Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “What does it say?”

  “If the word ‘proof’ in this context applies only to arrays of sentences that make an assertion about an object language L, then in fact the proof itself, as opposed to the word ‘proof,’ shall be evident only in terms of the language M, or metalanguage, in which we draw necessary conclusions about the object language L, this method M also being subject to formal study through investigations carried out in M prime, or meta-metalanguage, the purpose being to preserve selectness by using only those statements that consistently refer to themselves,” Bolin said.

  The boy went back to cube one and got into bed. Isochronal rock-falls. Cave openings all along this route. More guano for my artifacting. The caves set into the slopes of the excavation contained a number of megaderma, or “false vampires.” These were cannibal bats that rampaged among the roosting species, all of which were covered with tiny bloodsucking insects which themselves provided asylum for even smaller parasitic blood-fleas. Whole lot of sucking going on. Which could be the reason, thought Wu, why medieval gnome-worshippers in the mountains of central Europe believed that the crystal mixture of hydro-magnesite and water possessed distinct medicinal properties and may have been right, they might, for wasn’t it used centuries later to stop the flow of blood? Moon milk. Dehydrating agent and coagulant.

  EDNA GETS ANNOYED

  “I don’t know what to call you,” he said. “What do you want to be known as?”

  “Mrs. Lown.”

  “Maybe I’ll get out of bed later and come talk to you. Right now I’m in bed.”

  “We have work to do.”

  “Being in bed is the work I’m doing right now.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I think I have a fever.”

  “I’ll leave this material on your desk,” she said. “Then I’ll come back for it.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “I expect you to read it in the meantime.”

  “How will you know if I do or not?”

  “Really this is childish.”

  “I could fake it,” he said.

  “You’ve no reason to behave this way.”

  “Okay, I’ll read it.”

  “We’re professionals, after all.”

  “I’ll read it right away.”

  “Please read it,” she said.

  “I will.”

  “Do you really have a temperature?”

  “They’re common for my age,” he said. “Growing takes place with a fever.”

  “That’s quite a stack of reading you’ve got before you. I’m afraid you have to put up with my handwriting. If your eyes get tired, close them. As long as your eyes are closed, you might as well sit in front of the radiation lamp Lester Bolin brought on down. It compensates for lack of sunlight. You can borrow my goggles if you promise to return them.”

  “What does Lester Bolin want to be known as?”

  “Mr. Bolin,” she said.

  Once she’d been a character in a novel. How distressingly strange it was. The woman in the book wasn’t like her at all, at all. Yet she’d recognized herself immediately. Such essential differences. The name he’d given her. Impossible to think of herself with a name like that. The one word of dialogue he’d written. Nothing at all like something she might say. But she’d seen herself at once. Jean Sweet Venable. The mind of the character was completely unlike her own. The clothing. The body. The mannerisms. A carefully wrought set of individual mannerisms. Carefully. Wrought. But they weren’t hers, you know? No resemblance whatever. Still, she’d seen herself at once despite the differing circumstances, setting, dialogue, mind, body, clothing and mannerisms. What was it he’d done to bring her face to face with this representation she tried so forcefully to deny? How did he manage it? Son of a bitch. What did he know? Nothing more than anyone could learn by sleeping with someone. My star-shaped mole. That was the only thing she’d recognized as being literally hers. The character sat in cafeterias. The character was disheveled. She sat at tables still wet, bearing the elliptical traces of a washcloth. People talked to themselves. They pushed food into their mouths with their hands, pecking at their own fingers, never less than watchful of the possibilities of theft and death, poised cunningly over free glasses of water. They all carried shopping bags. The character was surrounded in her cafeterias by men and women with shopping bags and none of them shoppers, none at all, not one. It said so in the book. Collectors. Epicures of refuse. People tired and hungry after days of poking through trash cans. Collectors (talking to themselves, force-feeding) of bottles, cartons, bags, paper cups and other terminal necessities. Those without empty dented milk cartons will learn how foolish they’ve been when the time comes. Emblematic birthmark on the buttock. This was the only thing, superficial or otherwise, he’d used as perceived. This and her inclination to predict. Jean loved to make predictions. On marriages, divorces, breakdowns, booms and crashes. It was not these similarities, however, but other things, merely superficial in the book and resembling nothing she’d ever said, done, thought about or looked like, these other things, it was these that impressed on Jean a sense of resemblance between her and the character based on her. How painfully strange it was, searching the pages for signs of her own persona. Surfaces, guise and conscious intentions. The kingship of printed fiction. Its arbitrary power. Its capacity to gain possession of a person or thing by ineradicable prior right. The character had fainting spells. The character sometimes sat all night in doorways. The character’s underwear stank. The character was never far from the presence of ugliness, the physically ugly, from the plane of mis-shapenness. She, Jean, carried air-mail stamps in her handbag. She had a shoetree for every shoe. What did he know? How much and how? Son of a bitch bastard.

  Softly pushing in and out.

  Defenseless love is suicide. Under that open sky nothing falling survives the rigors of identification. Where once men and women sought communion in sexual love, innocent of the need for programmatic valuation, they now deploy themselves across a level of existence composed of silences and daunted withdrawals. The theme of modern love is isolation. No longer is the lover prepared to experience sentimental pain, that traditional embellishment that gives desire a degree of symmetry. We did not fall into the trap of matter in order to be redeemed by love and thrust upward into the world of pure form. Clearly we did not, she thought. No longer can lovers regard sex as the mysterious chrism of their life together, as nature partaken, the rayed balsamic flowers worn by a woodland god. Sex is painted on the very walls, spread on white bread. Lovers, then, once their secret language has been despoiled by synthetic exchange, are forced to disengage their love from biology and keep it in seclusion. What replaces erotic language? Oral sex, she answered brightly. Tongues wagging in appointed crannies. Lap, pal, left to right. Unsuspecting mouth devoured by the genitals to which it presumes to communicate its moist favors. Defenses must be built to save the lovers from what unfolds around them and then again within their love itself to shelter each from the other’s patent treachery. What is defenseless love but an invitation to nipple-pricking pain? Knowing the rules, we all shout at the jumper to jump. On the other hand, she thought, love does not speak to theorists.

  “Evil pelvis,” Softly said. “Unscrupulously seductive mouth. Belly a bowl of fruit. Labyrinthine navel. Resilient milky thighs. Cute pudendum, hee hee. Lickable armpits. Predatory eyes. Surging breasts. Hair rare. Smile terribly foudroyant. Backside a-twinkle.”

  Maurice Wu unencumbered by equipment and heavy clothing crossed the path to cube one. He was still a fairly young man, slender, appearing cheerfully relentless atop a long informal stride.

  “Unfunny, ass, and totally inaccurate needless to say.”

  “Call me names and see how far you get.”

  “I want to see Edna next.”

  “Next we do this.”

  “We just did that.”

  “We do it again.”

  “I’ll settle for Lester.” />
  “How lucky for me to be so crudely unattractive. What tinctures of wetness it loosens from your innermost loam.”

  “God how horrible.”

  “Admit it, bitch; my titmanesque frame, my gross and pettish mouth, collapsing jaw, unnatural skin pigment, my eye color; admit the jingle you feel. I kiss my own thumb every day on waking. Think what little chance I’d have as an idealized Hollywood dwarf. Get used to my lewds and moods, sweet Jean, foul runt and lecher that I am, because I control the flow of material and nothing of note gets said to the likes of a keen journalist like yourself without my considered okay.”

  “You don’t have baggy flesh,” she said. “It’s baggy flesh I count on for my cheapest thrills.”

  “You think this is a lark, don’t you?”

  “You’re firm, Rob. I give you credit, your age.”

  “You think you walk in here and just talk to some people and organize some notes and there it is, the whole story, all ready for the bookbinder’s tools.”

  Bolin and Lown left their cubicles.

  “This area of the world is rich in caves,” Wu said. “Up on the slopes there are openings, if you look closely enough. Some of the caves they lead to are first-rate. Tons of guano. Just a question of burrowing under.”

  “You go in it and look?”

  “Countless decades of accumulated bat shit.”

  “What do you find underneath?”

  “In this particular excavation, nothing that goes back very far. Pottery and bones mostly. I’ve found stuff in other places that goes back so far your flesh would crawl.”

  “Fifteen centuries.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Wu said.

  Bolin put the pot on, nodding to Softly as he passed. In the boy’s cubicle Maurice Wu stood leaning with his elbow up high against the partition, hand on head.

  “Understand you’re running a fever, Willy.”

  “Hello, Rob,” Wu said.

  “Hello, Maury. Hi, Willy. Understand you’re running a fever.”

  “It’s not much.”

  “Starve it,” Softly said. “Okay.”

  “What do you think of Maurice?”

  “I barely met him just now.”

  “What I value most about Maurice is this flair of his for syncretistic thinking. Sweet and sour pork. Diametrically opposed entities partaking of each other’s flesh. It permeates all his thinking. The reconciliation of opposites. Childish and dumb but I love it. Did you read the notes Edna gave you?”

  “It’s like Weierstrass wanting to take things like continuity and limit and base them on the integers.”

  “I told you never mind that stuff, mister. Forget about historical figures. Pretend you never heard of those people, places and things. Besides it’s not ‘wire-strass.’ Did you read the notes Edna gave you? Edna gave you notes to read.”

  I GET INTERVIEWED AGAIN

  Bolin was intent on composing the whole of Logicon on his old portable typewriter. Why not? If he and Edna and the youngster were sufficiently stringent in their methods, a handful of symbols would suffice. That plus the alphabet. More than enough to work with, ideographically. This sort of notation would appear at times to resemble cartoon obscenities. Nevertheless the meanings and relationships concealed by ordinary language would stand out sharply. In normal times Lester lived with his wife in a converted barn. The horse stalls they’d turned into dinettes. The haymows were now sleeping lofts. They’d found a hand-cranked washing machine and made an end table out of it. Elevator descending. A plant stand was formerly a butter churn. They bought Tiffany glass for their spirit lamps. A Civil War whiskey barrel became a pre-Revolutionary soup tureen. Conclusions must follow necessarily. We must compel acceptance of conclusions.

  “Did you know you’d get the prize?” Jean said.

  “I had a hunch.”

  “Where were you when you heard the news?”

  “At Rob’s house.”

  “Give me more.”

  “I was sitting in a chair. He came in and told me. Then we shook hands.”

  “That’s not too terribly interesting,” Jean said. “Give me something better.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  “I want better than that. You have to give me better.”

  “How come you keep riding back and forth? Why don’t you just stay down here?”

  “I’m not allowed,” she said. “The logic-mongers might object. Come on, slyboots, give me some more.”

  “Rob said I wouldn’t have to make a speech. Then he did this trick he does with turning his jacket inside out without taking it off. That’s all that happened.”

  “I understand whenever Rob lectures at the Center, the place swarms with mathematics groupies.”

  “Who do you want to know about, me or him?”

  “You’re not giving me anything to pounce on. You were a better subject last time.”

  “Talk about pouncing, better not bring your husband around if you have one. Rob doesn’t care what he says in front of husbands.”

  “Our marriage failed for lack of fun,” she said. “Fun is the only way to survive. A marriage is doomed without it. Think of all the time you have to spend alone, the pair of you. You have to renew, renew, renew. It’s time that wrecks marriages, obviously. For a long while we managed well. This is because we made sure we had fun. We played tricks on each other. We stuck out our tongues. We called each other on the phone and used funny voices. These weren’t necessarily impulsive acts. Often there was a great deal of premeditation involved. We thought it was essential to do these things and so we worked at it, we worked at it very hard, so very hard. And it was successful for the longest time.”

  “But then you ran into trouble.”

  “We used to scare each other a lot,” Jean said. “Of all the kinds of fun, this was probably the one that worked best. Jumping out of doorways at each other. Pretending to be dead. Screaming into the telephone. I loved pretending to be dead. I was terrifically good at it. He was never completely sure it was just fun. There was always an element of doubt in his mind. When he’d lean over me for a really close look, I’d jump up screaming. That would keep our marriage going for another week.”

  “I’m surprised it wasn’t longer.”

  “I know it sounds foolish. Between us, we totaled I don’t know how many years of very expensive higher education. Still, we felt we had to do these things to keep from going stale, you know? One morning he got up and left as usual. He always left before I did. I can barely remember his face but I know he left early, he liked to leave early, he liked to be the first one in the building to hit the streets. That was the day I realized we’d had no fun in a long time and I knew at once this was the reason we hadn’t been getting along. I made it a point to get home first that evening. Emptied a large bottle of aspirin. Hid the tablets. Put the bottle next to the bed. Got into the bed—torso nudo for documentary shock effect. I sprawled and waited, trying to look puffy. But he never came home. That was the day he’d decided to leave for good.”

  “Sure it wasn’t sex that caused the trouble? Maybe you just never brought it out in the open.”

  “Sex was fine,” she said. “It wasn’t sex at all. Sex was the least and best of our worries.”

  “How many times a night?”

  In the kitchen unit they worked and talked. Cigarette ash was scattered over Lown’s blouse. She slipped her feet out of the desert boots and discussed Lester Bolin’s latest work on notation, which she considered far too cumbersome, overburdened with content. It was pleasant to sit with Rob and Lester, exchanging ideas and objections, seeking to extend the technical possibilities of their method by making it ever more reductive.

  “It’s like doubling to get half,” she said. “A negative number doubled yields half the original value. A series of doubled reflections gets continually smaller by half. I don’t think we’ll be rewarded with a sense of genuine precision until we get as close as possible to a kind of beneficially correcti
ve infinite regress. Lester, I think you’d profit immensely by clearing your work through our young man.”

  “I showed him some stuff very recently. He just walked out. It seemed to depress him. I’m anxious to work with him but he just isn’t interested. I wonder if we really need him. Do we really need him?”

  “I’m reminded of a family that lives across the road from me in Pennyfellow,” Softly said. “Years ago they adopted a very small child an Asian girl, orphaned by the bombing. In a matter of days she became the focus of that home as none of the natural children in the family even did. This is because she possessed something unique. Moral authority Time and again I heard one member of the family chide another for piggishness, insolence, bad grammar, always saying in effect: ‘What will Phan think of us when she’s old enough to understand?’ Remark able, the sheer authority of that small round object. Because she was tiny, virtually mute, because she was Asian, an orphan, a victim of war Phan was the ultimate moral force in that household, a living contradiction of nearly everything the family had once held to be eternal; that is, justice, truth, honor, so forth. Now I don’t say my pal Willy is a moral force exactly. But I do believe his presence here has extramathematical significance. True, as Edna says, mathematical thinking is based on the whole numbers, Willy’s specialty, and it’s also true that his powers extend to related areas and that once he gets deeply involved in what we’re doing here he’ll probably put us all to shame, his mind working like a beam of light searching out a target. But Lester, when Lester asks whether we really need the boy, that’s a valid point. After all, we’re dealing with a form of mathematics that substitutes classes for numbers. This is what makes him reluctant to enter. He knows he may have trouble finding his way around. Nevertheless I maintain we absolutely need him. He’s our living contradiction. His intransigence speaks against us. We need him to balance things. He’s the listener, the person we need to judge what we do. This is the power of the young. They know what’s right, if not what’s left.”