Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  I LOSE MY BREATH

  When everything was quiet the boy slipped out from under the TV table and without even looking at the bed or the piece of paper on the bed went down the narrow trail of clay and gravel to the barrier nearest his own quarters, where he found among the boulders, crates and oil drums a very large section of heavy canvas which he struggled to dislodge from a numb mound of rubble, finally taking it in tow and heading back to cube one, time to rest, to catch his breath before proceeding to stand on the chair and place the edges of the tarpaulin if that’s what it was over the edges of the partitions of his cubicle, getting off the chair to move it several times to new locations until the placement was complete, time to rest and resettle, so that what he had now was a canvas roof with enough material left over to block all but a few inches at the bottom of the entranceway, his immobile home, not that he was foregoing the blanket-shrouded table, oh no, here we go, down and in, the enclosed area’s concealed zone’s secluded figure.

  We used to ring people’s bells and run, crossing the street in zigzags, building to building, wedging broken toothpicks into the cracks around the doorbells of people we didn’t like or who we thought would probably want to kill us if they could. In the Chinese laundry the old man kept an ax under the counter and what we used to do was pick one person to go stand in the doorway and make meat-cleaving motions with his or her hand until the old man reached under the counter and then you could run but not before you screamed into the store: “Halloween! Halloween!”

  He took excessive pleasure in the progress of his fever, luxuriating in the unprecedented smell of his sweat, a chemical stench that led him to credit his body with greater toxic power than he’d believed it to possess. His clothing was drenched, emitting a stink of its own, as did the blanket that hemmed him in and the canvas beyond that. He alternated between chills and periods of dawning warmth, his body at the mercy of these fluctuations, his mind “asleep” in elements of form, in angularity and curvature. Salutary hallucinations. Miner’s hat with headlamp. Phlegm deposits in his lungs or someplace. Perseverations. Spitting in the dust. Thinking of bats. Repeating a phrase. There were few things more pleasantly disgusting, he believed, than watching his own spit hit the dust, half quivering with fragments of earth, a tiny spoonful of drool. He curled up tighter, head between his knees, hands in the dirt, happy in his sub-reckonings, his dumbbody whiff, his spittle glisten, the persistent images of pure form, the sense that he was accompanying himself out of some systematic pattern.

  Wu put on his miner’s hat with headlamp. Across the path Mainwaring sat back in a swivel chair, his legs crossed on top of a small filing cabinet. His umbrella and suitcase were in a corner. His attaché case was on its side in the middle of his cot. This will not take long, he thought. This will be handled with dispatch. As such projects go, this one gives promise of being very elegant. It would also seem to lend itself to expeditious performance on all fronts. Promptness, efficient speed, general dispatch. It must be the antrum that gives me this feeling. Compulsion to perform according to standards. Convergence of a number of ideas at a single point. That is undoubtedly what Rob is aiming at. To approach the same point from different directions. To tend toward a definitive conclusion, result or balance. This woman standing here telling me she has been granted permission by “our friend Rob” if it is all right with me, this standing woman, to conduct an interview concerning my particular area of competence. There goes Mr. Wu.

  “Sit,” he said.

  “You were probably warned about a writer on the prowl.”

  “I don’t imagine I have to apologize for the accommodations.”

  “What is your role in the Logicon project?”

  “I’m associated with a firm called Cosmic Techniques. We’re in the process of developing an echolocation quantifier, patent pending, and we believe and hope and trust that this device will help us locate that part of the universe where the artificial signals originated. Concurrent with this, we are trying to identify a mohole, something that’s never been attempted before.”

  “Speaking more slowly, would you describe this quantifier in detail?” Jean said.

  “Restricted information.”

  “How do you plan to identify this mohole?”

  “Without getting too technical, I would say that the latest findings tend to support the theory that wherever there are moholes, we can expect to turn up a trace of exo-ionic sylphing compounds, or vice versa. With a very stylized computer-generated map of the galaxy and using observations made by the synthesis telescope here and fed to our facilities in Canada—that is, to Cosmic Techniques—we are ready and willing and able to sylph; that is, to locate absorption holes, or places in space where dust, gases, cosmic debris and electromagnetic information are being absorbed by sylphing compounds, as I explained to Mr. Bolin, pleasant man and very capable, I’m sure.”

  “If I had to put what a mohole is into words, what would I say?”

  “You’d have a problem,” Mainwaring said.

  This sitting woman intent on duplicating what I say, always a partial shock to find someone who thinks enough of fact to get it absolutely right, this woman sitting here at half my age. I have been photographed for the newspapers half a dozen times. I have been interviewed for this and that publication on more than a score of occasions. I have, let’s see now, been called on the telephone and asked for my opinion on the latest findings perhaps a dozen times. I belong to this this this this this organization. I have won that that that and that award. I own nineteen dress shirts.

  t. The codes to language contained in play-talk are the final secrets of childhood.

  u. Is it silly to say that there is only one limit to language and that it is crossed, in the wrong direction, when the child is taught how to use words?

  v. Does this mean that to break down language into its basic elements is to invent babbling rather than elementary propositions?

  w. Is play-talk a form of discourse about language? That the answer is in the affirmative seems undeniable.

  x. I’m tempted to say: babbling is metalanguage.

  Edna Lown was beginning to think of this set of notes as a subprofession, her cryptic existence in an alternate system of relationships. Puzzling, isn’t it, how I’m beginning to look forward to this scribbling, making time for it, setting aside more immediate things, sneaking it into what’s supposed to be an inflexibly tight schedule. It was quiet in the antrum. Lester Bolin was between snore cycles and there was no sound at all except the clear faint measures of water flowing in the distance. There was no reason for Edna to regard her note-taking as a secret occupation and yet she did, thinking of it often while engaged in other tasks or in conversations with Lester and Rob. It’s like something I keep behind a closed door, she thought. A bed, she thought. To meet with someone behind a closed door, a man or woman (or woman?) who is not known to any of those who know me. To engage in these meetings between scheduled events. To never change the sheets on the bed behind the door. To barely know the person not known to those who know me. To be in this sense a witness to my own adventure. Wandering, she thought. I am wandering badly. A thing she rarely did in the extreme setting of the excavation. Some fairly large rocks came bouncing down the slope and crashed (judging by the sound) into a sturdy cluster of oil drums. Yes I love it here.

  y. To maintain that things belong backwards is a facile argument intended to emphasize the difficulties involved in making observations and conducting experiments.

  z. Is this always true?

  a. We think we know that a child’s intuition of geometry neatly reverses the series of historical developments in this field. Beginning with invariant spatial relationships, the child proceeds to closed and open structures; to the properties of figures extended through space; to the elements of point, line and plane.

  b. To a geometer this is regressive development, or history inside out.

  c. The child knows these things before it knows words.

  d
. It may be important to seek connections.

  e. It may be important to ask whether the child’s day-to-day geometry, this grasp of certain principles of space and sequence, automatically confers on childlike babbling an element of mystical sophistication.

  f. On the other hand we may be back to facile argument.

  g. What is unexamined and superficial is often “cured” by obsession. This too, of course, suggests the inside-outness of things.

  h. Fragmentation.

  i. Forced dispersion of a fixed idea.

  j. Does the scattering of the fragments of a scientific obsession reflect the physical and mental state of the person seeking to be cured of facile argument?

  k. Mathematics.

  1. Half-blind Euler pacing at his slate. Lagrange in his despondency pondering the blank spaces in his art.

  Softly had never set eyes on his own semen. He regarded this fluid not primarily as a transporting medium but as some defensive secretion of the body, a reaction (perhaps) to danger or excessive stress. Danger from what source? The excessive stress of intercourse? He didn’t ask these questions in so many words or examine the reasons why this secretion might be defensive. He hated the feel of semen on his thighs or on the sheet beneath him, bleak lick of damp, that adhesive resistance to the possibilities of flow, the chill synthetic stickiness of it. Thinning there in cubic centimeters. Approaching the “appearance” of transparency. Sugar fuel in that plasma to rouse my sperm from its quiescent state. To maintain its fertility. To boost its movement into the female apparatus. But do I know for certain there is sperm in my ejaculate? Noughts and crosses. Shepherd’s score. Hopscotch. Cybernetics. Precisely why he avoided the sight of his own semen was another question he didn’t ask in so many words. It was a sight to be avoided, that was all. What could you say about your own semen and why you hated the feel of it and avoided the sight of it? It was not a subject to be nudged toward some finished insight. So Softly thought, the same Softly (all too aware of the irony of it all) who believed in the wholesomely promotional idea that sex is not what you do but what you are. This made the fluid in question an ambiguous topic at best.

  He left Jean (muttering) on her stomach and took the elevator down to the bottom of the antrum, Jean (on her stomach) not unloved, not unmarked by the incidental menace of this loving, by Softly’s roistering maul, good luck to her arms and legs, physically a shade slack, he thought, lacking all in all her customary purpose and zeal, that expressive force through which her body explored some silent ideal of spacelessness, moving now against the sheets to rewarm herself and wearily to clean his nervous semen from that itching patch of lower belly. He went straight from the elevator to the crude shower stall near the barrier. Here he undressed, eyes averted from the center of his body, and stepped with terrible suddenness into what proved to be no more than a trickle of freezing water, enough at any rate to freshen his armpits, crotch and feet. He hurried into his clothes, body taut against the cold, and walked on down to cube one.

  There was a dusty tarpaulin draped over the entire cubicle. It covered most of the entranceway as well. Softly leaned way over, lifted the canvas and stepped inside. Moldy gloom. There was a blanket over the plastic table that was supposed to serve as a desk. He assumed the boy was under there. It didn’t seem absurd that the boy would be under there. It was sort of Willy’s way these days. On the bed was a piece of mail. There was also the chair to be noted. The footlocker. Finally the suitcase. The suitcase was opened, its contents giving every indication of having gone untouched since the time they were first carried down here.

  Softly sat in the chair and took one of the small cigars out of the tin he carried in his jacket pocket. He lit it up, squirming further back into the seat. He recalled that Lester Bolin had once told him how boring it was to teach game theory to sophomores. That was a long time ago. That was Lester on the brink. Now he was inescapably within the confines. Prenex normal forms. Recursive undecidability. The pure monadic predicate calculus. A firm foundation for analysis is all that got it going. EXERCISE: Prove that every consistent decidable first-order theory has a consistent decidable complete extension.

  Uga boo

  Uga boo boo uga

  “That’s my cigar smoke you smell. I don’t want you to think the place is on fire.”

  “I’m very calm.”

  “Calm,” Softly said. “Wonder what our young man means by that.”

  “It’s easy to concentrate in here.”

  “He must be trying to lift the general morale in the place, declaring his readiness to concentrate. On what, of course, remains to be seen. This must be a phase of the polar hysteria syndrome that the experts are not ready to confirm just yet. Utter calmness. Readiness to concentrate.”

  “What’s polar hysteria?”

  “He’s able to squeak out occasional questions, it would appear. Very encouraging indeed. Sunlessness. That’s your problem. Aggravated sunlessness.”

  “Keep believing it.”

  “Any plans for making an appearance sometime in the near or distant future?”

  “I’ll play it by ear.”

  “He gives every sign of being alive, at any rate, and in tentative control of his faculties.”

  “That brings up an interesting point.”

  “We’re all anxious to hear what sort of points are deemed interesting by people who spend their time crouching in shrouded environments.”

  “You got this whole thing started down here by talking about the tensions going on in the outside world.”

  “True enough.”

  “Maybe I’d like to know what’s happening lately.”

  “Things, if anything, are worse,” Softly said. “We’re getting reports about aggression and counter aggression. The meaning of the term ‘counteraggression’ defeats me for the moment but I suppose in this kind of situation there’s bound to be a certain amount of muddled thinking.”

  “I’d like the talking to end now.”

  “Wants to be alone, does he, with his newly discovered sense of calmness? Desires the kind of quiet even blankets and waterproof coverings can’t guarantee? Plans to concentrate, does he? Chooses to listen to his circulating blood as it bears tender nutrients through his body? Decides he needs an interval of quiet breathing, right? Intends to invent the nonce word that renders death irrelevant.”

  “Somebody’s getting carried away.”

  “It’s very uncomfortable in here,” Softly said. “Do you know that or not? If not, why not? This canvas I find depressing. You’ve never behaved this way before. I think I’ll keep talking just to annoy you.”

  Immense bedraggled dishevelment.

  Because it was possible to get infected without even being bitten. It had been known to happen. There were cases on record. Because of the saliva in the air. Or because of the parasitic insects floating around. Or because of the guano. Or because of the urinous mist surrounding the colony itself. So this possibility alone was reason to think of a bat cave not as a place inhabited by bats, inviting to bats or even swarming with bats but rather as a place that was bat-infested.

  Jean Venable wearing a raincoat walked into Softly’s cubicle and finding it unoccupied sat down and waited for Rob to return, which eventually he did, Billy’s head coming out from under the blanket, Softly moving right past Jean and seating himself formally at the elaborate desk, where he pretended to engage in a series of engrossing tasks, the boy’s head withdrawing again, damp wool, the humidity of stilled midnights.

  I AM NOT JUST THIS

  There is a life inside this life. A filling of gaps. There is something between the spaces. I am different from this. I am not just this but more. There is something else to me that I don’t know how to reach. Just outside my reach there is something else that belongs to the rest of me. I don’t know what to call it or how to reach it. But it’s there. I am more than you know. But the space is too strange to cross. I can’t get there but I know it is there to get to. On the other side is
where it’s free. If only I could remember what the light was like in that space before I had eyes to see it with. When I had mush for eyes. When I was dripping tissue. There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for.

  I TAKE A DRINK

  “If you’re busy, Rob, I’ll go, although it’s silly, isn’t it, this artifice.”

  “You have something for me to read, do you?”

  “I want to interview Edna,” Jean said.

  “I thought you might have some notes for me to go over, or even some prose, actual prose, a first draft, you know, not so finely styled but full of raw technical data or something on that order. Didn’t you tell me you were devising a new system of note-taking or note-arranging or whatever? Aren’t you that person? I want to read, Jean. I want something to look at. I want to be of service to you. Don’t talk to me about artifice please. We’re supposed to be doing a book. You write it, I read it and make helpful suggestions. This is the arrangement. This is what you’re here to do.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  “Edna doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said. “But I’ll talk to you. I’ll tell you anything Edna can tell you.”

  “Let me go over my questions here.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  “What about Lester?” she said. “Will Lester want to talk to me?”

  “Seriously doubt it.”

  “Am I allowed to enter his presence and request a few moments of his time? I’ve talked to everyone else at least once and after all these are the key people, more or less, aren’t they? I mean this is the Logicon project and they’re the mathematical logicians. I want to hear their unfiltered ideas, opinions and convictions. What kind of journalist would I be if I settled for less than a face-to-face encounter?”

  “Let’s have sex,” he said. “Take off your clothes and never mind the people here. The people here are working, sleeping, climbing the slopes, camped under tables. To even things up, I will take off my clothes at the same time you are removing yours. This equalizes things.”