Gravity's Rainbow Read Online Free

twirling a walking stick with W. C. Fields’ head,
     nose, top hat, and all, for its knob, and surely capable of magic, while the band
     plays a second chorus. Accompanying will be a phantasmagoria, a real one, rushing
     toward the screen, in over the heads of the audiences, on little tracks of an elegant
     Victorian cross section resembling the profile of a chess knight conceived fancifully
     but not vulgarly so—then rushing back out again, in and out, the images often changing
     scale so quickly, so unpredictably that you’re apt now and then to get a bit of lime-green
     in with your rose, as they say. The scenes are highlights from Pirate’s career as
     a fantasist-surrogate, and go back to when he was carrying, everywhere he went, the
     mark of Youthful Folly growing in an unmistakable Mongoloid point, right out of the
     middle of his head. He had known for a while that certain episodes he dreamed could
     not be his own. This wasn’t through any rigorous daytime analysis of content, but
     just because he
knew.
But then came the day when he met, for the first time, the real owner of a dream
     he, Pirate, had had: it was by a drinking fountain in a park, a very long, neat row
     of benches, a feeling of sea just over a landscaped rim of small cypresses, gray crushed
     stone on the walks looking soft to sleep on as the brim of a fedora, and here comes
     this buttonless and drooling derelict, the one you are afraid of ever meeting, to
     pause and watch two Girl Guides trying to adjust the water pressure of the fountain.
     They bent over, unaware, the saucy darlings, of the fatal strips of white cotton knickers
     thus displayed, the undercurves of baby-fat little buttocks a blow to the Genital
     Brain, however pixilated. The tramp laughed and pointed, he looked back at Pirate
     then and said something extraordinary: “Eh? Girl Guides start pumping water . . .
your sound will be the sizzling night
 . . . eh?” staring directly at no one but Pirate now, no more pretense. . . . Well,
     Pirate had dreamed these very words, morning before last, just before waking, they’d
     been part of the usual list of prizes in a Competition grown crowded and perilous,
     out of some indoor intervention of charcoal streets . . . he couldn’t remember that
     well . . . scared out of his wits by now, he replied, “Go away, or I will call a policeman.”
    It took care of the immediate problem for him. But sooner or later the time would
     come when someone else would find out his gift, someone to whom it mattered—he had
     a long-running fantasy of his own, rather a Eugène Sue melodrama, in which he would
     be abducted by an organization of dacoits or Sicilians, and used for unspeakable purposes.
    In 1935 he had his first episode
outside
any condition of known sleep—it was during his Kipling Period, beastly Fuzzy-Wuzzies
     far as eye could see, dracunculiasis and Oriental sore rampant among the troops, no
     beer for a month, wireless being jammed by other Powers who would be masters of these
     horrid blacks, God knows why, and all folklore broken down, no Cary Grant larking
     in and out slipping elephant medicine in the punchbowls out here . . . not even an
     Arab With A Big Greasy Nose to perform on, as in that wistful classic every tommy’s
     heard . . . small wonder that one fly-blown four in the afternoon, open-eyed, in the
     smell of rotting melon rinds, to the seventy-seven-millionth repetition of the outpost’s
     only Gramophone record, Sandy MacPherson playing on his organ “The Changing of the
     Guard,” what should develop for Pirate here but a sumptuous Oriental episode: vaulting
     lazily and well over the fence and sneaking in to town, to the Forbidden Quarter.
     There to stumble into an orgy held by a Messiah no one has quite recognized yet, and
     to know, as your eyes meet, that you are his John the Baptist, his Nathan of Gaza,
     that it is you who must convince him of his Godhead, proclaim him to