Gravity's Rainbow

by Thomas Pynchon

Once something was done to him, in a room, while he lay helpless. . . .

The fear balloons again inside his brain. It will not be kept down with a simple Fuck You. . . . A smell, a forbidden room, at the bottom edge of his memory. He can’t see it, can’t make it out. Doesn’t want to. It is allied with the Worst Thing.

He woke begging It no—but even after waking, he was sure, he would remain sure, that It could visit him again, any time It wanted. Perhaps you know that dream too. Perhaps It has warned you never to speak Its name. If so, you know about how Slothrop’ll be feeling now.

“But you are free. We all are. You’ll see. Before long.”

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

One of the sweetest fruits of victory, after sleep and looting, must be the chance to ignore no-parking signs.

But in the dynamic space of the living Rocket, the double integral has a different meaning. To integrate here is to operate on a rate of change so that time falls away: change is stilled. . . . “Meters per second” will integrate to “meters.” The moving vehicle is frozen, in space, to become architecture, and timeless. It was never launched. It will never fall.

It’s not the gentlemanly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns he spun for Tantivy back in the ACHTUNG office, so much as the primitive fear of having a soul captured by a likeness of image or by a name. . . . He wants to preserve what he can of her from Their several entropies, from Their softsoaping and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can also do it for himself . . . although that’s awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He Thought Was His Own.

Ghosts used to be either likenesses of the dead or wraiths of the living. But here in the Zone categories have been blurred badly. 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. Their likenesses will not serve. Down here are only wrappings left in the light, in the dark: images of the Uncertainty. . . .

Colonies are much, much more. 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. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .

No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he’d seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people. . . . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.

It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own case, that he enter the service of the Rocket. . . . Beyond simple steel erection, the Rocket was an entire system won, away from the feminine darkness, held against the entropies of lovable but scatterbrained Mother Nature: that was the first thing he was obliged by Weissmann to learn, his first step toward citizenship in the Zone. He was led to believe that by understanding the Rocket, he would come to understand truly his manhood. . . .

Technology vs nature, technology as the masculine and nature as the feminine.

But it’s not only the details. 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. He has dreamed of being held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake . . . he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. He is being hunted, his days are full of narrow escapes which he finds exciting, physically graceful . . . and the Plot itself! it has a stern, an intense beauty, it is music, a symphony of the North, of an Arctic voyage, past headlands of very green ice, to the feet of icebergs, kneeling in the grip of this incredible music, washed in seas blue as blue dye, an endless North, vast country settled by people whose old culture and history are walled off by a great silence from the rest of the world . . . the names of their peninsulas and seas, their long and powerful rivers are unknown down in the temperate world . . . it is a return, this voyage: he has grown old inside his name, the sweeping music of the voyage is music he wrote himself, so long ago that he has forgotten it completely . . . but now it is finding him again. . . .

But this must be a different star, a northern star. There is no comfort. What has happened to us? 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?

They hunted Sarts, Kazakhs, Kirghiz, and Dungans that terrible summer like wild game. Daily scores were kept. It was a competition, good-natured but more than play. Thousands of restless natives bit the dust. Their names, even their numbers, lost forever. Colors of skin, ways of dressing became reasonable cause to jail, or beat and kill.

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. We know them, and we can control them. But ‘addiction’? What do we know of that? Fog and phantoms. No two experts will even agree on how to define the word. ‘Compulsion’? Who is not compelled? ‘Tolerance’? ‘Dependence’? What do they mean? All we have are the thousand dim, academic theories. A rational economy cannot depend on psychological quirks. We could not plan. . . .”

“Not if you’ve been where we have. Forty years ago, in Südwest, we were nearly exterminated. There was no reason. Can you understand that? No reason. We couldn’t even find comfort in the Will of God Theory. These were Germans with names and service records, men in blue uniforms who killed clumsily and not without guilt. Search-and-destroy missions, every day. It went on for two years. The orders came down from a human being, a scrupulous butcher named von Trotha. The thumb of mercy never touched his scales.

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. . . .

Someone here is cleverly allowing for parallax, scaling, shadows all going the right way and lengthening with the day—but no, Säure can’t be real, no more than these dark-clothed extras waiting in queues for some hypothetical tram, some two slices of sausage (sure, sure), the dozen half-naked kids racing in and out of this burned tenement so amazingly detailed—They sure must have the budget, all right. Look at this desolation, all built then hammered back into pieces, ranging body-size down to powder (please order by Gauge Number), as that well-remembered fragrance Noon in Berlin, essence of human decay, is puffed on the set by a hand, lying big as a flabby horse up some alley, pumping its giant atomizer. . . .

“But even the freest of Gauchos end up selling out, you know. That’s how things are.”

Since discovering that Schwarzkommando are really in the Zone, leading real, paracinematic lives that have nothing to do with him or the phony Schwarzkommando footage he shot last winter in England for Operation Black Wing, Springer has been zooming around in a controlled ecstasy of megalomania. He is convinced that his film has somehow brought them into being. “It is my mission,” he announces to Squalidozzi, with the profound humility that only a German movie director can summon, “to sow in the Zone seeds of reality. The historical moment demands this, and I can only be its servant. My images, somehow, have been chosen for incarnation. What I can do for the Schwarzkommando I can do for your dream of pampas and sky. . . . I can take down your fences and your labyrinth walls, I can lead you back to the Garden you hardly remember. . . .”

“Look, peasant, you read the transcript in there. That man is one unhappy loner. He’s got problems. He’s more useful running around the Zone thinking he’s free, but he’d be better off locked up somewhere. He doesn’t even know what his freedom is, much less what it’s worth. So I get to fix the price, which doesn’t matter to begin with.”

Who wrote the transcript that they are reading?

The Sodium Amytal session nags at the linings of Tchitcherine’s brain as if the hangover were his own. Deep, deep—further than politics, than sex or infantile terrors . . . a plunge into the nuclear blackness. . . . Black runs all through the transcript: the recurring color black. Slothrop never mentioned Enzian by name, nor the Schwarzkommando. But he did talk about the Schwarzgerät. And he also coupled “schwarz-” with some strange nouns, in the German fragments that came through. Blackwoman, Blackrocket, Blackdream. . . . The new coinages seem to be made unconsciously. Is there a single root, deeper than anyone has probed, from which Slothrop’s Blackwords only appear to flower separately? 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. . . .

Well, the man is a puzzle. When Geli Tripping first sent word of his presence in the Zone, Tchitcherine was only interested enough to keep a routine eye on him, along with the scores of others. The only strange item, which grew stranger as surveillance developed, was that he seemed to be alone. To date Slothrop has still not recorded, tagged, discovered, or liberated a single scrap of A4 hardware or intelligence. He reports neither to SPOG, CIOS, BAFO, TI, nor any American counterpart—indeed, to no known Allied office. Yet he is one of the Faithful: the scavengers now following industriously the fallback routes of A4 batteries from the Hook of Holland all across Lower Saxony. Pilgrims along the roads of miracle, every bit and piece a sacred relic, every scrap of manual a verse of Scripture.

Betrayal by Geli? The rockets are given a religious tone as "Pilgrims" continue their search throughout the Zone.

He sits tonight by his driftwood fire in the cellar of the onion-topped Nikolaikirche, listening to the sea. Stars hang among the spaces of the great Wheel, precarious to him as candles and goodnight cigarettes. Cold gathers along the strand. Child phantoms—white whistling, tears never to come, range the wind behind the wall. Twists of faded crepe paper blow along the ground, scuttling over his old shoes. Dust, under a moon newly calved, twinkles like snow, and the Baltic crawls like its mother-glacier. His heart shrugs in its scarlet net, elastic, full of expectation. He’s waiting for Ilse, for his movie-child, to return to Zwölfkinder, as she has every summer at this time.

She must have always been a child on somebody’s list. He only avoided thinking about it. But all the time she was carrying her disappearance in her drawn face, her reluctant walk, and if he hadn’t needed her protection so much he might have seen in time how little she could protect anything, even their mean nest. He couldn’t talk to her—it was arguing with his own ghost from ten years ago, the same idealism, the adolescent fury—items that had charmed him once—a woman with spirit!—but which he came to see as evidence of her single-mindedness, even, he could swear, some desire to be actually destroyed. . . .

When he began to dream about the Rocket with some frequency, it would sometimes not be a literal rocket at all, but a street he knew was in a certain district of the city, a street in a certain small area of the grid that held something he thought he needed. The coordinates were clear in his mind, but the street eluded him. Over the years, as the Rocket neared its fullness, about to go operational, the coordinates switched from the Cartesian x and y of the laboratory to the polar azimuth and range of the weapon as deployed: once he knelt on the lavatory floor of his old rooming house in Munich, understanding that if he faced exactly along a certain compass-bearing his prayer would be heard: he’d be safe. He wore a robe of gold and orange brocade. It was the only light in the room. Afterward he ventured out into the house, knowing people slept in all the rooms, but feeling a sense of desertion. 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. . . .

“They’re using you to kill people,” Leni told him, as clearly as she could. “That’s their only job, and you’re helping them.” “We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.” She laughed. “Transcend,” from Pökler? “Someday,” honestly trying, “they won’t have to kill. Borders won’t mean anything. We’ll have all outer space. . . .” “Oh you’re blind,” spitting it as she spat his blindness at him every day, that and “Kadavergehorsamkeit,” a beautiful word he can no longer imagine in any voice but hers. . . .

We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, the informationless state of signal zero.

A blinking, tentative fury grew in Pökler. They must have known everything—all this time. His life was secretless as this mean cubicle, with its bed, commode and reading-light.

Taking and not giving back, demanding that “productivity” and “earnings” keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it’s only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . .

There are stops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime-lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting—passengers will now reclaim their seats and much as you’d like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it’s no use: he is waiting beside the door of the bus in his pressed uniform, Lord of the Night he is checking your tickets, your ID and travel papers, and it’s the wands of enterprise that dominate tonight. . . as he nods you by, you catch a glimpse of his face, his insane, committed eyes, and you remember then, for a terrible few heartbeats, that of course it will end for you all in blood, in shock, without dignity—but there is meanwhile this trip to be on . . .

“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—something that Kekulé’s Serpent had come to—not to destroy, but to define to us the loss of . . . we had been given certain molecules, certain combinations and not others . . . we used what we found in Nature, unquestioning, shamefully perhaps—but the Serpent whispered, ‘They can be changed, and new molecules assembled from the debris of the given. . . .’

Behind this job-like-any-other-job seems to lie something void, something terminal, something growing closer, each day, to manifestation. . . .

Any deviations into jealousy, metaphysics, vagueness would be picked up immediately: he would either be corrected back on course, or allowed to fall. Through winter and spring the sessions with Weissmann became routine. Pökler grew into his new disguise—Prematurely Aged Adolescent Whiz—often finding that it could indeed take him over, keeping him longer at reference books and firing data, speaking lines for him he could never have planned in advance: gentle, scholarly, rocket-obsessed language that surprised him.

In a corporate State, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable.

Through the rest of the furlough, they strolled about Zwölfkinder, always hand in hand. Lanterns swaying from the trunks of elephants’ heads on top of tall pillars lit their way . . . over spidery bridges looking down at snow-leopards, apes, hyenas . . . along the miniature railway, between the corrugated pipe legs of steel-mesh dinosaurs, down to the patch of African desert where every two hours exactly the treacherous natives attacked an encampment of General von Trotha’s brave men in blue, all the parts played by exuberant boys, and a great patriotic favorite with children of all ages . . .

Outside the Peenemünde wind-tunnel, Pökler has come to stand at night, next to the great sphere, 40 feet high, listening to the laboring pumps as they evacuate the air from the white sphere, five minutes of growing void—then one terrific gasp: 20 seconds of supersonic flow . . . then the fall of the shutter, and the pumps starting up again . . . he has listened, and taken it to imply his own cycle of shuttered love, growing empty over the year for two weeks in August, engineered with the same care. He has smiled, and drunk toasts, and traded barracks humor with Major Weissmann, while all the time, behind the music and the giggling, he could hear the flesh of pieces moved in darkness and winter across the marshes and mountain chains of the board . . .

began, and would not be put down. Weissmann was saving him for something: some unique destiny. Somehow the man had known the British would bomb that night, known even in ’39, and so arranged the tradition of an August furlough, year after year but all toward protecting Pökler from the one bad night. Not quite balanced . . . a bit paranoid, yes, yes . . . but the thought purred on in his brain, and he felt himself turning to stone.

Pökler scratches at a graying 48-hour beard, bites at lips very chapped, as if he has spent most of the late winter outside: he has a winter look. Around his eyes, over the years, has grown a ruinous system of burst capillaries, shadows, folds, crowsfeet, a ground that by now has gathered in the simple, direct eyes of his younger and poorer days . . . no. Something was in them,

even then, something others saw and knew they could use, and found how to. Something Pökler missed. He’s spent enough of his life looking into mirrors. He really ought to remember. . . .

Chances are astronomically against a perfect hit, of course, that is why one is safest at the center of the target area. Rockets are supposed to be like artillery shells, they disperse about the aiming point in a giant ellipse—the Ellipse of Uncertainty.

Pökler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp: he could see—the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uniforms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp. But it wasn’t till August, when the furlough arrived as usual in its blank kraft envelope, and Pökler rode northward through the gray kilometers of a Germany he no longer recognized, bombed and burned, the wartime villages and rainy purple heath, and found her at last waiting in the hotel lobby at Zwölfkinder with the same darkness in her eyes (how had he missed it till now? such swimming orbits of pain) that he could finally put the two data together. For months, while her father across the wire or walls did his dutiful hackwork, she had been prisoner only a few meters away from him, beaten, perhaps violated. . . . If he must curse Weissmann, then he must also curse himself. Weissmann’s cruelty was no less resourceful than Pökler’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. They had sold him convenience, so much of it, all on credit, and now They were collecting.

Trying, a bit late for it, to open himself to the pain he should have been feeling, he questioned her now. Did she know the name of her camp? Yes, Ilse confirmed—or was told to answer—that it was Dora. The night before she left to come here she’d seen a hanging. Evening was the hour for the hangings. Did he want to hear about it? Did he want to hear about it. . .

“You don’t really want to be here, do you?” They sat by a polluted stream, throwing bread to ducks. Pökler’s stomach was upset from ersatz coffee and tainted meat. His head ached. “It’s here or the camp,” her face stubbornly aside. “I don’t really want to be anywhere. I don’t care.” “Ilse.” “Do you like it here? Do you want to be back under your mountain? Do you talk to the elves, Franz?” “No, I don’t enjoy it where I am”—Franz?—“but I have, I have my job. . . .” “Yes. So do I. My job is being a prisoner. I’m a professional inmate. I know how to get favors, who to steal from, how to inform, how to—”

He did, then, let everything go, every control. He veered into the wind of his long isolation, shuddering terribly. He cried. She took his hands. The floating ducks watched. The sea cooled under the hazy sun. An accordion played somewhere back in the town. From behind the decaying mythical statues, sentenced children shouted to each other. Summer ended.

On the last day, Pökler walked out the south end of the main tunnels. Lorries were everywhere, all engines idling, farewell in the spring air, tall trees sunlit green on the mountainsides. The Obersturmbannführer was not at his post when Pökler went into Dora. He was not looking for Ilse, or not exactly. He may have felt that he ought to look, finally. He was not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but did not know, with senses or heart. . . . 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 . . . each face so perfect, so individual, the lips stretched back into death-grins, a whole silent audience caught at the punch line of the joke . . . and the living, stacked ten to a straw mattress, the weakly crying, coughing, losers. . . . All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on paper, this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside . . . all this time. . . . Pökler vomited. He cried some. The walls did not dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, not at this finding, on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to that silence. . . . But what can he e...

With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold.

Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment of maximum freedom.

When Greta hears shots out in the increasingly distant streets, she will think of the sound stages of her early career, and will take the explosions as cue calls for the titanic sets of her dreams to be smoothly clogged with a thousand extras: meek, herded by rifle shots, ascending and descending, arranged into patterns that will suit the Director’s ideas of the picturesque—a river of faces, made up yellow and white-lipped for the limitations of the film stock of the time, sweating yellow migrations taken over and over again, fleeing nothing, escaping nowhere. . . .