Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Page B

Book: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online
Authors: Thomas Pynchon
Ads: Link
the medium who’s across the room chatting
     with young Gavin Trefoil, “could be fallen upon at any moment—pouring in the windows,
     hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present
     my God what imbecile Fascist
rot . . .”
    “Careful, Mexico, you’re losing the old objectivity again—a man of science shouldn’t
     want to do that, should he. Hardly scientific, is it.”
    “Ass. You’re on
their
side. Couldn’t you feel it tonight, coming in the door? It’s a great swamp of paranoia.”
    “That’s my talent, all right,” Pirate as he speaks knowing it’s too abrupt, tries
     to file off the flash with: “I don’t know that I’m really up to the
multiple
sort of thing. . . .”
    “Ah. Prentice.” Not an eyebrow or lip out of place. Tolerance. Ah.
    “You ought to come down this time and have our Dr. Groast check it out on his EEG.”
    “Oh, if I’m in town,” vaguely. There’s a security problem here. Loose talk sinks ships
     and he can’t be sure, even about Mexico. There are too many circles to the current
     operation, inner and outer. Distribution lists growing narrower as we move ring by
     ring toward the bull’s eye, Instructions To Destroy gradually encompassing every scrap,
     idle memo, typewriter ribbon.
    His best guess is that Mexico only now and then supports the Firm’s latest mania,
     known as Operation Black Wing, in a statistical way—analyzing what foreign-morale
     data may come in, for instance—but someplace out at the fringes of the enterprise,
     as indeed Pirate finds himself here tonight, acting as go-between for Mexico and his
     own roommate Teddy Bloat.
    He knows that Bloat goes somewhere and microfilms something, then transfers it, via
     Pirate, to young Mexico. And thence, he gathers, down to “The White Visitation,” which
     houses a catchall agency known as PISCES—Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting
     Surrender. Whose surrender is not made clear.
    Pirate wonders if Mexico isn’t into yet another of the thousand dodgy intra-Allied
     surveillance schemes that have sprung up about London since the Americans, and a dozen
     governments in exile, moved in. In which the German curiously fades into irrelevance.
     Everyone watching over his shoulder, Free French plotting revenge on Vichy traitors,
     Lublin Communists drawing beads on Varsovian shadow-ministers, ELAS Greeks stalking
     royalists, unrepatriable dreamers of all languages hoping through will, fists, prayer
     to bring back kings, republics, pretenders, summer anarchisms that perished before
     the first crops were in . . . some dying wretchedly, nameless, under ice-and-snow
     surfaces of bomb craters out in the East End not to be found till spring, some chronically
     drunk or opiated for getting through the day’s reverses, most somehow losing, losing
     what souls they had, less and less able to trust, seized in the game’s unending chatter,
     its daily self-criticism, its demands for total attention . . . and what foreigner
     is it, exactly, that Pirate has in mind if it isn’t that stateless lascar across his
     own mirror-glass, that poorest of exiles. . . .
    Well: he guesses They have euchred Mexico into some such Byzantine exercise, probably
     to do with the Americans. Perhaps the Russians. “The White Visitation,” being devoted
     to psychological warfare, harbors a few of each, a Behaviorist here, a Pavlovian there.
     It’s none of Pirate’s business. But he notes that with each film delivery, Roger’s
     enthusiasm grows. Unhealthy, unhealthy: he has the sense of witnessing an addiction.
     He feels that his friend, his provisional wartime friend, is being used for something
     not quite decent.
    What can he do? If Mexico wanted to talk about

Similar Books

Don't You Wish

Roxanne St. Claire

HIM

Brittney Cohen-Schlesinger

My Runaway Heart

Miriam Minger

The Death of Chaos

L. E. Modesitt Jr.

The Crystal Sorcerers

William R. Forstchen

Too Many Cooks

Joanne Pence