Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online

thunder. But not quite. Seconds later, this time from in front of him, it happened
     again: loud and clear, all over the city. Bracketed. Not a buzzbomb, not that Luftwaffe.
     “Not thunder either,” he puzzled, out loud.
    “Some bloody gas main,” a lady with a lunchbox, puffy-eyed from the day, elbowing
     him in the back as she passed.
    “No it’s the
Ger
mans,” her friend with rolled blonde fringes under a checked kerchief doing some monster
     routine here, raising her hands at Slothrop, “coming to get
him
, they especially
love
fat, plump Americans—” in a minute she’ll be reaching out to pinch his cheek and
     wobble it back and forth.
    “Hi, glamorpuss,” Slothrop said. Her name was Cynthia. He managed to get a telephone
     number before she was waving ta-ta, borne again into the rush-hour crowds.
    It was one of those great iron afternoons in London: the yellow sun being teased apart
     by a thousand chimneys breathing, fawning upward without shame. This smoke is more
     than the day’s breath, more than dark strength—it is an imperial presence that lives
     and moves. People were crossing the streets and squares, going everywhere. Busses
     were grinding off, hundreds of them, down the long concrete viaducts smeared with
     years’ pitiless use and no pleasure, into hazegray, grease-black, red lead and pale
     aluminum, between scrap heaps that towered high as blocks of flats, down side-shoving
     curves into roads clogged with Army convoys, other tall busses and canvas lorries,
     bicycles and cars, everyone here with different destinations and beginnings, all flowing,
     hitching now and then, over it all the enormous gas ruin of the sun among the smokestacks,
     the barrage balloons, power lines and chimneys brown as aging indoor wood, brown growing
     deeper, approaching black through an instant—perhaps the true turn of the sunset—that
     is wine to you, wine and comfort.
    The Moment was 6:43:16 British Double Summer Time: the sky, beaten like Death’s drum,
     still humming, and Slothrop’s cock—say what? yes lookit inside his GI undershorts
     here’s a sneaky
hardon
stirring, ready to jump—well great God where’d
that
come from?
    There is in his history, and likely, God help him, in his dossier, a peculiar sensitivity
     to what is revealed in the sky. (But a
hardon?
)
    On the old schist of a tombstone in the Congregational churchyard back home in Mingeborough,
     Massachusetts, the hand of God emerges from a cloud, the edges of the figure here
     and there eroded by 200 years of seasons’ fire and ice chisels at work, and the inscription
     reading:
     
    In Memory of Constant
    Slothrop, who died March

    year of his age.
     
    Death is a debt to nature due,
    Which I have paid, and so must you.
     
    Constant saw, and not only with his heart, that stone hand pointing out of the secular
     clouds, pointing directly at him, its edges traced in unbearable light, above the
     whispering of his river and slopes of his long blue Berkshires, as would his son Variable
     Slothrop, indeed all of the Slothrop blood one way or another, the nine or ten generations
     tumbling back, branching inward: every one, except for William the very first, lying
     under fallen leaves, mint and purple loosestrife, chilly elm and willow shadows over
     the swamp-edge graveyard in a long gradient of rot, leaching, assimilation with the
     earth, the stones showing round-faced angels with the long noses of dogs, toothy and
     deep-socketed death’s heads, Masonic emblems, flowery urns, feathery willows upright
     and broken, exhausted hourglasses, sunfaces about to rise or set with eyes peeking
     Kilroy-style over their horizon, and memorial verse running from straight-on and foursquare,
     as for Constant Slothrop, through bouncy Star Spangled Banner meter for Mrs. Elizabeth,
     wife of Lt. Isaiah Slothrop (d. 1812):
     
    Adieu my dear friends, I have come to this grave
    Where Insatiate Death in his reaping hath brought me.
    Till Christ