Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Slothrop finds himself in a dilapidated old studio, dark except where yellow sunlight comes through small holes in the overhead. Rusted catwalks, creaking under his weight, black burned-out klieg lights, the fine netting of spider webs struck to graphwork by the thin beams of sun. . . . Dust has drifted into corners, and over the remains of other sets: phony-gemütlich love nests, slant-walled and palm-crowded nightclubs, papier-mâché Wagnerian battlements, tenement courtyards in stark Expressionist white/black, built to no human scale, all tapered away in perspective for the rigid lenses that stared here once. 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, getting more agitated as he prowls the old shell, the girders 50 feet overhead almost lost in shadows, tripping over his own echoes, sneezing from the dust he stirs.