by Don DeLillo
“What else?”
“It could be an act,” she said.
He picked some lint from the bedsheet and blew it off his fingertip to another part of the same sheet.
“Why would he want to put on an act?”
“Maybe he wants pity. Maybe he thinks it helps him maintain command. People sometimes embellish their afflictions in order to create a specific effect. Maybe he thought child size alone would make him a comic figure. He felt compelled to seek a tragic tone, to gain a more complex kind of attention.”
“Anyway this isn’t the only story I’ve heard about Rob’s disease. Lester Bolin said it had something to do with his mother’s womb being unbalanced, the chemicals not mixing right.”
“I don’t know anything about his wombhood,” Jean said.
“And then Maurice Wu told me that Rob was born in China where he got this so-called gnome disease because of the water having no minerals. So I’ve been through this before.”
“All I’ve told you I heard from Rob himself. Except for the dislocated hips being an act, of course.”
“Which is just a guess.”
“They don’t seem dislocated when we’re in bed,” she said.
MORE ON BATS
Everyone was impressed by the confident gleam on Mainwaring’s face. Everywhere he went in the antrum he carried an attaché case full of documents that tended to support what he consistently referred to as “the latest findings.”
“It was Gauss who worked out a proof of the binomial theorem in which n is a negative integer,” he said. “I don’t mean to impinge on the other fellow’s area of competence but it seems to me that n may be a vital element in the present scheme of things.”
“How so?” Bolin said.
“As you well know, the physical universe tends to provide an arena for the utilization of totally abstract mathematical ideas long after these ideas are developed. Happens time and again. What first appears to be worth preserving solely for its beauty is often found to have direct application to the world of matter, energy and the life processes. So: if Moholean relativity is valid, we may find that the concept of an indefinite number of dimensions is more than a purely abstract piece of Gauss-inspired mathematics. As of this moment, the value-dark dimension continues to be pure theory. What we’re doing at Cosmic Techniques, my home base, involves trying to identify an actual mohole. According to Mohole himself, there are moholes numbering n.”
“I’d like to hear more about it.”
“If you’re sure I’m not impinging,” Mainwaring said.
“Please keep going.”
“My father was a mathematician, you see, so there’s a distant affinity.”
“My father designed war toys,” Bolin said.
“We are presently engaged in sylphing. According to Mohole’s theory, wherever there are exo-ionic sylphing compounds, there are moholes. This is why we say a mohole is space-time sylphed. And what we’re trying to do is identify areas in space where mohole-trapped particles, X-ray emissions and so on are absorbed by sylphing compounds. On a contour map such an area would take the form of an absorption hole.”
Wu checked his backpack for trowel, pocket magnifier, dental pick, brush with soft fine bristles, nylon cord, cable ladder, whistle, dehydrated food, lengths of manila rope, candles, compass, the first-aid kit, the container that held the extra carbide, the pouch that held spare parts for the carbide lamp. He left the pack sitting on his sleeping bag and went across the path to visit Billy.
“See you in a while.”
“Don’t tell me you’re not scared going up there.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Wading through that stuff.”
“The guano.”
“You’re scared, I think.”
“The right kind of scared.”
“Bat-cave-osis.”
“Want to come with me?” Wu said.
“I’m not budging.”
“See you in a while.”
“Ever see a bat get born?”
“No,” Wu said, “but they do it pretty much the way we do. And I guess if you attach nonbat emotions to the event, it’s just as happy as human birth and just as sad,” thinking that darkness possesses a measure of vestigial light, the yin-influenced veiling of the sun, a unity in this occultation. He’d scrutinized astronomical inscriptions on ancient Chinese oracle bones. He’d written a brief study of the relationship between mathematics and fortune-telling (“techniques of destiny”) in early China. He’d toured the temple caves of the Northern Wei dynasty. He’d investigated China’s history and tried to analyze the intrinsic rhythms of its language and character. He’d learned the language itself. He’d spent long periods of time in the land itself. From all of this he hoped to gain nothing more than a feudal sense of security. He did not pursue self-identification, a centralized response to one’s own distinctness, as much as community, and there it is again, common possession, this including a measure of that, the number one (even if negative and printed in black, as was done by the Sung algebraists) seeking a perfect balance, a positive complementary sun-cut force with which to interlock. What he wanted from that microscopic China in his mind was some affirmation of the fact that he was not alone.
“Why sad?” Billy said.
“The birth of a baby equals the death of a fetus. This experience recreates itself throughout our lives. Wish me luck.”
Arithmetize, Softly thought, semihysterically.
Lown and Bolin had a whispered conversation in the former’s cubicle. Her desert boots were unlaced and the cigarette she was trying to smoke kept going out. Lester was dressed in a combination of pajamas and golf togs.
“Could it be the other way around?”
“Everything could be the other way around.”
“And probably is,” she said.
“That’s the trouble.”
“So go ahead.”
“At any rate,” Bolin said, “he explained that Mohole’s model of the universe is a stellated twilligon with an n-bottomed hole.”
“I see.”
“This is also called a terminal mohole.”
“Sounds ridiculous to me.”
“I didn’t want to say anything to him.”
“Childlike.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “That precise idea occurred to me.”
“Which isn’t to say it’s not valid.”
“Right-o.”
“I suppose metamathematics would sound just as childlike to Mainwaring,” she said. “And we both know nothing is more valid.”
“Better keep your voice down, Edna.”
“So go on.”
“At any rate,” Bolin said, “the whole thing apparently springs from forces that were created in the first split second after the big bang.”
“The big bang,” she said.
“Because Ratner’s star lies within a suspected mohole, which is a fractional part, as I understand it, of the value-dark dimension, meaning no spatial area and no time, it was thought the signal picked up by the synthesis telescope was originating from Ratner’s star. But it wasn’t.”
“This part I already know.”
“It was just that the mohole had trapped the signal and sent it our way. Ratner’s star is a binary dwarf. Couldn’t possibly sustain a planet of any size.”
“A binary dwarf,” she said.
“Mainwaring and his people are trying to identify an actual mohole at the same time that they attempt to trace the signal to its real source.”
“Yes.”
“Unpredictable cosmic events are implicit in Moholean relativity.”
“Yes,” she said.
“If there are moholes, the physical laws in a mohole probably change, depending on the observer, where he is, whether he is moving or at rest, his rate of speed if he is moving.”
“I see.”
“A mohole has little or nothing in common with a black hole. A mohole is part of the innate texture of sp
ace. It is not a singularity, a collapsed object, a gravity pit. It is simply what is out there, numbering n.”
“A black hole,” she said.
“In the last analysis, moholes are impossible to talk about. What we’re really doing is imposing our own conceptual limitations on a subject that defies inclusion within the borders of our present knowledge. We’re talking around it. We’re making sounds to comfort ourselves. We’re trying to peel skin off a rock. But this, according to Mainwaring, quoting Mohole, is simply what we do to keep from going mad.”
LESTER TRIES AGAIN
Softly at his desk was in a state of intense excitement. Funny things happening to the tissue at the back of his brain. He kept inserting pencils in the battery-operated sharpener, thinking that the interval aboard the submarine had at least renewed his appreciation of the dedicated tone that obtained in the antrum. It was all beginning to fit together. Wu would have time while artifacting in the dark to develop further his “contralogical” theory of human evolution. Mainwaring appeared to be efficiency, calm and self-assurance incorporated; was clearly making correct probes; might even be inclined to try a bit of synthetic intensifier in the spirit of hale fellows well met. Lown and Bolin were proceeding apace, more or less, lacking only the raw gut power of Terwilliger’s methodology, a circumstance which might by this time be completely rectified, hope I hope I hope. What the boy had to overcome was the pain, the dread, the risk involved in being logical. Historical development of the word “boy” might be instructive fun to trace with him some time. Make him aware of the soft treatment he gets around here. Ox, oxhide, he thought. Neck collar, knave, servant. There was Jean. Jean’s book fit in. Jean’s book would detail the ingredients of their triumph while making no reference to what was really going on. So Jean’s book definitely fit in, not to mention Jean herself, chilled silver in the candlelight, pleasant to smell, slow to anger, an easeful creature experience, sidereal distinction of her left buttock, make of that what I will, snug in the gunnels of her wraparound legs. Women are at their best when oppressed undressed. Of course this kind of elegant ideational structure depends in the end on technically precise mathematical language.
We used to crush pieces of chalk with the butt end of wooden guns that had a nail and a rubber band and you could shoot off small pieces of linoleum at each other. We used to fill up socks with the powdered chalk and smash each other on the back. We used to say: “Halloween! Halloween!”
This is where zorgs fit in, the technicality, the precision, the mathematics, the language. Strict rules, Billy thought, feeling tired and limp, watching Lester Bolin come into the cubicle and pull the chair over to the cot and extend a sheet of paper in the general direction of his mouth. He took it and looked at it as Lester waited for him to react. He did not react, however, and after a while Lester got up and went away. What was strange was that Billy, looking at the page, fully realized the beauty of Logicon or at least its potential beauty as seen in the nearly surreal cleanness of its ideography: nothing unnecessary, nothing concealed, a sense of what he instinctively regarded as “extreme Chinese formalism,” the mechanical drawing that is the machine.
He got out of bed, took the blanket off the cot and spread it over the TV table. Then he crawled under the table, wedging himself between its plastic legs before proceeding to even out the edges of the blanket so that it completely shrouded the table and the person under the table. He felt foolish but determined. The foolishness of the gesture only strengthened his resolve. He thought of a characteristic of his. Whenever people expected him to like something, he either didn’t like it or concealed his liking of it. He supposed he didn’t want his feelings to be anticipated by others. But in this case it wasn’t his feelings that were the issue, or liking something or disliking it. He didn’t really know what the issue was and he was sure no one could tell him. All he knew was that in a very short while he no longer felt foolish.
BREATHE! GLEAM! VERBALIZE! DIE!
Wu’s backpack was stenciled with the letters MXW. He filled a canteen with water from a larger canteen. He reknotted his boots. He was just starting to roll up his sleeping bag when Softly entered his quarters, followed by Mainwaring, Bolin and Lown, Lester’s eyes shifting (Mainwaring noticed) as he appraised Wu’s cubicle. For one thing there were no chairs. For another there was no cot. There was no desk either and no sign of luggage. Wu dragged the backpack into a corner and sat down on top of it.
“Before you get going,” Softly said, “I’d like you to fill these people in.”
“Sure,” Wu said. “On what?”
“Events.”
“You mean events in the field?”
“The field and after the field,” Softly said. “These people know nothing about it. They need to be filled in.”
“It’s like this,” Wu said. “We were in Sangkan Ho under the auspices of the Chinese-American Science Sodality. We seemed to be witnessing an unusual thing taking place. After a certain point, the deeper we went the greater the complexity of the tool types, of the culture in general. This is after a certain point. Up to that point, everything was normal. After that point, we found a progressive increase in complexity.”
“Interesting,” Mainwaring said.
“Everything we found was carefully analyzed. The methods of optical confirmation are very advanced. And we don’t anticipate the slightest controversy as to our dating techniques and so on. The controversy we may get will be the culturally based sort of thing that doesn’t question the findings but only the implications of the findings. This is simply a case of people not being able to accept revolutionary truths.”
“To be expected,” Lown said.
“We’re in no hurry to publish,” Wu said. “There is plenty of work to be done. When Rob no longer needs my services, I’m heading back to the field. It wasn’t until I left the field and came here that I first realized the extent of what I’d seen in the field.”
“Man more advanced the deeper we dig,” Softly said.
“Charming,” Bolin said.
Someone using a crayon had written out the number eighteen on the undersurface of the TV table. To read the word he’d had to roll his eyeballs way up. The blanket smelled of stale traffic, the corroborating truth a laboratory of research onanists might produce in their methodical throbbing and desperation for pictures. His body filled the space between the blanket walls. He had never before been so aware of himself as a biological individual. He smelled, he sweated, he ached. Between himself and his idea of himself there was an area of total silence. What would happen if this space could be filled with some aspect of that collective set of traits that enabled him to qualify as a persisting entity? He put his hands under his shirt and rubbed his chest and stomach. He was growing, he was aging. The greater sag of his left testicle, natural as it was, seemed an intimation of some massive dysfunction soon to manifest itself. Death he felt to be anything but senseless. In ways he could not put into words, it appeared to be a perfectly reasonable occurrence. A logical conclusion, in short. But in thinking about it, in preparing (as it were) to evade it, he seemed to lead himself into a series of inexpressible mental states. These were states that weren’t so much bleak as negative, lacking some fundamental element. He felt there was something between or beyond, something he couldn’t account for, between himself and the idea of himself, beyond the negative mental invention; and what he knew about this thing was that it had the effect of imposing a silence. That was as far as his thinking went on the subject. There was nowhere else for it to go, he believed. In a while he began to feel better about the site he’d chosen for his life and thought.
Googolplex and glossolalia.
Jean was alone in her room on her bed working a needle and thread. Earlier she had written a number of pages and now she was trying to busy herself into a different line of thinking. She mended this and that. She bit apart thread. She mumbled instructions to herself, not very successfully. The results, that is, were not successful, dangling b
uttons, loosely stitched seams; the mumbling itself was quite flawless. Oh, well, worship of the body always ends in fascism. Of the body and the body’s armor. What had surprised her in the relatively brief time she’d spent at the typewriter was the very direct correlation between writing and memory. Writing, in this case, being of the nonjournalistic type. Memory being not just the faculty of recollection but the power to summon the density of past experience. The author of The Gobbledygook Cook Book (as she sometimes thought of herself) had never before realized the degree of concentration she might succeed in reaching simply by staring into the keys of a typewriter and now and then tapping on one or more. Writing is memory, she thought, and memory is the fictional self, the powdery calcium ash waiting to be stirred by a pointed stick. She didn’t believe the book she was determined to write would include a great many of her own past experiences, at least not as they occurred in the special trembling weather in which she’d stood. Still, memory might yield the nuance and bone earth necessary to make fictional people. Having herself been a character in someone else’s novel, she tried to anticipate the nature of the successive reflections she might eventually have to confront. She sat on the bed, playfully mingling the words “fear itself fear itself fear itself” into the instructions she mumbled concerning needles and threads and a different line of thinking.
He heard someone step into his cubicle, Billy did. Pretty heavy meant probably Bolin. Wu took long sort of bounces. Rob hobbled. Edna Lown with desert boots dragged her feet. Mainwaring, he didn’t know how Mainwaring walked but he bet on Lester, judging not only by the weight expressed in those footsteps but the accompanying sound, paper rattling in someone’s hand and almost definitely paper being sailed onto his cot, a single sheet, Softly thought, beatific Chinese, lovely how my Lester-pet does his stuff on an old Royal portable, quaint as a puking babe on some far-off plain, if only now the object of our concerted love will blink to indicate his willingness to play.
