Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Read Free Book Online Page B

about to swing open?
     What would the ghosts of the North, in their finery, have to show him?
    But this was a spring night, and the sky was gusting red, warm-orange, the sirens
     howling in the valleys from Pittsfield, Lenox, and Lee—neighbors stood out on their
     porches to stare up at the shower of sparks falling down on the mountainside . . .
     “Like a meteor shower,” they said, “Like cinders from the Fourth of July . . .” it
     was 1931, and those were the comparisons. The embers fell on and on for five hours
     while kids dozed and grownups got to drink coffee and tell fire stories from other
     years.
    But what Lights were these? What ghosts in command? And suppose, in the next moment,
     all of it, the complete night,
were
to go out of control and curtains part to show us a winter no one has guessed at. . . .
    6:43:16 BDST—
in the sky right now
here is the same unfolding, just about to break through, his face deepening with
     its light, everything about to rush away and he to lose himself, just as his countryside
     has ever proclaimed . . . slender church steeples poised up and down all these autumn
     hillsides, white rockets about to fire, only seconds of countdown away, rose windows
     taking in Sunday light, elevating and washing the faces above the pulpits defining
     grace, swearing
this is how it does happen—yes the great bright hand reaching out of the cloud
. . . .
    • • • • • • •
    On the wall, in an ornate fixture of darkening bronze, a gas jet burns, laminar and
     gently singing—adjusted to what scientists of the last century called a “sensitive
     flame”: invisible at the base, as it issues from its orifice, fading upward into smooth
     blue light that hovers several inches above, a glimmering small cone that can respond
     to the most delicate changes in the room’s air pressure. It registers visitors as
     they enter and leave, each curious and civil as if the round table held some game
     of chance. The circle of sitters is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your
     white hands or luminous trumpets here.
    Camerons officers in parade trews, blue puttees, dress kilts drift in conversing with
     enlisted Americans . . . there are clergymen, Home Guard or Fire Service just off
     duty, folds of wool clothing heavy with smoke smell, everyone grudging an hour’s sleep
     and looking it . . . ancient Edwardian ladies in crepe de Chine, West Indians softly
     plaiting vowels round less flexible chains of Russian-Jewish consonants. . . . Most
     skate tangent to the holy circle, some stay, some are off again to other rooms, all
     without breaking in on the slender medium who sits nearest the sensitive flame with
     his back to the wall, reddish-brown curls tightening close as a skullcap, high forehead
     unwrinkled, dark lips moving now effortless, now in pain:
    “Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland found that all the signs
     had turned against him. . . . Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position
     and movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in dance . . . irrelevant
     dance. None of Blicero’s traditional progress, no something new . . . alien. . . .
     Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality had never allowed him. Discovered
     it so . . . so joyful, that the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing
     all year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the secular wind . . . he
     means, only his personal wind. Yet . . . Selena, the wind, the wind’s everywhere. . . .”
    Here the medium breaks off, is silent awhile . . . one groan . . . a quiet, desperate
     moment. “Selena. Selena. Have you gone, then?”
    “No, my dear,” her cheeks mottled with previous tears, “I’m listening.”
    “It’s control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first
     time it was
inside
, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to