Free Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon Page B

a wall, just as the tip of his tail flicks away,
     the doctor steps into the white waiting throat of a toilet bowl he has not, so intent
     on his prey, seen. He bends over, awkwardly, tugging loose the bowl from its surrounding
     debris, muttering oaths against all the careless, meaning not himself, particularly,
     but the owners of this ruined flat (if they weren’t killed in the blast) or whoever
     failed to salvage this bowl, which seems, actually, to be wedged on rather tight. . . .
    Mr. Pointsman drags his leg over to a shattered staircase, swings it quietly, so as
     not to alarm the dog, against the lower half of a fumed-oak newel post. The bowl only
     clanks back, the wood shudders. Mocking him—all right. He sits on stairsteps ascending
     to open sky and attempts to pull the damned thing loose of his foot. It will not come.
     He hears the invisible dog, toenails softly clicking, gain the sanctuary of the cellar.
     He can’t reach inside the toilet bowl even to untie his fucking
boot
. . . .
    Settling the window of his Balaclava helmet snug and tickling just under his nose,
     resolved not to give way to panic, Mr. Pointsman stands up, has to wait for blood
     to drain, resurge, bounce up and down its million branches in the drizzly night, percolate
     to balance—then limping, clanking, he heads back toward the car to get a hand from
     young Mexico, who did remember, he hopes, to bring the electric lantern. . . .
    Roger and Jessica found him a bit earlier, lurking at the end of a street of row houses.
     The V-bomb whose mutilation he was prowling took down four dwellings the other day,
     four exactly, neat as surgery. There is the soft smell of house-wood down before its
     time, of ashes matted down by the rain. Ropes are strung, a sentry lounges silent
     against the doorway of an intact house next to where the rubble begins. If he and
     the doctor have chatted at all, neither gives a sign now. Jessica sees two eyes of
     no particular color glaring out the window of a Balaclava helmet, and is reminded
     of a mediaeval knight wearing a casque. What creature is he possibly here tonight
     to fight for his king? The rubble waits him, sloping up to broken rear walls in a
     clogging, an openwork of laths pointlessly chevroning—flooring, furniture, glass,
     chunks of plaster, long tatters of wallpaper, split and shattered joists: some woman’s
     long-gathered nest, taken back to separate straws, flung again to this wind and this
     darkness. Back in the wreckage a brass bedpost winks; and twined there someone’s brassiere,
     a white, prewar confection of lace and satin, simply left tangled. . . . For an instant,
     in a vertigo she can’t control, all the pity laid up in her heart flies to it, as
     it would to a small animal stranded and forgotten. Roger has the boot of the car open.
     The two men are rummaging, coming up with large canvas sack, flask of ether, net,
     dog whistle. She knows she must not cry: that the vague eyes in the knitted window
     won’t seek their Beast any more earnestly for her tears. But the poor lost flimsy
     thing . . . waiting in the night and rain for its owner, for its room to reassemble
     round it . . .
    The night, full of fine rain, smells like a wet dog. Pointsman seems to’ve been away
     for a bit. “I’ve lost my mind. I ought to be cuddling someplace with Beaver this very
     minute, watching him light up his Pipe, and here instead I’m with this
gillie
or something, this spiritualist, statistician, what
are
you anyway—”
    “Cuddling?” Roger has a tendency to scream.
“Cuddling?”
    “Mexico.” It’s the doctor, sighing, toilet bowl on his foot and knitted helmet askew.
    “Hello, doesn’t that make it difficult for you to walk? should think it would . . .
     up here, first get it in the door, this way, and, ah, good,” then closing the door
     again around Pointsman’s ankle, the bowl now occupying Roger’s seat, Roger half-resting
     on Jessica’s