GRAVITY RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon

Author:Thomas Pynchon [Pynchon, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-05-28T12:35:35+00:00

D D D D D D D

Under a tall willow tree beside a canal, in a jeep, in the shade, sit Tchitcherine and his driver Dzabajev a teenage Kazakh dope fiend with pimples and a permanently surly look, who combs his hair like the American crooner Frank Sinatra, and who is, at the moment, frowning at a slice of hashish and telling Tchitcherine, "Well, you should have taken more than this, you know."

"I only took what his freedom is worth to him," explains Tchitcherine. "Where's that pipe, now?"

"How do you know what his freedom is worth to him? You know what I think? I think you're going a little Zone-happy out here." This Dzabajev is more of a sidekick, really, than a driver, so he enjoys immunity, up to a point, in questioning Tchitcherine's wisdom.

"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 / get to fix the price, which doesn't matter to begin with."

"Pretty authoritarian," sneers young Dzabajev. "Where's the matches?"

It's sad, though. Tchitcherine likes Slothrop. He feels that, in any normal period of history, they could easily be friends. People who dress up in bizarre costumes have a savoir-vivre-not to mention the sort of personality disorder-that he admires. When he was a little boy, back in Leningrad, Tchitcherine's mother sewed by hand a costume for him to wear in a school entertainment. Tchitcherine was the wolf. The minute he put on the head, in front of the mirror by the ikon, he knew himself. He was the wolf.

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 Schwarzgerat. 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 Black-words 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.

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