Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Page B

shadow states of the rats and flies, were saying
     about the chances for mercy that year. The grimed brick sprawl is known as the Hospital
     of St. Veronica of the True Image for Colonic and Respiratory Diseases, and one of
     its residents is a Dr. Kevin Spectro, neurologist and casual Pavlovian.
    Spectro is one of the original seven owners of The Book, and if you ask Mr. Pointsman
     what Book, you’ll only get smirked at. It rotates, the mysterious Book, among its
     co-owners on a weekly basis, and this, Roger gathers, is Spectro’s week to get dropped
     in on at all hours. Others, in Pointsman’s weeks, have come the same way to “The White
     Visitation” in the night, Roger has heard their earnest, conspirators’ whispering
     in the corridors, the smart rattle of all their shoes, like dancing pumps on marble,
     destroying one’s repose, refusing ever to die with distance, Pointsman’s voice and
     stride always distinct from the rest. How’s it going to sound now with a toilet bowl?
    Roger and Jessica leave the doctor at a side entrance, into which he melts, leaving
     nothing but rain dripping from slopes and serifs of an unreadable legend on the lintel.
    They turn southward. Lights on the dash glow warmly. Searchlights rake the raining
     sky. The slender machine shivers over the roads. Jessica drifts toward sleep, the
     leather seat creaking as she curls about. Windscreen wipers brush the rain in a rhythmic
     bright warp. It is past two, and time for home.
    • • • • • • •
    Inside St. Veronica’s hospital they sit together, just off the war-neurosis ward,
     these habitual evenings. The autoclave simmers its fine clutter of steel bones. Steam
     drifts into the glare of the gooseneck lamp, now and then becoming very bright, and
     the shadows of the men’s gestures may pass through it, knife-edged, swooping very
     fast. But both faces are usually reserved, kept well back, in the annulus of night.
    Out of the blackness of the ward, a half-open file drawer of pain each bed a folder,
     come cries, struck cries, as from cold metal. Kevin Spectro will take his syringe
     and spike away a dozen times tonight, into the dark, to sedate Fox (his generic term
     for any patient—run three times around the building without thinking of a fox and
     you can cure anything). Pointsman will sit each time waiting for their talking to
     resume, glad to rest these moments in the half-darkness, the worn gold-leaf letters
     shining from the spines of books, the fragrant coffee mess besieged by roaches, the
     winter rain in the downspout just outside the window. . . .
    “
You’re
not looking any better.”
    “Ah, it’s the old bastard again, he’s got me down. This fighting, Spectro, every
day
, I don’t . . .” pouting downward at his eyeglasses that he’s wiping on his shirt,
     “there’s more to damned Pudding than I can
see
, he’s always springing his . . . senile little surprises. . . .”
    “It’s his age. Really.”
    “Oh,
that
I can deal with. But he’s so damned—such a
bastard
, he
never
sleeps, he
plots
—”
    “Not senility, no, I meant the position he’s working from. Pointsman? You don’t have
     the priorities he does quite yet, do you? You can’t take the chances he can. You’ve
     treated them that age, surely you know that strange . . .
smugness. . . .”
    Pointsman’s own Fox waits, out in the city, a prize of war. In here the tiny office
     space is the cave of an oracle: steam drifting, sybilline cries arriving out of the
     darkness . . . Abreactions of the Lord of the Night. . . .
    “I don’t like it, Pointsman. Since you did ask.”
    “Why not.” Silence. “Unethical?”
    “For pity’s sake, is
this
ethical?” raising an arm then toward the exit into the ward, almost a Fascist salute.
     “No, I’m only trying to think of ways to justify it, experimentally. I can’t. It’s
     only one man.”
    “It’s Slothrop. You know what he is. Even Mexico