Status Updates From Gravity's Rainbow

Dear Mr. Slothrop:
You never did.
The Kenosha Kid

What more do they want?… as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways…The true war is a celebration of markets. (107)

In hoc signo vinces

The entire fabric of the air, the time, is changed—…
Their hearts pound. Eardrums brushed taut by the overpressure ring in pain. The invisible train rushes away close over the rooftop…

Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reached for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can’t bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the back of the dogs but making a nice recovery, and by now she’s ticklish all over,…
But a rocket has suddenly struck. A terrific blast quite close beyond the village

“One took lots of aspirin. One was drinking or drink much of the time. One was concerned about getting one’s lounge suits to fit properly. One despised the upper classes but tried desperately to behave like them…”
“And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—“

“All I remember is that it was silly. Just overwhelmingly silly. Nothing happened…”
“I know that, I can read magazines. But what was it like?”
“Just…just damned silly, that’s all. Worrying about things that don’t—Jess, can’t you really remember?”

“Don’t be ridic, I’m serious, Roger. I don’t remember.” Watches dimples come up either side of his mouth as he considers this, smiling at her in an odd way. It’ll be like this when I’m thirty…flash of several children, a garden, a window, voices Mummy, what’s…cucumbers and brown onions on a chopping board, wild carrot blossoms sprinkling with brilliant yellow a reach of deep, very green lawn…

Pointsman’s… his…a bleakness wherever she meets him. Scientist-neutrality. Hands that—she shivers. There are chances now for enemy shapes out of the snow and stillness. She drops the blackout curtain. Hands that could as well torture people as dogs and never feel their pain…

“What do you expect from me, working day in day out among raving lunatics.” … “they believe in survival after death, communication mind-to-mind, prophesying, clairvoyance, teleportation—they believe, Jess! and—and” … she comes up out of the fat paisley chair to hold him, how does she know,… muscles touches, skins confused high, blooded—know so exactly what Roger meant to say?

—for an end to all change, for a long static afternoon and the grouse forever in blurred takeoff, the sights taking their lead a slant purple hills to pallid sky, the good dog alerted by the eternal scent, the explosion over his head always just about to come—these hopes so patently, defenselessly there that Roger even at his most cheaply nihilistic couldn’t quite bring himself to take the pictures down,

stalking now this stuffed, dim little parlor, hung about with rigid portraits of favorite tun dogs at point in field that never existed save in certain fantasies about death,

“It’s the damned Calvinist insanity again. Payment. Why must they always put it in terms of exchange?

But what does she want to say? That he must always be lovable, in need of her and never, as now, the hovering statistical cherub who’s never quite been to hell but speaks as if he’s one of the most fallen…
“Cheap nihilism” is Captain Prentice’s name for that.

“Everyone’s equal. Same chances of getting hit. Equal in the eyes of the rocket.”

She saw his loneliness: in his face, between his red nail-bitten hands…

Roger really wants other people to know what he’s talking about. Jessica understands that.

“Mexico.” Leaning forward, definitely hostile. “They used the stalks that grew through the hole to cure the sick. The sieve was a very sacred item to them. What will you do with the sieve you’ve laid over London? How will you use the things that grow in your network of death?

How can Mexico play, so at his ease, with these symbols of randomness and fright? Innocent as a child, perhaps unaware—perhaps—that in his play he wrecks the elegant rooms of history, threatens the idea of cause and effect itself. What if Mexico’s whole generation have turned out like this? Will Postwar be nothing but “events,” newly created one moment to the next? No links? Is it the end of history?

“I’m sorry. That’s the Monte Carlo Fallacy. No matter how many have fallen inside a particular square, the odds remain the same as they always were. Each hit is independent of all the others. Bombs are not dogs. No link. No memory. No conditioning.”

Both know how strange their liaison must look. If ever the Anti-pointsman existed, Roger Mexico is the man…The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive any place in between.

His little bureau is dominated now by a glimmering map, a window into another landscape than winter Sussex, written names and spidering streets, an ink ghost of London, ruled off into 576 squares, a quarter square kilometer each. Rocket strikes are represented by red circles. The Poisson equation will tell for a number of total hits arbitrarily chosen, how many squares will get none, how many one two three and so on.

As the date keeps coming in, Roger looks more and more like a prophet.

“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t we do something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?”
“Why am I surrounded,” his usual understanding self today, “by statistical illiterates? There’s no way love, not as long as the mean density of strikes is constant. Pointsman doesn’t even understand that.”

Roger has tried to explain to her the V-Bomb statistics: the difference between distributions in angels-eye view, over the map of England, and their own chances, as seen from down here. She’s almost got it: nearly understands his Poisson equation, yet can’t quite put the two together—put her own enforced calm day-to-day alongside the pure numbers, and keep them both in sight. Pieces keep slipping in and out.

Unit it touch them. Until something falls. A doodle will give time to get to safety, a rocket will hit before they can hear it coming. Biblical, maybe, spooky as an old northern fairy tale, but not The War, not the great struggle of good and evil the wireless reports everyday. And no reason not just to, well, to keep on…

Don’t you know there’s a war on, moron? yes but—here’s Jessica in her sisters hand-me-down pajamas, and Roger asleep in nothing at all, but where is the war?