As a matter of fact, he is also just about to run into his Lisaura: someone he will be with for a while and then leave again. The Minnesinger abandoned his poor woman to suicide. What Slothrop will be leaving Greta Erdmann to is not so clear. Along the Havel in Neubabelsberg she waits, less than the images of herself that survive in an indeterminate number of release prints here and there about the Zone, and even across the sea…. Every kind technician who ever threw a magenta gel across her key light for her has gone to war or death, and she is left nothing but God’s indifferent sunlight in all its bleaching and terror…. Eyebrows plucked to pen-strokes, long hair streaked with gray, hands heavy with rings of all colors, opacities and uglinesses, wearing her dark prewar Chanel suits, no hat, scarves, always a flower, she is haunted by Central European night-whispers that blow, like the skin curtains of Berlin, more ghostly around her fattening, wrecked beauty the closer she and Slothrop draw….

This is how they meet. One night Slothrop is out raiding a vegetable garden in the park. Thousands of people living in the open. He skirts their fires, stealthy— All he wants is a handful of greens here, a carrot or mangel-wurzel there, just to keep him going. When they see him they throw rocks, lumber, once not long ago an old hand-grenade that didn’t go off but made him shit where he stood.

This evening he is orbiting someplace near the Grosser Stern. It is long after curfew. Odors of woodsmoke and decay hang over the city. Among pulverized heads of stone margraves and electors, reconnoitering a likely-looking cabbage patch, all of a sudden Slothrop picks up the scent of an unmistakable no it can’t be yes it is it’s a REEFER! A-and it’s burning someplace close by. Goldshot green of the Rif’s slant fields here, vapor-blossoms resinous and summery, charm his snoot on through bushes and matted grass, under the blasted trees and whatever sits in their branches.

Sure enough, in the hollow of an upended trunk, long roots fringing the scene like a leprechaun outpost, Slothrop finds one Emil (“Säure”) Bummer, once the Weimar Republic’s most notorious cat burglar and doper, flanked by two beautiful girls, handing around a cheerful little orange star. The depraved old man. Slothrop’s on top of them before they notice. Bummer smiles, reaches up an arm, offering the remainder of what they’ve been smoking to Slothrop, who receives it in long dirty fingernails. Oboy. He hunkers down.

“Was ist los?” sez Säure. “We’ve had a windfall of kif. Allah has smiled on us, well actually he was smiling at everybody, we just happened to be in his direct line of sight….” His nickname, which means “acid” in German, developed back in the twenties, when he was carrying around a little bottle of schnapps which, if he got in a tight spot, he would bluff people into thinking was fuming nitric acid. He comes out now with another fat Moroccan reefer. They light up off of Slothrop’s faithful Zippo.