have much hegemony any more.

Sometimes I think—ah, Joe, I think they’re pieces of the Heavenly City falling down.

But she can’t pronounce those umlauts, so it comes out 'Hubschrauber! Hubschrauber!' which means 'Helicopter! Helicopter!'

One morning Trudi just goes stomping away into an 82nd Airborne mass jump over the conquered city, a million fleecy canopies in the sky, falling slow as white ash behind around the silhouette of her good-by stomp.

The space directly below the Jacobistrasse, slowly, paranoiacally, is hollowed, sculpted, carefully shored up under the thin crust of street so the odd tram won't find itself in unscheduled plunge.

Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse itself inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate.

KRUPPALOOMA comes this giant explosion: water leaps in a surprised blue-green tongue (ever seen a toilet hollering, “Yikes!”?) out of every single black-lidded bowl, pipes wrench and scream, walls and floor shudder.

On moonless or overcast nights, Takeshi and Ichizo take off all their clothes and splash each other with Cypridina light, running and giggling under the palm trees.

Clergymen, working for the army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to die about God, death, nothingness, redemption, salvation.

Reminded, too late, of how dependent you are on Them, for neglect if not good will: Their neglect is your freedom.

For millions of years, the sun has been roaring, a giant, furnace, 93 millionmile roar, so perfectly steady that generations of men have been born into it and passed out of it again, without ever hearing it.

What if They find it convenient to preach an island of life surrounded by a void? Not just the Earth in space, but your own individual life in time?

Dope never gave you immortality. You hadda come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly meat!

Rumor sez he is cutting a swath these days across the Zone in a stolen American Special Services getup, posing as Frank Sinatra.

But ever since it became impossible to die for death, we have had a secular version—yours.

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.

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.

Evidence and intuition—and maybe a residue of uncivilizable terror that lies inside us, every one—point to 000°; true North.

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....

It is a suit that forces you either to reflect on matters as primary as its color, or feel superficial.

The second violin happens to be Gustav Schlabone, Saure Bummer’s frequent unwelcome doping partner, “Captain Horror,” as he is affectionately but not inaccurately known around Der Platz.

The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit.

He has to choose between his life and his death. Letting it sit for a while is no compromise, but a decision to live, on Their terms.

Not since then has Seaman Bodine felt so high in the good chances of death.

Pools of this and that glitter across the floor like water-mirages at the Sixth Antechamber to the Throne.

The Hexes-Stadt, with its holy mountains cropped in pale circles all up and down their green faces by the little tethered goats, has turned into just another capital, where the only enterprise is administrating.

So we, the crippled keepers, were sent out to multiply, to have dominion. God’s spoilers. Us. Counter-revolutionaries.

There have to be these too, lovers whose genitals are consecrated to shit, to endings, to the desperate nights in the streets when connection proceeds out of all personal control.

Fathers are carriers of the virus of Death, and sons are the infected...and, so that the infection may be more certain, Death in its ingenuity has contrived to make the father and son beautiful to each other as Life has made male and female.

The scene itself must be read as a card: what is to come.

Of Course It Begins Infinitely Below The Earth And Goes On Infinitely Back Into The Earth it’s only the peak that we are allowed to see, the break up through the surface, out of the other silent world, violently

Stored in its target-seeker will be the heretic’s EEG, the spikes and susurrations of heartbeat, the ghost-blossomings of personal infrared, each Rocket will know its intended and hunt him, ride him a green-doped and silent hound.

They have lied to us. They can’t keep us from dying, so They lie to us about death. A cooperative structure of lies.

It may be possible to ride the interface, like gliding at the edge of a thunderstorm... all the way to the end between armies East and West.

He wants to cry for himself: for what they all must believe is going to happen to him.

Trees creak in sorrow for the engineered wound through their terrain, their terrenity or earthhood.

Certainly not the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the evening, often forever, without knowing it.

It needs our submission so that it may remain in power. It needs our lusts after dominance so that it can co-opt us into its own power game.

So the assembly of the 00001 is occurring also in a geographical way, a Diaspora running backwards, seeds of exile flying inward in a modest view of gravitational collapse, of the Messiah gathering in the fallen sparks.

The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly?

Most of the others gave up long ago trying to hold him together, even as a concept—'It’s just got too remote' ’s what they usually say.

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.

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.

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.

He is the father you will never quite manage to kill. The Oedipal situation in the Zone these days is terrible.

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.

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.

The liquid oxygen runs freezing so close to your cheek, bones of frost to burn you past feeling.

So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows.

No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks, and they are all out today, making it difficult for you to follow the Manager’s entertaining story.

A plastic shroud, smothering me to my death. . . .

The Rocket stays a moment longer on the steel table, then slowly, trembling, furiously muscular, it begins to rise.

But it was not a star, it was falling, a bright angel of death, And in the darkening and awful expanse of screen something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see...

RELAX! SIT DOWN and Catch Up On Your Reading!

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

The great power station, and the gasworks beyond, stand precisely: crystals grown in morning’s beaker, stacks, vents, towers, plumbing, gnarled emissions of steam and smoke....

Yes—I’m—the— Fellow that’s hav-ing other peop-le’s fan-tasies, Suffering what they ought to be themselves—

The stars tacked up on Slothrop’s map cover the available spectrum, beginning with silver (labeled “Darlene”) sharing a constellation with Gladys, green, and Katharine, gold, and as the eye strays Alice, Delores, Shirley, a couple of Sallys—mostly red and blue through here—a cluster near Tower Hill, a violet density about Covent Garden, a nebular streaming on into Mayfair, Soho, and out to Wembley and to Hampstead Heath—in every direction goes this multicolored, here and there peeling firmament, Marias, Annes, Susans, Elizabeths.

The city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling and no surprises inside ever again.

The money seeping its way out through stock portfolios more intricate than any genealogy: what stayed at home in Berkshire went into timberland whose diminishing green reaches were converted acres at a clip into paper—toilet paper, banknote stock, newsprint—a medium or ground for shit, money, and the Word.

Were the radiant curtains just about to swing open? What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?

The wind’ had been blowing all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind ... he means, only his wind.

‘What’s the most frequent word?’ asks Jessica. ‘Your number one.’ ‘The same as it’s always been at these affairs,’ — the statistician, as if everyone knew: ‘death.’

It’s a great swamp of paranoia.

Imagine a missile one hears approaching only after it explodes. The reversal! A piece of time neatly snipped out...a few feet of film run backwards...

The rockets are distributing about London just as Poisson’s equation in the textbooks predicts.

Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says try to tickle me.

Slowly then, a revelation through the nacreous film of his seed, in Negro-brown, comes his message: put in a simple Nihilist transposition whose keywords he can almost guess.

But with the projec-tive technique, nothing he can do, con-scious or otherwise, can pre-vent us, from fin-ding what we need to know. We, are in control. He cannot help, him-self.

Odd, odd, odd—think of the word: such white finality in its closing clap of tongue.

When we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything, of every soul.

Outside, the long rain in silicon and freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against the mediaeval windows, curtaining like smoke the river's far shore.

Inside herself, enclosed in the soignée surface of dear fabric and dead cells, she is corruption and ashes, she belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven...

Often the rockets, crazed, turn at random, whinnying terribly in the sky, turn about and fall according each to its madness so unreachable and, it is feared, incurable.

He knows, like everyone, that captive children are always freed in the moment of maximum danger.

The true war is a celebration of markets.

There they were, the silent egg and the crazy Dutchman, and the hookgun that linked them forever, framed, brilliantly motionless as any Vermeer.

The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Fiihrer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity.

Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart?

The five ghosts are strung in clear escalation: Pumm in a jeep accident, Easterling taken early in a raid by the Luftwaffe, Dromond by German artillery on Shellfire Corner, Lamplighter by a flying bomb, and now Kevin Spectro... auto, bomb, gun, V-1, and now V-2.

One by one they are being picked off around him: in his small circle of colleagues the ratio slowly grows top-heavy, more ghosts, more each winter, and fewer living...

It’s as if the body we can measure is a scrap of this programme found outside in the street, near a magnificent stone theatre we cannot enter.

The eyes, which went towering for miles, shifting to follow their flight, the irises red as embers fairing through yellow to white, as they jettisoned all their bombs in no particular pattern, the fussy Norden device, sweat drops in the air all around its rolling eyepiece, bewildered at their unannounced need to climb, to give up a strike at earth for a strike at heaven.

AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night.

Is it any use for me to tell you that all you believe real is illusion? I don’t know whether you'll listen, or ignore it. You only want to know about your path, your Autobahn.

The real movement is not from death to any rebirth. It is from death to death-transfigured.

She is the British warm that protects his stooping shoulders, and the wintering sparrow he holds inside his hands.

Though he’s secretly held in re-ve-rent awe / As a sort of e-rot-ic Clausewitz....

Meaning things to Them it has never meant to us. Never. Two orders of being, looking identical... but, but...

They must have guessed, once or twice—guessed and refused to believe—that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chances, no return.

I’m an impotent man—all I have to look forward to is a book, Slothrop. A report to write...

Katje has understood the great airless arc as a clear allusion to certain secret lusts that drive the planet and herself, and Those who use her—over its peak and down, plunging, burning, toward a terminal orgasm...

Now mustard gas comes washing in, into his brain with a fatal buzz as dreams will when we don’t want them, or when we are suffocating.

Lipstick, among these tough and too often shallow girls, prevails like blood.

They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet.

The stink of shit floods his nose, gathering him, surrounding. It is the smell of Passchendaele, of the Salient.

If any of the young engineers saw correspondence between the deep conservatism of Feedback and the kinds of lives they were coming to lead in the very process of embracing it, it got lost, or disguised—none of them made the connection, at least not while alive.

Well, Slothrop can feel this beast in the sky: its visible claws and scales are being mistaken for clouds and other plausibilities . . . or else everyone has agreed to call them other names when Slothrop is listening.

The zoot suit is in a box tied with a purple ribbon. Keychain’s there too. They both belonged to a kid who used to live in East Los Angeles, named Ricky Gutiérrez.

She thumbs him upstairs and then gives him either the V-for-victory sign or some spell from distant countryside against the evil eye that sours the milk.

For possibly the first time he is hearing America as it must sound to a non-American.

Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.

Pointsman is hallucinating. He has lost control. Pointsman is supposed to have absolute control over Katje. Where does this leave her? In a control that is out of control.

Whoever it was left a red tulip between Slothrop’s toes. He has taken it for a sign.

It is the breath of the Forbidden Wing...essence of all the still figures waiting for him inside, daring him to enter and find a secret he cannot survive.

I’ve been sold, Jesus Christ I’ve been sold to IG Farben like a side of beef.

As darkness is mined and transported from place to place like marble, so the light bulb is the chisel that delivers it from its inertia.

There’s a Brennschluss point for every firing site. They still hang up there, all of them, a constellation waiting to have a 13th sign of the Zodiac named for it.

The cable, brought up taut, sings under Slothrop’s hand till he loses his grip on it, falls, and is carried gently upside down and hanging by the foot, in among fun-seekers around the beer keg.

A sergeant with a boy’s face and gray hair, dozing with a grease gun cradled against him, wakes up crying, “Krauts!” lets loose a deafening burst from his weapon straight into the beer barrel.

The woman feels power flood in through every gate: a river between her thighs, light leaping at the ends of fingers and toes.

Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit, Where he can — fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.

The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.

He has the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speaking lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader.

Each molecule had so many possibilities open to it, possibilities for bonding, bonds of different strengths, from carbon the most versatile, the queen, 'the Great Catherine of the periodic table,' down to the little hydrogens numerous and single-moving as pawns.

We know how to produce real pain. Wars, obviously . . . machines in the factories, industrial accidents, automobiles built to be unsafe, poisons in food, water, and even air—these are quantities tied directly to the economy.

The roar of Its voice is deafness, / The flash of Its light is blindness. / The floor of the desert rumbles, / And Its face cannot be borne.