Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow.pdf - Pynchon, Thomas - widez2

Beyond the Zero

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.

Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me,

strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence

after death.

—Wernher von Braun

h h h h h h h

ASCREAMING COMES ACROSS THE SKY. It has happened before, but

there is nothing to compare it to no.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are

no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an

iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day

through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will

be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout,

without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen

darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and

connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage’s frame, a poising,

an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all

out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20

years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more

children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of

the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all,

and at that only as half-silvered images in a view inder, green-stained VIP faces

remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city. . .

They have begun to move. They pass in line, out of the main station, out of

downtown, and begin pushing into older and more desolate parts of the city. Is

this the way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud.

Rain comes down. 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 . . . certain trestles of blackened

wood have moved slowly by overhead, and the smells begun of coal from days

far to the past, smells of naphtha winters, of Sundays when no trafic came

through, of the coral-like and mysteriously vital growth, around the blind curves

and out the lonely spurs, a sour smell of rolling-stock absence, of maturing rust,

developing through those emptying days brilliant and deep, especially at dawn,

with blue shadows to seal its passage, to try to bring events to Absolute Zero . . .

and it is poorer the deeper they go . . . ruinous secret cities of poor, places whose

names he has never heard. . . the walls break down, the roofs get fewer and so do

the chances for light. The road, which ought to be opening out into a broader

highway, instead has been getting narrower, more broken, cornering tighter and

tighter until all at once, much too soon, they are under the inal arch: brakes

grab and spring terribly. It is a judgment from which there is no appeal.

The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are ordered

out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them wear

cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old and dark

hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they have come

here. . . . Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron

eaves, unlit for centuries . . . the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing

down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles . . . velvet black

surfaces contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty

all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where

all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-painting, ixed stubborn and

luminous in the walls . . . the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator—a moving

wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys

whose spokes are shaped like Ss. At each brown loor, passengers move on and

off. . . thousands of these hushed rooms without light. . . .

Some wait alone, some share their invisible rooms with others. Invisible,

yes, what do the furnishings matter, at this stage of things? Underfoot crunches

the oldest of city dirt, last crystallizations of all the city had denied, threatened,

lied to its children. Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was talking

only to him, say, “You

didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now.

No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. . ..”

There is no way out. Lie and wait, lie still and be quiet. Screaming holds

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

light? Will the light come before or after?

But it is already light. How long has it been light? All this while, light has

come percolating in, along with the cold morning air lowing now across his

nipples: it has begun to reveal an assortment of drunken wastrels, some in

uniform and some not, clutching empty or near-empty bottles, here draped

over a chair, there huddled into a cold ireplace, or sprawled on various divans,

un-Hoovered rugs and chaise longues down the different levels of the enormous

room, snoring and wheezing at many rhythms, in self-renewing chorus, as

London light, winter and elastic light, grows between the faces of the mullioned

windows, grows among the strata of last night’s smoke still hung, fading, from

the waxed beams of the ceiling. All these horizontal here, these comrades in

arms, look just as rosy as a bunch of Dutch peasants dreaming of their certain

resurrection in the next few minutes.

His name is Capt. Geoffrey (“Pirate”) Prentice. He is wrapped in a thick

blanket, a tartan of orange, rust, and scarlet. His skull feels made of metal.

Just above him, twelve feet overhead, Teddy Bloat is about to fall out of the

minstrels’ gallery, having chosen to collapse just at the spot where somebody in

a grandiose it, weeks before, had kicked out two of the ebony balusters. Now, in

his stupor, Bloat has been inching through the opening, head, arms, and torso,

until all that’s keeping him up there is an empty champagne split in his hip

pocket, that’s got hooked somehow—

By now Pirate has managed to sit up on his narrow bachelor bed, and

blink about. How awful. How bloody awful . . . above him, he hears cloth

rip. The Special Operations Executive has trained him to fast responses. He

leaps off of the cot and kicks it rolling on its casters in Bloat’s direction. Bloat,

plummeting, hits square amidships with a great strum of bedsprings. One of the

legs collapses. ”Good morning,” notes Pirate. Bloat smiles briely and goes back

to sleep, snuggling well into Pirate’s blanket.

Bloat is one of the co-tenants of the place, a maisonette erected last century,

not far from the Chelsea Embankment, by Corydon Throsp, an acquaintance

of the Rossettis’ who wore hair smocks and liked to cultivate pharmaceutical

plants up on the roof (a tradition young Osbie Feel has lately revived), a few of

them hardy enough to survive fogs and frosts, but most returning, as fragments

of peculiar alkaloids, to rooftop earth, along with manure from a trio of prize

Wes-sex Saddleback sows quartered there by Throsp’s successor, and dead

leaves off many decorative trees transplanted to the roof by later tenants, and

the odd unstomachable meal thrown or vomited there by this or that sensitive

epicurean—all got scumbled together, eventually, by the knives of the seasons,

to an impasto, feet thick, of unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could

grow, not the least being bananas. Pirate, driven to despair by the wartime

banana shortage, decided to build a glass hothouse on the roof, and persuade a

friend who lew the Rio-to-Ascension-to-Fort-Lamy run to pinch him a sapling

banana tree or two, in exchange for a German camera, should Pirate happen

across one on his next mission by parachute.

Pirate has become famous for his Banana Breakfast. Messmates throng

here from all over England, even some who are allergic or outright hostile to

bananas, just to watch—for the politics of bacteria, the soil’s stringing of rings

and chains in nets only God can tell the meshes of, have seen the fruit thrive

often to lengths of a foot and a half, yes amazing but true.

Pirate in the lavatory stands pissing, without a thought in his head. Then he

Pynchon, Thomas - Gravity's Rainbow.pdf

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