by Don DeLillo
“What do you learn from the ants?”
“The ants and their semifluid secretions teach us that pattern, pattern, pattern is the foundational element by which the creatures of the physical world reveal a perfect working model of the divine ideal. Now can you tell me what it is that serves as the foundational element?”
“Pattern, pattern, pattern.”
“Correct,” the elderly priest said. “Notice the uniform spacing maintained by the ants as each one emerges from the nest. Notice how interchangeable the ants seem to be. Try to observe secretion patterns with your untrained eyes. Everything they do for us here today is part of a plan. This is self-perfective activity, the patterned plan, and it is this evidence in nature that tends to be supportive of the notion of a divine essence imitable outside itself and that also tends to lead us implicitly to the conclusion that self-perfective free activity in this life leads to beatitude in the next.”
“For ants?”
“For people.”
“But why study ants?” Billy said. “Why not snow leopards or albatrosses?”
“Why not ants?”
“Why not snow leopards?”
“Why not ants?”
“Okay, but why red ants? Why not black ants?”
“Why not yellow ants?” Verbene said.
“Okay, why not?”
“Because red ants secrete uniformly. Their secretions are nonrandom. They can be classified and studied.”
“What do you learn from these secretions?”
“Everything,” the priest said. “A given ant will always secrete at a fixed number of centimeters from the secretion of the previous ant save one. Within this pattern we find secondary and tertiary patterns. It’s all very measurable. There’s nothing soft about it. I use strict empirical methods. What kind of methods do I use?”
“Strict and empirical.”
“Correct,” the priest said.
“I’m only answering because you’re old. I know I don’t have to answer.”
“There are more terrifying questions than mine waiting just around the corner. This is because you’ve reached the most terrifying of ages. Passion is the violent outward thrust of the sense appetite and it’s always accompanied by extreme bodily changes. I know the operative appetitive urges you must be encountering. Urges and semiurges. Your little body is beginning to grow and to sprout and to want. It needs, it pleads, it desires. I think it’s worthy of note that passions do not tend to be inflamed without the presence of concomitant phantasms. This is what you have to be on guard against. There are two kinds of concomitant phantasms, mild and erotomaniacal.”
“Dirty thoughts, you mean.”
“Correct.”
“So far you haven’t told me anything I really want to know.”
“Many people die while having sexual coitus,” the Jesuit said. “It puts a strain on the heart and causes cardiac arrest. Sex should never be furtive. This causes added strain. If it must be done, it should be done with a spouse in a bed in an atmosphere of mutual love and trust. Avoid technique. Technique causes many problems. Technique can kill. If heart palpitations occur during coition, interrupt at once and think about parasitic worms infesting your anal canal. This is called ideational analogous restraint. If, in interrupting, you cannot by strength of will or imagination dispel the urge to emit, then effect your emission in a clean drinking glass or sanitized specimen bottle left at your bedside for this purpose. Do not discard your emission. Take it at once to your spouse and assist in the immediate and direct uterine ingestation of your emission, using whatever nonmechanical means are necessary so as to effect nonimpediment of fertilization. It is not necessary to actively seek fertilization; it is sufficient not to impede it. These are fine but thrilling distinctions. If spillage of your emission is willed as end or means, you have committed the sin of sins.”
“In the middle of a heart attack?”
“End or means,” the priest said. “Sin of sins.”
“What’s the story on premature genuflection?”
“We dip to one knee just before we enter a pew and then in cadence with the word ‘peace’ every time the priest says: ‘Peace, peace, peace, it’s a long time a-coming.’ Some people kneel on the steps outside the church and I suppose this sort of kneeling might be termed premature. Pilgrims still crawl on their knees from shrine to shrine. There’s been more of that lately but there aren’t many shrines left and so the distances they have to crawl are very great.”
“I’m trying to understand this.”
“Think upon it,” Verbene said.
He picked up one of the ants and let it move across the palm of his hand. He studied it with what appeared to be total concentration. The ant traveled the length of Fr. Verbene’s middle finger and disappeared beyond the tip. Verbene turned his hand palm down and watched the red ant move across his knuckle.
“He’ll wound me with his mandible. Then he’ll spray formic acid directly into the wound.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s an ant. Everything he does is based on patterns of self-perfective activity.”
He returned the red ant to the earth. Billy realized the ants were going in and out of the nest without collecting food or carrying nest-building materials. He asked the priest about this.
“The workers have already gathered the food. What we’ve been observing all this time is a very special class of ant. They aren’t workers, soldiers, queens or brood. They don’t secure food. They don’t perpetuate the species. They don’t protect themselves from the elements. These ants simply crawl and secrete. These are the pattern ants. They enter, they exit, they secrete. These are the ants of red ant metaphysics.”
“Do you ever expect red ant metaphysics to be called a hard science?”
“Not in our lifetime,” the priest said.
“You mean not in your lifetime.”
“We all die, boy.”
“But my lifetime figures to be longer than yours.”
“Here’s the secondary pattern,” Verbene said. “See, this one’s about to secrete right now, zunk, lovely, and then he’ll pick up the secretion of the previous ant and carry the sticky substance into the nest, whereupon he’ll emerge and redischarge it exactly so many centimeters from his own previous secretion save two. We see here evidential proof of the divine ideal.”
Billy continued to watch the ants emerge from the nest at fixed intervals. He wondered whether, beneath the nest, there was a huge tunnel in which a hundred million ants waited in line to come out and secrete in their well-ordered patterns. Or was he seeing the same five or six? The mist was thicker now, making the background fade. Light seeped into the trees and earth, into the nest and the bodies above it.
“I’m haunted by the thought that red ants don’t need red ant metaphysics,” Verbene said. “Just as stars don’t need astronomy. Just as numbers don’t need number theory. Red ant metaphysics is inherent in the colony. If anyone has formulated this study, credit the ants themselves. I’m in a state of personal anguish over this question because the scholar-priests of my order have been historically driven to adopt a pose of agonizing self-doubt. This done, I can tuck up my skirts and leave. Be it said first, however, that every colony of ants represents an extremely complex social organization. They have labor, they have self-defense, they have procreation, they have architecture. What of the pattern ants then? What of those that simply crawl out to secrete? Reflect and ponder. Deliberate a while. Theology? Logic? Mathematics? Art? Think upon it, boy.”
On his knees the old priest hummed his evening prayers. Billy rose to leave, his pants moist and smudged at one knee, coming away with blades of grass smeared to the fabric. He walked across the lawn, enjoying the wet smells and dense underwater sensation, last light strained through haphazard gauze. In his canister he turned off the light and worked, making progress in several directions. There was often an element of suspense in his calculations and when he felt this heightened interest coming ov
er him now he got up, as always, and began to pace, trying to order his thoughts, space them to the rhythm of his pacing. Because the canister was dark he immediately noticed a span of light under the bathroom door. He went to the door and opened it. The light was on, all right, and the tub was occupied. Someone was in his bathtub. It was a woman, fully reclined, immersed in suds up to her neck, expressionless, right there in front of him. She was blond and strong-featured, hair upswept in an aromatic bale, clinical blue eyes studying the figure of the boy, who had halted in midstride like a small forest creature downwind of some novel beast, some danger-laden presence sufficiently near to spike the wary nostrils with fabulous balm. Her clothing hung on a towel rack inches from his face. It was an outfit full of slits and apertures, dynamic evening wear, extremely high-powered, rich in fetish content, and he found himself wishing to see her dressed in this ultraseductive apparel, aware of the irony of his desire, backing into the totally serene confusion of it all, the inverted fundamentalism of maleness allowed its answered prayer. His body remained taut. He didn’t think he could take a step forward or back to save his skin. He tried to keep his face blank, a level eye steadied on her chin just above the water line.
“Who are you?” he said. “Not that I mind.”
“Thorkild.”
“What about a first name?”
“What about it?”
“You do what kind of work here?”
“Decollation control.”
Her arms were extended along the edges of the tub. He thought she must be pretty tall, judging by her name.
“So how come you’re here?” he said. “Checking up on how close I am to working out the code? Somebody send you to check?”
“I’m here because the plumbing’s run amuck in my sector.”
“No water?”
“Too much water,” she said. “It’s in the walls and under the tiles.”
“The wet shadow. The shadow-flow.”
“Precisely.”
“Come back when you’re finished.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“In other words, I’m saying use my tub anytime. Not just this once. Find it convenient to return.”
“Yours was the first unoccupied canister, so I slipped right in.”
“If you’re interested, I think I’m almost close to getting somewhere. I can feel it beginning to happen. You’re the only person who knows this of my work on the code up to now.”
“I was never in favor of bringing you here. I’m telling you this because I believe in ruthless honesty even when using another person’s facilities. For years it’s been assumed that interstellar radio communication would have to be mathematical in nature. Mathematics, so the argument goes, is the universal language. A civilization initiating contact would surely attempt to establish an identifying link through the grammar of mathematics, which is a higher grammar than all others and the only conceivable bond between creatures who differ in every other respect. Numbers would be used. The concepts of addition and subtraction. The rudiments of logic. This is our programming, this is what we’ve agreed upon and this is precisely what I deny. Those aren’t human beings out there. What we believe to be logical may have no bearing on the way they think, assuming they think at all in our sense of the word. The fact that they’ve apparently constructed an apparatus for transmitting signals doesn’t mean they’ve used the same scientific means we would use. Perhaps there is no apparatus. There may be other ways to transmit radio signals, ways unimaginable to us. And perhaps there is no message. This is even more likely, that the signals were the result of errors in our receiving equipment or computer. You have no business here really. This is the cruel hurting truth, regardless of whose bathtub I happen to be occupying at the time.”
“I can’t get rid of this feeling that I’m close to half the answer.”
“Remember, we’re dealing with interstellar distances. Probability of misinterpretation is quite high. Even if the signal is genuinely artificial, cosmic noise could easily cause a slight error, perhaps one pulse too many, a misplaced gap. There’s always the chance the signal hasn’t been separated out properly. The decollation effect is even more of a problem. Blank intervals between pulses being cut off. Haven’t you ever wondered why there were ninety-nine pulses and only two gaps? The decollation effect. Gaps shortened or eliminated completely. The message wasn’t repeated, remember, and this makes error detection a hopeless task at best.”
“Let’s have some thigh.”
“It was not only wrong of them to bring you here; it’s wrong of them to allow you to do advanced mathematics at all. You shouldn’t be allowed to touch a mathematical text until you’re seventeen or eighteen. Rudiments, yes, all right, certainly. Advanced work, not until you’re older. You lack the broad-based education that produces a savage spark of intellect. Yes, all right, it’s easy to cite Abel and Galois. Epochal work while still in their teens. But look how they ended. One destitute and tubercular, dead at twenty-six. The other shot to death at twenty, buried in a common grave. You’re brilliant but not savagely brilliant. I miss the killer instinct of the liberal arts major.”
She put the soap in the soap dish. He had the impression, as he rarely did with an adult female, that nothing he said or did was subject to those special allowances made for his age and sex. Thorkild did not seem to acknowledge modifying circumstances. It was like dealing with a female his own age. He was not automatically regarded as an endearing specimen. There was none of that mock coquettishness he’d come to take for granted. He was denied the skittish delight of being talked down to or smiled upon or led along. She prepared to get out of the tub.
“Before the accident,” she said, “I wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. But in my present condition I don’t wish to be seen naked. So leave please, for both our sakes.”
“What accident?”
“I have no lap.”
“That’s hard to picture.”
“Very little lap to speak of.”
“How do you sit?”
“That’s the question,” she said. “No major difficulty as long as I extend myself. Seated, there’s a problem, the lap being a factor in a person’s seated state.”
He waited outside, not even able to enjoy the sound of Thorkild standing up in the tub, rising in a silver cascade that should have been spectacular to listen to, trickle-tongue streams taking murmurous routes over her body. He moved out of the small entranceway and into the canister proper. The room was still dark. He smelled something unpleasant. Body mold. Debris lodged between toes. It was faint but clinging, a hard-core odor. He didn’t turn on the light, afraid he’d see Grbk in a chair. His mind couldn’t produce a clear picture of Grbk sitting. The chair was there, quite detailed, but the man in the chair was no more than a latent shape. He thought of running for the door. He had laplessness behind him and a latent man ahead. With luck he’d be able to get to the door before Grbk could snatch at him and force him to watch the nipples being exposed. Suddenly the smell became a noise, easier to locate, coming from the wall to his right, down low, an ambiguous noise, maybe the sound of Grbk’s zero-grade voice gargling out some stop consonants. The sound was definitely in the wall and he knew that if he tried to run past the sound to the door, the sound would hear him and lunge, becoming pure touch. But he was desperate enough to try it. He had confidence in his quickness, his ability to cut and veer. Being small he presented an imperfect surface to anyone prepared to grab. He heard the sound become another sound and then a voice in the dark.
“Open up.”
He paused, not moving out of his runner’s crouch.
“Open up what?” he said.
“The stupid dumb-ass grating.”
“Are you Grbk?”
“What kind of Grbk? It’s Harry Braniff. Open up, okay?”
“I’m not opening anything until I turn on the light.”
“As a personal favor to me, I wish you wouldn’t do that. My left eye is ligh
t-sensitive. It can take normal lighting in the outside world but the light the way it bounces off the shiny walls of these canisters it’s too much for me, causing personal injury and mental aggravation. So do me that favor.”
“No talk without lights.”
“You insist, right?”
“Lights we talk.”
“Okay, wait’ll I close my left eye and put my hand over it for added protection. The eye’s closed. Here comes the hand. Okay—now.”
Billy turned on the light and went over to the grill set into the wall just above the floor line. Through the metal latticework he saw Harry Braniff’s face, hand over left eye. Billy sat on the floor in front of the grating. He couldn’t tell whether Braniff was standing on a ladder or on solid ground, some kind of access tunnel or interior walkway. Either way, Braniff’s body was below the level of the grating, leaving only face and hand visible in the dimness beyond the barrier.
“I thought that smell was Grbk. What’s that smell?”
“That’s my breath. People notice it wherever I go. A matter of dietary preference. I eat a lot of Limburger on onion roll smothered in garlic.”
“What was the first sound I heard?”
“That was my breath too. I was breathing pretty hard. It’s not easy getting up here.”
“What was the second sound?”
“That was me trying to get the grating opened up so I could deliver the object. I didn’t know anyone was here. It was dark in here. I was told open the grill, put the object in the room, close the grill, make your departure. But I couldn’t get the grill opened up. So do me that favor and open it up.”
“First tell me what the object is you’re supposed to be delivering.”
“I was told a tape cartridge,” Braniff said. “Judging by its look and feel, that’s exactly what it is.”
He helped the man remove the grating and then accepted the cartridge. To be on the safe side he reinstalled the barrier before going on with the conversation.
