Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “It was very ambiguous. I feel ambivalent about it. All I really remember is somebody named Motor Car talking about boomerangs. I guess I dropped off once or twice.”

  Goldfloss patted his side whiskers. The elevator door opened and he stepped in, yawning. Billy headed back to the amphitheater, where Mutuka was still seated at the edge of the little flatcar.

  “So then he hasn’t come back yet.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I was here for the demonstration. I was one of the ones who stayed for the whole thing.”

  “I believe he’s still here,” Mutuka said. “Somehow he’s compressed himself. He hasn’t actually gone away. He’s here but we can’t see him.”

  “What’s a graviton isometric axis?”

  “You’ve got it backwards.”

  “Maybe I reversed the words purposely to see if you’d let on to knowing.”

  “Odd if I didn’t know,” Mutuka said. “I spent twenty-three years in futurology before going into the bush. I was a futurologist before the word was even coined.”

  “How were things in Perth last time you were there?”

  “Exactly who are you?”

  “Just wondering about the nightlife in Perth.”

  “I spent two days there. Never been back. My home is the bush.”

  “Two days and two nights?”

  “They usually go together,” Mutuka said.

  “So you think he’s compressed himself.”

  They sat without speaking for a long time. This period of waiting began to take on the character of a vigil. The feeling between them grew nearly fraternal, drawing them to the subject of their ritual observation. Of course, there was also something comic about the watch they kept. They were watching over something that wasn’t there. The aborigine wasn’t there and neither was the tektite object. Nothing was there but the idea of an nth dimension. They watched over this idea until well past dinnertime.

  “One last thing I’d like to ask,” Billy said, “before one of us gets tired and goes. My question is why did you give up your whole career that you spent twenty-three years in to go live in the empty desert with these aborigines?”

  “They’re fun to watch.”

  An attendant entered the amphitheater. There was a hawser tied to a ring at one end of the flatcar and the attendant took the line and pulled the flatcar out the door with Mutuka still seated at one end, his legs held straight out to keep his feet from bumping on the floor.

  On his way back Billy got lost in the play maze. He knew he was very close to his canister but there wasn’t much he could do about it, since nobody was around to give directions. He kept walking between the Masonite panels, up one row and down another, wondering whether the array of zeros and ones might be the equivalent of a single number. It was easy to imagine a system in which every common whole number is composed of one hundred and one subnumbers, all of which have to be arranged in proper order and then counted before the person doing the counting is allowed to proceed to the next number. An extraterrestrial programming code maybe. Could be that what they’ve transmitted is really one unit of information—not one hundred and one. More to come maybe. The rabbit in the hat on Softly’s lap.

  He hadn’t been through the maze since the day he’d arrived. He tried to recall the arrangement of panels, shifting his perspective so that he viewed the maze from above. His memory of events wasn’t exceptional. Where he rarely failed was in a spatial framework. He was able to recall entire pages of complicated text by summoning the pages themselves—typography, space between lines, degree of airiness, the visual personality of words or numbers. Density of text discouraged him slightly. Breezy sort of pages were memory’s wading place. What he saw were relationships, the design and arrangement of type-metal shapes. When he had trouble remembering something related to mathematics he usually turned off the lights. He’d tried simply closing his eyes but an unlighted room seemed to work better. He liked the feeling of being surrounded by dark objects and hazy shapes. It wasn’t memory they contained but their own sprawling shadows, the only perfect death. Porcelain cats and glass figurines of little girls. Sitting in darkness seemed to him a totally natural act, a minimal process subject to the calculus of variations. It was the favored way of nature itself. States of equilibrium. Principle of least action. Point of minimum energy. Zero rate of change. He wasn’t sure at what moment he first became aware that the woman with the eyepatch was walking with him stride for stride. She wore an armful of jade bangles. Black silk shirt and pants. Her name, she said, was Celeste Dessau.

  “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “I don’t come here,” he said.

  “They change the panel arrangement every day. I find it renewing, I really do. Serious play usually is. Of course, there’s a thin line between serious play and neurosis. The same famous thin line we find nearly everywhere. What were you thinking about?”

  “Sitting in the dark.”

  “Charming,” she said. “You’ve existed in my mind a long time, you know. Ever since I first read about you in the journals and technical digests.”

  “You keep yourself well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It just came out.”

  “Turn left here.”

  “A nervous remark, that’s all.”

  “It must be a curious feeling to exist in someone’s mind and not even know that person is alive.”

  “It’s hard for me to say what it’s like because I don’t know who out there might be thinking about me.”

  “I expected a stark and haunted face.”

  “Why?”

  “One hears things about pure mathematics. But you don’t look especially driven.”

  “What did you think of the aborigine?” he said.

  “It was just an excuse to gather together. We were all very lonely. Loneliness among the overeducated is the saddest thing in the world. Your own work here is the only touch of romance in our lives. An idealized exploit at last. We want you to discover a beautiful sentiment in the message of the star people. We expect your announcement any day now. In fact we’re depending on it.”

  “But what about the note you wrote? Do you really think it was all a trick?

  “I didn’t write that note. The note I wrote was about my horoscope. I was passing it to a friend down front. Some time later somebody passed me a note about a nightclub act. That’s when I decided to leave.”

  “The whirl was pretty good. You should have stayed for the whirl.”

  At a junction in front of them, two men with books to their noses nearly bumped heads. They moved in silent glides, seeming to overstep themselves, to be walking beyond their physical limits. Objects in topological space, he fancied. “Isoperimetrical readers of Virgil.” Human members of open sets in reciprocal orbit. Several more people were evident here and there, their bodies crossing the space at the end of matching panels.

  “Science avers that for every black hole there’s a white hole,” she said. “All matter lost in black holes must inevitably reappear through white holes either in another part of the universe or in an alternate universe. My work here is interdisciplinary. This is the loneliest kind of work. I find it hard to make real friends.”

  He liked the way she’d said that: science avers. He also liked her close-cropped hair and the way the bangles clicked when she moved her arm. He’d never associated close-cropped hair with lonely people. In his experience that kind of hair went with firm, self-controlled and unflinching people. He was happy to learn that Celeste Dessau had a soft interior to counterbalance her somewhat hard-edged surface. Nevertheless he doubted that science averred the existence of white holes. It appeared too convenient an explanation. Maybe science supposed, conjectured, surmised and pulled its hair out by the roots, guessing. He didn’t think it went beyond that. On the other hand maybe it did. How would he know? Maybe science did aver. One white for every black. Who knew? In a dumb kind of way
maybe it made sense.

  “Symmetry is a powerful analgesic,” the woman said. “Tell me more about sitting in the dark. Maybe I can work up enough courage to do it myself.”

  “Sometimes I write in the dark. At first it would come as a shock to turn on the light and see how big all the writing looked on top of each other or falling off the page. But I’m a lot better at it now.”

  “Living defensively is the central theme of our age. How else can we live? Biologically we’ve instructed ourselves in the deepest way possible that living in a defensive manner is the only way we’ll survive, both in theme and fact. Maybe your hunch is right. Sitting alone in a room isn’t enough. We should turn out the lights as well. The only way to survive is to curtail one’s perspective, to exist as close to one’s center as possible.”

  “I just do it because it helps me concentrate.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “The worst age,” she said. “Too old to be cute. Too young to be sexy. A haunted fourteen. That’s the kind of face I thought you’d have.”

  He felt he should be getting back to work. He hadn’t experienced this eager yielding to a sense of obligation since he’d left the Center. In a roundabout way the aborigine was responsible. Billy had been impressed by the gyration and disappearance. As the impact of these events began to manifest itself, he found he was more receptive to the idea that events in general merited his attention. If the aborigine could spin off into the nth dimension, maybe there was something to this star business after all. Plausibility by association. People were crowding into the play maze. This must be what they do instead of naps, he thought. Serious play. To enter an area in order to find your way out.

  “We sit in our dark rooms,” Celeste Dessau said. “Traffic in the area is being rerouted for reasons nobody is willing to discuss. Wild animals have been seen entering the city. All air-mail letters are returned to sender. We are determined not to turn on the lights. Manhole covers begin shooting into the air. It rains in triplicate.”

  Throughout the maze there was a general mood of well-being, most likely arising from the basic satisfactions of negotiating intricate pathways. It was necessary to move sideways now because of the mass of people.

  “Now I exist in your consciousness as you’ve existed in mine. When you least expect it, I’ll surface to share your life.”

  In his room he sat at the module and took a number two pencil in hand. He thought he heard a metallic click behind him. It was so slight he didn’t even turn around. He started working and a second later heard a papery slither followed by another click. This time he turned, seeing an envelope propped against the emergency exit grating at the base of the wall. He went and got it. It was a manila envelope, roughly nine inches by twelve. He wasn’t surprised to find nothing inside it. Two notes in one day were one too many. Nothing remarkable about an empty clasp-envelope coming through the exit hatch. Not in this place. Perfectly in keeping. When he sat down again he realized there was something drawn on the front of the envelope, its face, as it were. The envelope had come into the room backside—and blank surface—showing. He studied the labeled drawing with some interest.

  He assumed this was Celeste Dessau’s way of continuing to exist in his mind and he assumed furthermore that other reminders of her existence would be forthcoming, every new message designed to reaffirm her image. Already he could see her black-clad figure lurking among a mass of cells in his brain, passing softly through every synaptic cleft. He saw her crouched behind his eyes, co-opting his vision, opening the world to further mistranslation. He went to work now, looking into ring structure and fields, coming quite by accident upon a twillig nil-potent element. This was one of two mathematical entities named in his honor. The other was a stellated twilligon—a figure, coincidentally, that had more than a casual resemblance to the drawing on the manila envelope. He continued his present explorations almost to the notched dot of midnight, rearranging the surface of one zero one, looking for fresh connections in the texture. As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or “terror in a lonely place,” the original semantic content of that word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. The work’s ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art’s private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist’s self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time’s pinewood dust and admire one’s own veronicas and pavanes.

  Before going to bed he looked once more at the drawing on the outside of the envelope and he wondered whether it was by accident or design that the figure resembled a boomerang.

  7

  REARRANGEMENT

  Synthetic figures on the glass slide moved at timed intervals in a bright clasping skater’s blur of identity and division. As one microsphere parted from another, a third joined a fourth. This coincident symmetry did not astonish the lone brown eye that watched from above. Billy thought of the process as a simple one, that of artificial objects being rearranged on a limited surface. There was something wholly touching about these microspheres, these subcreatures of polypeptide origin. They possessed the innocence of small things viewed from a distant point.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting back to work?” the woman said. “I feel guilty about letting you linger. So much depends on you.”

  He raised his head from the eyepiece. Desilu Espy in her starched close-fitting tunic and high white socks resembled a puffy schoolgirl whose age had somehow doubled before she’d found time to don appropriate clothing. She and Billy stood in a glass booth in an area set aside for research in extramolecularism. Beyond the enclosure, in every direction, were all the elements of modern laboratory swamplife—electron microscopes, optical rotation instruments, rows of precision devices for measuring, photographing and synthesizing the unseeable, everywhere a sense of insomnious acids. He put his eye to the microscope once more.

  “We’re analyzing a giant molecule,” she said. “It’s more complex than anything ever found in the spectral lines in the Milky Way. Perfectly stable under heat and light. This is a good sign in terms of do we or do we not find the building blocks of life beyond the solar system. Don’t you have work to do?”

  “I’m not finished looking at this.”

  “Sometimes I wonder wouldn’t it be simpler if the Ratnerians just turned up one day. Or wouldn’t it be almost as simple if we used an enormous topographical marking to indicate to any visual monitoring device that there’s intelligent life on Earth. Somebody thought of a huge pine forest planted in Siberia in the form of a right triangle. The monitoring device would see it and report back to its people. Ideas like that really appeal to me. They’re such human ideas. Only humans could think of ideas like that. Radio emissions are impersonal.
What can you learn about a civilization from pulses and gaps? We could plant a right triangle of pine trees with a square of blue spruce attached to each side. The extraterrestrials would be charmed by it. If not, we wouldn’t want to know them anyway.”

  She stood five feet away, watching over him with a clear concern for the object entrusted to his secular pleasure. Without raising his head from the instrument he closed his scope eye and simultaneously opened his free eye. He shielded this action from Desilu Espy by putting left hand to forehead in a pretense of deep concentration. As she continued to talk, he stared at her knees, the only items discernible under the circumstances. Very clean. Clean knees. A clean-kneed woman.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t be getting back to work?”

  “I worked last night.”

  “Here comes whosis himself. What’s-his-name. He’s probably going your way. He can take you back.”

  “I didn’t know I needed taking.”

  “I’ve put together a tiny discussion group for this evening,” she said. “The gymnasium just around the corner. You have to come. They’ll want to see you.”

  “Haven’t they seen me yet?”

  “Your wrong eye’s open.”

  He raised his head and stepped down the small aluminum ladder he’d been using to position himself at microscope level. A man was standing outside the glass booth, smiling ironically. He was small and seedy-looking, dressed in a wrinkled ill-fitting suit that gave the impression it had just traveled thousands of miles, perhaps with him inside it, at the bottom of a steamer trunk. He was so close to the booth when he spoke that his words made small clouds on the glass.

  “Tea more noot.”

  “Now I remember,” the woman said.

  “We meet at last.”

  “Who?” Billy said.