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notebooks—work-therapy.
     As inputs to ACHTUNG got faster, often he’d show up in time to help the search crews—following
     restless-muscled RAF dogs into the plaster smell, the gas leaking, the leaning long
     splinters and sagging mesh, the prone and noseless caryatids, rust already at nails
     and naked threadsurfaces, the powdery wipe of Nothing’s hand across wallpaper awhisper
     with peacocks spreading their fans down deep lawns to Georgian houses long ago, to
     safe groves of holm oak . . . among the calls for silence following to where some
     exposed hand or brightness of skin waited them, survivor or casualty. When he couldn’t
     help he stayed clear, praying, at first, conventionally to God, first time since the
     other Blitz, for life to win out. But too many were dying, and presently, seeing no
     point, he stopped.
    Yesterday happened to be a good day. They found a child, alive, a little girl, half-suffocated
     under a Morrison shelter. Waiting for the stretcher, Slothrop held her small hand,
     gone purple with the cold. Dogs barked in the street. When she opened her eyes and
     saw him her first words were, “Any gum, chum?” Trapped there for two days, gum-less—all
     he had for her was a Thayer’s Slippery Elm. He felt like an idiot. Before they took
     her off she brought his hand over to kiss anyway, her mouth and cheek in the flare
     lamps cold as frost, the city around them at once a big desolate icebox, stale-smelling
     and no surprises inside ever again. At which point she smiled, very faintly, and he
     knew that’s what he’d been waiting for, wow, a Shirley Temple smile, as if this exactly
     canceled all they’d found her down in the middle of. What a damn fool thing. He hangs
     at the bottom of his blood’s avalanche, 300 years of western swamp-Yankees, and can’t
     manage but some nervous truce with their Providence. A
détente.
Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks
     wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death . . .
     Slothrop’s Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he
     can find himself inside a parable.
    He has become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it—if they’re
     really set on getting him (“They” embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi Germany)
     that’s the surest way, doesn’t cost them a thing to paint his name
on every one, right?
    “Yes, well, that can be useful,” Tantivy watching him funny, “can’t it, especially
     in combat to, you know,
pretend
something like that. Jolly useful. Call it ‘operational paranoia’ or something. But—”
    “Who’s pretending?” lighting a cigarette, shaking his forelock through the smoke,
     “jeepers, Tantivy, listen, I don’t want to upset you but . . . I mean I’m four years
     overdue’s what it is, it could happen
any time
, the next second, right, just suddenly . . . shit . . . just zero, just nothing . . .
     and . . .”
    It’s nothing he can see or lay hands on—sudden gases, a violence upon the air and
     no trace afterward . . . a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence
     forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real
     horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing
     down all of Tantivy’s quiet decencies . . . no, no bullet with fins, Ace . . . not
     the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day. . . .
    It was Friday evening, last September, just off work, heading for the Bond Street
     Underground station, his mind on the weekend ahead and his two Wrens, that Norma and
     that Marjorie, whom he must each keep from learning about the other, just as he was
     reaching to pick his nose, suddenly in the sky, miles behind his back and up the river
mementomori
a sharp crack and a heavy explosion, rolling right behind, almost like a clap of