by Don DeLillo
“You’re not supposed to be in there,” he said. “They read me a prepared statement the first day I was here. That’s the exit point for this whole sector. We’re not supposed to use it except in emergencies. I can get in trouble over this.”
“I was told open the grill, put the object in the room, close the grill, make your departure.”
“Who told you?”
“I was told if anyone asked I shouldn’t vouchsafe a reply. But because you’re only a kid and you helped me open up the grating, I’ll let you in on a piece of hard-earned wisdom gleaned from many years of delivering things to dumb-ass places. Are you prepared to remember this and learn from it?”
“Yes.”
“There is always a higher authority than you think.”
“Is that it?”
“Sometimes the person in charge isn’t the person or persons who seem to be in charge. No matter how far up or down the line you go, there’s always someone else. That’s what Harry Braniff has gleaned.”
“The person who gave you this tape to deliver to me was a one-eyed woman or at least a woman with an eyepatch. She said she wanted to exist in my mind, so one time she put an envelope with a drawing on it through the grating or probably you’re the one that put it there and now she’s sending me this tape with probably her voice on it just to keep me aware of her existence so she can keep on existing in my mind. I know it’s her. The woman in the play maze. She had one bad eye and you have one bad eye and hers was the right and yours is the left and that’s the way things have been happening around here. Celeste Dessau sent you. It all holds together. It makes sense. It fits right into the pattern.”
Thorkild opened the bathroom door and appeared in the entranceway, dressed in that hit-and-run outfit he’d seen hanging on the towel rack. When he looked back to the grating, Harry Braniff’s head and hand were gone but the sound of his voice, barely audible, drifted up from the darkness below.
“Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.”
9
COMPOSITE STRUCTURE
News of the conference spread rapidly, causing rumor to flourish, much of it humorous in nature, centering on the notion that ninety percent of the universe is missing. It was the second formal conference in the brief history of Field Experiment Number One. (The first, predating Billy’s arrival, had been presided over by Endor and concerned the transmission from the area of Ratner’s star.) It even had a name. Conference on Invisible Mass. As the hours passed, there was less jocularity in evidence and a greater degree of uneasiness, particularly among those who’d heard the latest rumor.
He walked into the conference room.
The latest rumor concerned the people who’d been selected to attend the conference. All (with one exception) were experts in alternate physics. Why did this cause uneasiness and tense speculation? Because many scientists questioned the utility and general merit of alternate physics, dealing as it did with the effects of suppositional laws on hypothetical environments.
Since he’d been invited merely to “sit in” on the meeting, Billy took a chair in the corner and tried to look like someone “sitting in.” Three men and a woman sat at a large octagonal table. There were no pencils, note pads or glasses of water. He took this to mean that extremely serious matters were about to be discussed. No time for customs, rules, formalities or informalities. The woman’s name was Masha Simjian. The men were Maidengut, Lepro and Bhang Pao.
“Who’s chairing?” Simjian said.
She looked from face to face, sucking on hard candy all the while, cheeks indented and thin lips thrust sourly outward.
“Let’s all chair,” Maidengut said. “Except whoever’s sitting in.”
“All right then, who’s participating and who’s sitting in? Show of hands please.”
“I’m sitting in,” Billy said.
“Show of hands.”
He raised his hand.
“It’s my understanding,” she said, “that persons invited to sit in on a formal conference aren’t permitted to speak unless directly addressed.”
“Why or because,” Lepro said.
“What do you mean?”
Maidengut, a blocklike man, spoke out on Lepro’s behalf.
“He has trouble distinguishing between ‘why’ and ‘because.’ In his language the same word is used for both. So in order to save time and avoid confusion he uses ‘why’ as well as ‘because’ and leaves it to the listener to match the right word to the context. In other words he says ‘why or because’ instead of ‘why’ individually or ‘because’ individually.”
“Time to begin,” Simjian said. “Who wants to get things moving?”
Bhang Pao shifted in his chair, drawing everyone’s attention. He wore a dark suit and tie. His face was round and pleasant, shady manila in color, and on his head was a bowl-shaped toupee, incongruous not only because it suggested an unprofessional haircut but also in view of its glossy look and poor fit, these factors combining to engulf any trace of authenticity.
“We’ve long known about invisible mass,” Bhang Pao said. “Galaxies are no longer flying apart at previous rates of speed. We must presume they are being held together by gravity. However, the mass needed to generate this much gravity is not present in or between the galaxies themselves. There is unexplained mass. A great deal of unexplained mass. Really a whole lot. What is it? Where does it come from? Why can’t we find it?”
“Succinctly put,” Simjian said.
“Don’t interrupt my train.”
“Please go on.”
“Visible matter cannot account for the failure of the galaxies to disperse at prior speeds. Therefore we frame a hypothesis based on missing matter and we estimate that this matter is many times greater than the sum of all detected matter in the universe. Of course not everyone accepts this model. Some years ago it was determined that interstellar deuterium abundance relative to hydrogen is lower than was thought. This means less density than suspected, which in turn means not as much invisible mass as previously conjectured. However, I regard these findings as tentative in the extreme.”
“Bravo.”
“Everything I’ve stated may prove to be total poppycock,” Bhang Pao said. “Perhaps time will tell. Perhaps time will do nothing of the kind. All we can do as scientists is try to determine the nature of the invisible mass, assuming there is such mass and that it’s invisible. Some say the laws of physics are different in remote parts of the universe. Others argue that hydrogen clouds invisible to our most sensitive devices account for the missing mass. But now a new theory has been put forth, one of vast implications.”
“Do we ask questions as he goes along,” Maidengut said, “or do we hold them in abeyance?”
“Let’s let him finish, but when he does I’ve got some extremely incisive queries to make,” Simjian said.
“But now a new theory has been put forth.”
The telephone buzzed once.
“Vast implications.”
Masha Simjian got up and answered the phone, which was part of a mounted array of devices set into the wall. She listened for a moment and then turned toward Billy.
“Contingency personnel,” she said. “There’s a loud party going on in your canister.”
“Who, mine?”
“A very wild party, contingency says. He hasn’t made a security check yet. Wanted to contact you first. I’m repeating what he says semi-verbatim. It sounds excessive. Drinking, shouting, raucous laughter. Someone singing in a very loud voice. Obviously intoxicated, he says. Your canister. A wild, wild party. I’m paraphrasing.”
“That’s not a wild party,” he said. “That’s just the tape of a wild party. I was listening to it when they told me to come up here and sit in. There’s no wild party. Tell contingency it’s just a recording.”
“This is a one-way priority phone. I can’t tell him anything. You’d better go down there and straighten it out. Unfortunately we can’t delay Bhang’s clarification of invisible mass. But
that doesn’t mean you don’t have to come back. You have to come back immediately. Melcher-Speidell wants to see you.”
“Who’s that?” he said.
“Be serious.”
“I never heard the name in my life.”
“Security man’s waiting,” she said.
He took the elevator to his sector. Since he hadn’t heard the entire tape, he intended to run it over from the beginning. The tape had surprised him to the degree that he now tended to believe what Harry Braniff had crudely implied after making the delivery, that the woman with the eyepatch had absolutely no part in this. First, there was no sign of her voice on that portion of the tape he’d already played. Second, no one on the tape had referred to her in any way—not in dialogue, moan, bellow or song. It was a party tape, all right, and a wild party at that. The focus of the recording was Cyril Kyriakos, the one-armed transitional logician and somewhat cynical father-to-be who had talked a while with Billy and others on the day of the shadow-flow.
On the tape, scattered among shouts, odd remarks, volleys of laughter, sounds of stunning insults and objects flung at walls, weaved freely into all this scat and roar, was an extended song delivered by Cyril in a dissonant tenor voice, altering the metrical flow as he went, talking the lines, then chanting ecclesiastically, sometimes wailing at the high-pitched edge of panic. Billy saw the contingency man waiting in the corridor. He stood there flexing his knees and slowly swinging his arms in front of him, right fist popping into the palm of his left hand, this contact made in synchronization with the bending knees—a characteristic stance of security personnel everywhere. The corridor was quiet, however. No hint of a party or the tape of a party.
“I’m contingency for this sector,” the man said. “Kyzyl by name.”
“There’s no party in there. That’s just a tape recording.”
“I wondered why it stopped so suddenly.”
“Tape.”
“I wondered what kind of party would stop so suddenly,” Kyzyl said. “Orgy parties sometimes do that out of sheer exhaustion.”
“I’ll put the volume way down this time.”
“While I was here a personage came by and said he wants to receive you in his apartments at the top of the armillary sphere.”
“Apartments plural?”
“This is acoustically what I heard.”
“It must be Melcher-Speidell.”
“He gave no name but said I should be sure to escort you to his quarters.”
“Why do I need an escort all of a sudden?”
“An aborigine was seen in the building early this morning.”
“What was he seen doing?”
“Lurking,” Kyzyl said.
O the Swiss and the Swedes
Are at it all right
A bore of a war
And no end in sight
They’re killing each other
With unlikely skill
Who’d have believed it
Neutral and Nil
It’s a bore
What a bore
It’s a bore of a war
Logically sound
But soft at the core
When Vienna surrenders
To Cambridge symbolic
The null class is Z
The peace terms a frolic
O bore
What a bore
It’s a bore of a war
Deft but bereft
Of a Renaissance roar
VOICE 1: What’s black and white, left or right, growing little and has no middle?
O bring on a genuine algebra war
Del Ferro, Fontana, Cardano, Fior
None of these formalist postulate sets
Less of this Either and Or
VOICE 2: This is horrible or words to that effect. Why must they break the furniture?
VOICE 3: End of the world. It’s behavior suitable for the end of the world. This is an end-of-the-world party. First in a series. Alcoholic stupors befitting the end of the world. Oblivion as conscious art. That’s all it is, reaction to the rumor that most of the universe is missing.
Fourth dimension Yorkshireman and versifying Jew
Pedagogic modern logic came too late for you
One is one, two is one, three is two anew
Theory of invariants
Turbulence serene
Higher space contains a trace
Of double umbral sheen
VOICE 4: Just realized. Cyril and lyric. Cyril’s lyric. Just came to me. Lyric and Cyril.
VOICE 5: So what?
VOICE 4: Bit of insight, that’s all.
VOICE 5: Insight into what?
VOICE 6: What’s not composite. Can’t be divided by insight. No divisors whatsoever except itself and one. What into what is one. What times one equals what. What times two equals two what. The square root of what is irrational.
Nature intrinsic reveals itself
Consistent as one, two, three pence
Point by point an event unravels
Invariant in its sequence
But physical significance
And theories vague and sure
And modern relativity and empirical proclivity
All yield the abstract field
To mathematics pure
To mathematics pure
All yield the abstract field
To mathematics pure
Shadow of a figure
Projected on a plane
Two is one, the one that was
Different and the same
VOICE 3: But it’s not just what’s missing. Not just the conference. Not just the name of the conference or the people at the conference. It’s the rumor about the mohole.
VOICE 2: Sounds familiar, that name.
VOICE 3: It’s the whole idea of a mohole that’s got everyone so anxious and depressed.
VOICE 2: Where have I heard that word?
VOICE 6: Where plus when times the square root of minus-one equals point-event.
Matrix theory
Covariant junctions
Hyperelliptic theta functions
Umbral notations
Dimensional swarms
Wine-red canonical binary forms
Algebraic granite
Before the set of all sets
Not members of themselves
Before the class of all classes
Similar to a given class
O chant and pant a hymn ironic
To deductive demons fierce and chthonic
Axiom of reducibility
Rule of inverse probability
Fallacy of affirming the consequent
Fallacy of denying
Incremental confirmation
Who is dying
Play away the sense
Of the logical consequence
Of living
A is disconfirmed to some extent
B is bent
Beware, boy, the formal argument
Geometry shimmering on rose-stone columns
Before the set of all sets
Not members of themselves
Before the class of all classes
Similar to a given class
O recite a litany in extremis
To the peaceful end of logical premise
Our Lady of Inferred Entities
Prey on us
Wielder of Occam’s Razor
Spare our multiplicities
Expounder of the Unthinkable
Have mercy on our system of signs
Elucidator of Logical Form
Guide our superstitions
Annihilator of Tautologies
Bless our refrains
Language Inviolate
Forgive us our stammer
VOICE 1: Two answers really. A book that’s being read. The universe itself.
Toiled both on their compound discriminant scheme
Dividing the light on the half-shadowed shore
Induction, experiment, rapturous dream
&nb
sp; That night we slept no more
That night we slept no more
Shadow of a figure
Projected on a plane
Two is one, the one that was
Different and the same
Kyzyl escorted the boy to the top of the armillary sphere. To get there they had to take two elevators, enter a fire exit and climb a flight of stairs.
“If you ever have to go to jail,” Kyzyl said, “a designated autonomous area is one of the few good places left for that. UN trust territories I rate no better than fair. When we speak of torture, I recommend avoidance of canal zones. This is when we speak of physical torture. Stomping, flaying, bastinado, electric shock. The psychological variety, when we speak of that, you can do a lot worse than enclave republics or gulf protectorates. In protectorates, speaking from personal experience, they use only moderate hooding, they go easy on the monotonous noise, they deprive the body of sleep only in rare instances. Upon release from incarceration you find that you experience only the minimum symptoms. Startle-responses, yes, affirmative. Insomnia, to be expected, but not chronic. Sphincter-spasms, poco poco. Not much heightened anxiety. And very little dread. When we speak of the hooding experience, with or without monotonous noise, and when you’ve gone through this experience and you’re able to function with very little dread, this is when you’re entitled to regard yourself as fortune’s favorite.”
Kyzyl waited outside as the boy entered the large suite of rooms and sat in a laminated chair that smelled faintly of chemicals. The place looked like a mysterious bi-level motel. Colors were neutral and every surface was designed to be heat-resistant and scratchproof. Materials were clearly cheap and unembellished, stressing utility. At the same time there was something grand about the setting, a self-importance not associated with motel decor, and this is what accounted for the composite nature of the suite’s appearance. The furniture was immense and the ceiling extremely high. Arched passageways connected the rooms. Enormous mirrors were everywhere, surprising him with his own image, which, as sometimes happens when a person faces a particular mirror for the first time, was not quite what he was accustomed to seeing. He heard heavy steps behind him.
“Yours is a name synonymous with genius.”
