These pine limbs, crackling so blue and watery, don’t seem
to put out any heat at all, Confiscated weapons and ammo
lie around half-crated or piled loose inside the C-Company
perimeter. For days the U.S. Army has been out sweeping
Thuringia, busting into houses in the middle of the night.
A certain lycanthropophobia fear of Werewolves occupies
minds at higher levels. Winter is coming. Soon there won't
be enough food or coal in Germany. Potato crops toward
the end of the War, for example, all went to make alcohol
for the rockets. But there are still small-arms aplenty, and
ammunition to fit them. Where you cannot feed, you take
away weapons. Weapons and food have been firmly linked
in the governmental mind for as long as either has been
around. .
On the mountainsides, patches will flash up now and
then, bright as dittany in July at the Zippo’s ceremonial
touch. Pfc. Eddie Pensiero, a replacement here in the
89th Division, also an amphetamine enthusiast, sits hud-
dling nearly on top of the fite, shivering and watching the
divisional patch on his arm, which ordinarily resembles a
cluster of rocket-noses seen out of a dilating asshole, all
in black and olive-drab, but which now looks like some-
thing even stranger than that, which Eddie will think of
in a minute. .
Shivering is one of Eddie Pensiero’s favorite pastimes.
Not the kind of shiver normal people get, the goose-on-
the-grave passover and gone, but shivering that doesn’t
stop. Very hard to get used to at first. Eddie is a con-
noisseur of shivers. He is even able, in some strange way,
to read them, like Siure Bummer reads reefers, like Miklos
Thanatz reads whip-scars, But the gift isn’t limited just
to Eddie’s own shivers, oh no, they’rd other people’s
_ shivers, too! Yeah they come in one by one, they come in
all together in groups (lately he’s been growing in his
brain a kind of discriminator circuit, learning how to sep-
arate them out), Least interesting of these shivers are the
ones with a perfectly steady frequency, no variation to
them at all. The next-to-least interesting are the freqency-
modulated kind, now faster now slower depending on in-
formation put in at the other end, wherever that might be.
Then you have the irregular waveforms that change both
in frequency and in amplitude. They have to be Fourier-
analyzed into their harmonics, which is a little tougher.
There is often coding involved, certain subfrequencies, cer-
tain power-levels—you have to be pretty good to get the
hang of these.
“Hey Pensiero.” It is Eddie’s Sergeant, Howard (“Slow”)
Lerner. “Getcher ass offa dat fire.”
“Aww, Sarge,” chatters Eddie, “c’mon. I wuz just tryin’
ta get wawm.”
“No ick-skew-siz, Pensiero! One o’ th’ koinels wants his
hair cut, right now, an’ yer it!”
“Ahh, youse guys,” mutters Pensiero, crawling over to
his sleeping bag and looking through his pack for comb
and scissors. He is the company barber. His haircuts,
which take hours and often days, are immediately recog-
nizable throughout the Zone, revealing as they do the
hhair-by-hair singlemindedness of the “benny” habitué.
The colonel is sitting, waiting, under an electric bulb.
The bulb is receiving its power from another enlisted man,
who sits back in the shadows hand-pedaling the twin
generator cranks. It is Eddie’s friend Private Paddy
(“Electro”) McGonigle, an Irish lad from New Jersey, one
of those million virtuous and adjusted city poor you know
from the movies—you’ve seen them dancing, singing,
hanging out the washing on the lines, getting drunk at
wakes, worrying about their children going bad, I just
don’t know any more Faather, he’s a good. b’y but he’s
runnin’ with a crool crowd, on through every wretched
Hollywood lie down to and including this year’s big hit,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. With his crank here young
Paddy is practicing another form of Eddie’s gift, though
he’s transmitting not receiving. The bulb appears to burn
steadily, but this is really a succession of electric peaks
and valleys, passing by at a speed that depends on how
fast Paddy is cranking. It’s only that the wire inside the
bulb unbrightens slow enough before the next peak shows
up that fools us into seeing a steady light. It’s really a
train of imperceptible light and dark. Usually impercepti-
ble. The message is never conscious on Paddy’s part. It is
sent by muscles and skeleton, by that circuit of his body
which has learned to work as a source of electrical power.
Right now Eddie Pensiero is shivering and not paying
much attention to that light bulb. His own message is
interesting enough. Somebody close by, out in the night,
is playing a blues on a mouth harp. “Whut’s dat?” Eddie
wants to know, standing under the white light behind the
silent colonel in his dress uniform, “hey, McGonigle—you
hear sump’nP”
“Yeah,” jeers Paddy from behind the generator, “I hear
yer dischodge, flyin’ away, wit’ big wings comin’ outa th’
ass end, Dat’s whut I hear! Yuk, yuk!”
“Aw, it’s th’ bunk!” replies Eddie Pensiero, “Y-you don’t
hear no dischodge, ya big dumbheaded Mick.”
“Hey, Pensiero, ya know whut a Eye-talian submarine
sounds like, on dat new sonar? Huh?”
“Uh... whut?”
“Pinnnggguinea- -guinea-guinea wopwopwop! Dat’s whet!
Yuk, yuk, yu KI”
“Fuck youse,” sez Eddie, and commences combing ths
colonel’s silver-black hair.
The moment the comb contacts his head, the colonel
begins to speak. “Ordinarily, we'd spend no more than 24
hours on a house-to-house sweep. Sundown to sundown,
house to house. There’s a quality of black and gold to
either end of it, that way, silhouettes, shaken skies pure as
a cyclorama. But these sunsets, out here, I don’t know.
Do you suppose something has exploded somewhere?
Really—somewhere in the East? Another Krakatoa? An-
other name at least that exotic... the colors are so differ-
ent now. Volcanic ash, or any finely-divided substance,
- suspended in the atmosphere, can diffract the colors
strangely. Did you know that, sonP Hard to believe, isn’t
it? Rather a long taper if you don’t mind, and just short
of combable on top. Yes, Private, the colo change, and
how! The question is, are they chan according to
something? Is the sun’s everyday spectrum being modu-
lated? Not at random, but ae by this unknown
debris in the prevailing winds? Is there information for
us? Deep questions, and disturbing ones.
“Where are you from, son? I’m from Kenosha, Wiscon-
sin. My folks have a little farm back there. Snowfields and
fenceposts all the way to Chicago. The snow covers the
old cars up on blocks in the yards .. . big white bundles...
it looks like Graves Registration back there in Wisconsin.”
“Heh, heh... .”
“Hey Pensiero,” calls Paddy McGonigle, “ya still hearin’ .
dat sound?”
“Yeah uh I tink it’s a mouth-organ,” Pensiero busily
combing up single hairs, cutting each one a slightly differ-
ent length, going back again and again to touch up here
and there...God is who knows their. number. Atropos
is who severs them to different lengths. So, God under the
aspect of Atropos, she who cannot be turned, is in posses-
sion of Eddie Pensiero tonight.
“I got your mouth organ,” jeers Paddy, “right herel
Look! A wop clarinet!”
Each long haircut is a passage. Hair is yet another kind
of modulated frequency. Assume a state of grace in which
all hairs were once distributed perfectly even, a time of
innocence when they fell perfectly straight, all over the
colonel’s head. Winds of the day, gestures of distraction,
sweat, itchings, sudden surprises, three-foot falls to the edge
of sleep, watched skies, remembered shames, all have since
written on that perfect grating. Passing through it tonight,
restructuring it, Eddie Pensiero is an agent of History.
Along with the reworking of the colonel’s head runs the
shiver-bome blues—long runs in number 2 and 3 hole
correspond, tonight anyway, to passages in the deep
reaches of hair, birch trunks in a very humid summer night,
approaches to a stone house in a wooded park, stags
paralyzed beside the high flagged walks. ...
Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear
note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of
your face. Muscles of your face have been laughing, tight
with pain, often trying not to betray any emotion, all your
life. Where you send the pure note is partly a function of
that. There’s that secular basis for blues, if the spiritual
angle bothers you.... :
“I didn’t know where I was,” relates the colonel. “I kept
climbing downward, along these big sheared chunks of
concrete. Black reinforcing rod poking out... black rust.
There were touches of royal purple in the air, not bright
enough to blur out over their edges, or change the sub-
stance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out,
one by one—ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh
of course not, you're a city boy. There’s a lot to learn, out
on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like,
so that if you happen to be climbing around a concrete
mountain in the dark, and see one, or several, up in the
sky reproduced in purple, youll know what they look
like—that’s a heap better than the city, son, there you
just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand-new, noth-
ing to couple it back onto. ...”
Well, there he is, cautiously edging along the enormous
ruin, his hair at the moment looking very odd—brushed
forward from one occipital spot, forward and up in great
long points, forming a black sunflower or sunbonnet
around his face, in which the prominent feature is the
colonel’s long, crawling magenta lips. Things grab up for
him out of crevices among the debris, sort of fast happy
lunge out and back in, thin pincer arms, nothing personal,
just thought I'd grab a little night air, ha, hal When they
miss the colonel—as they always.seem to do—why they
just zip back in with a gambler’s ho-hum, well, maybe
next time....
Dammit, cut off from my regiment here, gonna be cap-
tured and cremated by dacoits! Oh Jesus there they are
now, unthinkable Animals running low in the light from
the G-5 version of the city, red and yellow turbans,
scarred dope-fiend faces, faired as the front end of a *37
Ford, same undirected eyes, same exemption from the
Karmic Hammer— /
A ’37 Ford, exempt from the K.H.? C’mon quit fooling,
They'll all end up in junkyards same as th’ rest!
Oh, will they, Skippy? Why are there so many on the
roads, then? ai hy
W-well gee, uh, Mister Information, th-th’ War, I mean
there’s no new cars being built right now so we all have to
keep our Old Reliable in tiptop shape cause there’s not too
many mechanics left here on the home front, a-and we
shouldn’t hoard gas, and we should keep that A-sticker
prominently displayed in the lower right—
Skippy, you little fool, you are off on another of your
senseless and retrograde journeys. Come back, here, to the
points. Here is where the paths divided. See the man back
there. He is wearing a white hood. His shoes are brown.
He has a nice smile, but nobody sees it. Nobody sees it
because his face is always in the dark. But he is a nice
man. He is the pointsman. He is called that because he
throws the lever that changes the points. And we go to
Happyville, instead of to Pain City. Or “Der Leid-Stadt,”
that’s what the Germans call it. There is a mean poem
about the Leid-Stadt, by a German man named Mr. Rilke. ©
But we will not read it, because we are going to Happy-
ville. The pointsman has made sure we'll go there, He
hardly has to work at all. The lever is very smooth, and
easy to push. Even you could push it, Skippy. If you
knew where it was. But look what a lot of work he has
done, with just one little push. He has sent us all the way
to Happyville, instead of to Pain City, That is because he
knows just where the points and the lever are. He is the
only kind of man who puts in very little work and makes
big things happen, all over the world. He could have sent
you on the right trip back. there, Skippy. You can have
your fantasy if you want, you probably don’t deserve any-
thing better, but Mister Information tonight is in a kind
mood. He will show you Happyville. He will begin by
reminding you of the 1937 Ford. Why is that dacoit-faced
auto still on the roads? You said “the War,” just as you
rattled over the points onto the wrong track. The War was
the set of points. Eh? Yesyes, Skippy, the truth is that the
War is keeping things alive. Things. The Ford is only
one of them. The Germans-and-Japs story was only one,
rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is
always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the
War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now
it is killing them in more subtle ways. Often in ways that
are too complicated, even for us, at this level, to trace.
But the right people are dying, just as they do when
armies fight. The ones who stand up, in Basic, in the
middle of the machine-gun pattem. The ones who do not
have faith in their Sergeants. The ones who slip and show
a moment’s weakness to the Enemy. These are the ones
the War cannot use, and so they die. The right ones sur-
vive. The others, it’s said, even know they have a short
life expectancy. But they persist in acting the way they
do. Nobody knows why. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could
eliminate them completely? Then no one would have to
be killed in the War. That would be fun, wouldn’t it,
Skippy?
Jeepers, it sure would, Mister Information! Wow, I-I
can’t wait to see Happyvillel
Happily, he doesn’t have to wait at all. One of the
dacoits comes leaping with a whistling sound, ecru silk
cord strung buzzing tight between his fists, eager let’s-get-
to-it grin, and just at the same moment a pair of arms
comes up out of a fissure in the ruins, and gathers the
colonel down to safety just in time. The dacoit falls on his
ass, and sits there trying to pull the cord apart, muttering
oh shit, which even dacoits do too.
“You are under the mountain,” a voice announces. Stony
cave-acoustics in here. “Please remember from this point
on to obey all pertinent regulations.”
His guide is a kind of squat robot, dark gray plastic
with rolling headlamp eyes. It is shaped something like a
crab, “That’s Cancer in Latin,” sez the robot; “and in
Kenosha, too!” It will prove to be addicted to one-liners
that never quite come off for anyone but it.
“Here is Muffin-tin Road,” announces the robot, “note
the smiling faces on all the houses here.” Upstairs win-
dows are eyes, picket fence is teeth, Nose is the front door.
“Sa-a-a-y,” asks the colonel, taken by a sudden thought,
“does it ever snow here in Happyville?”
“Does what ever snow?”
“You're evading.”
“Tm evading-room vino from Visconsin,” sings this boor-
ish machine, * ‘and you oughta see the nurses run! So what
else is new, Jackson?” The squat creature is actually chew-
ing gum, a Laszlo Jamf variation on polyvinyl chloride,
very malleable, even sending out detachable molecules
which, through an ingenious Osmo-elektrische Schalter-
werke, developed by Siemens, is transmitting, in code, a
damn fair approximation of Beeman's reeiaie flavor to the
robot crab’s brain.
“Mister Information always answers spittle
“For what he’s making, I’'d even question answers.
Does it ever snow? Of course it snows in 1 Happyville. Lotta
snowmen’d sure be sore if it didn’t!”
“T recall, back in Wisconsin, the wind used to blow
right up the walk, like a visitor who expects to be let in.
Sweeps the snow up against the front door, leaves it drifted
there... . Ever get that in Happyville?”
“Old stuff,” sez the robot.
“Anybody ever open his front door, while the wind was
- doing that, eh?”
“Thousands of times.”
“Then,” pounces the colonel, “if the door is the house’s
nose, and the door is open, a-and all of those snowy-white
crystals are blowing up from Muffin-tin Road in a big
cloud right into the—”
“Aagghh!” screams the plastic robot, and scuttles way
into a narrow alley. The colonel finds himself alone in a
brown and wine-aged district of the city: sandstone and
adobe colors sweep away in a progress of walls, rooftops,
streets, not a tree in sight, and who’s this come strolling
down the Schokoladestrasse? Why, it’s Laszlo Jamf him-
self, grown to a prolonged old age, preserved like a °37
Ford against the World’s ups and downs, which are never
more than damped-out changes in smile, wide-pearly to
wistfully gauze, inside Happyville here. Dr. Jamf is wear-
ing a bow tie of a certain limp grayish lavender, a color
for long dying afternoons through conservatory windows,
minor-keyed lieder about days gone by, plaintive pianos,
pipesmoke in a stuffy parlor, overcast Sunday walks by
canals... here the two men are, dry-scratched precisely,
attentively on this afternoon, and the bells across the canal
are tolling the hour: the men have come from very far
away, after a journey neither quite remembers, on a mis-
sion of some kind. But each has been kept ignorant of the
other’s role....
Now it turns out that this light bulb over the colonel’s
head here is the. same identical Osram light bulb that
Franz Pékler used to keep next to in his bunk at the under-
ground rocket works at Nordhausen. Statistically (so Their
story goes), every n-thousandth light bulb is gonna be
perfect, all the delta-q’s piling up just right, so we shouldn’t
be surprised that this one’s still around, burning brightly.
But the truth is even more stupendous. This bulb is im-
mortal! It’s been around, in fact, since the twenties, has
that old-timery point at the tip and is less pear-shaped
than more contemporary bulbs. Wotta history, this bulb, if
only it could speak—well, as a matter of fact, it can speak.
It is dictating the muscular modulations of Paddy Mc-
Gonigle’s cranking tonight, this is a loop here, with feed-
back through Paddy to the generator again. Here it is,