Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Author:Thomas Pynchon [Pynchon, Thomas]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Unread
ISBN: 9780099533214
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1995-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

“Greta, somebody also thought it prudent to name me Max Schlepzig.” He shows her the pass he got from Säure Bummer.

She gazes at it, then at Slothrop briefly. She’s begun to tremble again. Some mixture of desire and fear. “I knew it.”

“Knew what?”

Looking away, submissive. “Knew he was dead. He disappeared in ‘38. They’ve been busy, haven’t They?”

Slothrop has picked up, in the Zone, enough about European passportpsychoses to want to comfort her. “This is forged. The name’s just a random alias. The guy who made it probably remembered Schlepzig from one of his movies.”

“Random.” A tragic, actressy smile, beginnings of a double chin, one knee drawn up as far as these leg irons will let her. “Another fairytale word. The signature on your card is Max’s. Somewhere in Stefa-nia’s house on the Vistula I have a steel box full of his letters. Don’t you think I know that Latin z, crossed engineer-style, the flower he made out of the g at the end? You could hunt all the Zone for your ‘forger.’ They wouldn’t let you find him. They want you right here, right now.”

Well. What happens when paranoid meets paranoid? A crossing of solipsisms. Clearly. The two patterns create a third: a moire, a new world of flowing shadows, interferences. . . .” ‘Want me here’? What for?”

“For me.” Whispering out of scarlet lips, open, wet. . . . Hmm. Well, there’s this hardon, here. He sits on the rack, leans, kisses her, presently unlacing his trousers and peeling them down far enough to release his cock bounding up with a slight wobble into the cool studio. “Put your helmet on.”

“O.K.”

“Are you very cruel?”

“Don’t know.”

“Could you be? Please. Find something to whip me with. Just a little. Just for the warmth.” Nostalgia. The pain of a return home. He rummages around through inquisitional props, gyves, thumbscrews, leather harness, before coming up with a miniature cat-o’-nine-tails, a Black Forest elves’ whip, its lacquered black handle carved in a bas-relief orgy, the lashes padded with velvet to hurt but not to draw blood. “Yes, that’s perfect. Now on the insides of my thighs. . . .”

But somebody has already educated him. Something . . . that dreams Prussian and wintering among their meadows, in whatever cursive lashmarks wait across the flesh of their sky so bleak, so incapable of any sheltering, wait to be summoned. . . . No. No—he still says “their,” but he knows better. His meadows now, his sky . . . his own cruelty.

All Margherita’s chains and fetters are chiming, black skirt furled back to her waist, stockings pulled up tight in classic cusps by the suspenders of the boned black rig she’s wearing underneath. How the penises of Western men have leapt, for a century, to the sight of this singular point at the top of a lady’s stocking, this transition from silk to bare skin and suspender! It’s easy for nonfetishists to sneer about Pavlovian conditioning and let it go at that, but any

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