Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  Coiled room, she thought. A nervous little step into the coiled room I’ve seen from time to time to time. Oh, well, how could you have nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man and expect things to progress in a routine manner, as in the non-half-crazy world of people the same size. Look at him in this weak light, how eager to mock my past, how aware of my cooperation in this undertaking, the return of my body, the canceling of subscriptions to reverie, fancy and illusion. Touching me just his touch I think insane. From time to time mingled with the reflections in the broken glass I pass in the street or in the windows of trains crossing dead sections of town, bodies nodding under the glass halves of a tenement’s outer doors, I see this room occupied by a female figure inside concentric rings. Oh, well, how could you be a man the size of a child and possess a touch that could be anything but insane, if only halfway so. I laugh at past loves, at the dreary predictability of the past itself, which may or may not make sense. Darker the better with him. Hate to see all that face-making and bizarre dimpling. Here we are now, set inside ourselves, let him have his say or nay, ruttish tyrant, cycloid, stunted pasha whirling in his silk pillows.

  Once more the boy’s head protruded from the blanket. He heard water running somewhere and after a while he crawled out from under the blanket and sat on the floor of the cubicle, listening intently. Sitting in the dirt was pleasant, although he was sure there was no calm that compared with the calm prevailing under the table. In time he crawled over to the segment of canvas that covered most of the entrance and he peered beneath this overhang into the dimness at the bottom of the antrum. He heard the running water. Not on the slopes this time. Closer to this level, swelling, looking for an outlet. Chill water moving through joints and break lines and over flowstone formations. Cavern water rich in nitric acid that dissolves limestone to widen existing holes. Cave-maker, Wu thought, hearing the same sound, thinking the stream might be traveling upward, carving out an embryonic cave, a living structure with a cycle that ends in death, wondering how much trouble it would be to order a rubber dinghy, neoprene wet suit, aqualung and waterproof spotlight, dismissing the idea on the grounds he would not be here long enough to see it through. The higher he climbed the darker it got. Along the rippling beam of the lamp, his eyes sought an opening.

  Billy left his cubicle and walked quietly toward the barrier and out over it. There was water nearby. He could feel as well as hear it. Where the floor of the antrum curved severely upward he put the heel of his shoe to a large flat stone and kicked it right through the natural hatch in the earth where it had been wedged. Water roaring engaged his senses. He lowered himself into the nearly vertical crawlway, knowing from the roar that it was only several yards long, and then braced his shoulders against one surface and his feet against the other and descended with some difficulty to solid ground. He could see almost nothing but knew he was on the edge of the underground river. It was fully a river in power and sound. It came flowing past him, carrying clay, silt and organic debris, carrying limestone to redeposit, straight on past, leaving him only a hint of its animal presence, that complex and adaptive motivation that directs living things toward the strangeness, beauty and freedom of repeated sequences. Naturally he put his hands in the water. It was cold enough to make him tremble and when he cupped his hands and brought some water to his lips to drink he felt some seconds later a brief assertion of pain behind his right eye. Mildly frightening. When it subsided he simply listened to the river, feeling no special need to see it, photograph it or take samples home to study. He had tasted it, after all. Some element of river-taste would subtract itself from the recollection of that unit of pain and he would learn again that hidden inside everything he knew was half of what he was. The river carried with it a near-sweet breeze, although not really that, nor a mineral redolence, nor whatever quality of freshness might result from its continuous onward movement, but something more complex, traveling with it from its source, that clarified whatever distance intervened between the river and the mind through which it flowed.

  Speaking outside herself, Softly thought. Sex inevitably enriches itself during those transmanic times in which to speak sensible phrases is to contravene the meaning of the act. Assuming there is sperm in my ejaculate, have my sperm cells successfully collected in my epididymis, storing themselves in that convoluted parlor while they approach the basking trance of their maturity? Important to contemplate the mechanics of one’s spermatic duct system. In this way we distinguish ourselves from lower forms of copulating life.

  The darkness he found had grades or stages. Where the water flowed it wove the dark into something whole. Beyond the river, or where he thought the other side must be, the darkness was not as absolute, stretching into distances that could be recognized as filling specific limits. He sat and listened, trying to detect some modulation in the roar.

  SELF-BETTERMENT

  Lester Bolin barely awake summoned the young woman by gesture into his quarters. He sat at the edge of the bed twirling an index finger through the thinning area of his hair as though trying to produce an ultimate flourish with dessert topping, Jean thought, noting to herself that particular men seem to have been born in pajamas, friendly tentative suicidal men, their bodies no more than stuffing for those loose-fitting playclothes. She sat in a chair with a note pad in her lap and watched Lester settle into a thoughtful yawn.

  “Rob said it was all right to ask you if it’s all right, you know, to talk to me.”

  “Why are you wearing a raincoat?”

  “Clothes are a mess.”

  “I accept that,” he said.

  “Need to be cleaned and things.”

  “I’m Mr. Bolin.”

  “What can you tell me about the Logicon project that might be in my technical grasp?”

  “I’m working on this thing, this sort of machine, and what I hope to do is I hope to get it to speak actual Logicon. It’ll save us huge amounts of time and trouble if all the most time-consuming and trouble-making aspects of Logicon can be handled by this control system. I’m using the most advanced materials and a lot of old-fashioned ingenuity. Mrs. Lown doesn’t think Logicon can be spoken. She says it’s inherently unspeakable. But I think I can provide meaningful sounds for our notation, which means all we have to do is come up with a metalogical language.”

  “So far I’m with you all the way,” she said. “Please keep on going.”

  “Would you like to see my male member?”

  Drowsily he plucked something from the midmost hollows of his pajamas. It was vividly sleek, a Pop Art penis, not at all like Bolin himself, all rumple and shrug. After a while he put it back in, more or less as an afterthought, it seemed to Jean, and not until he’d resumed his comments on Logicon.

  “It hasn’t been easy. You’ll never get me to say it’s been easy. And the toughest aspects are still to come. This is important so watch my lips. Metalanguage. We spend nearly every waking moment, Mrs. Lown and I, trying to perfect an alternate system that we can use to analyze the consistency of the original system.”

  “That’s it in theory,” she said. “Now how will the control system actually function in the sense of electronically or whatever?”

  “I don’t think that’s in your technical grasp.”

  “I was afraid not.”

  “I don’t think that’s in anyone’s technical grasp who hasn’t studied the matter from every angle over an extended period of time. I’m only being candid when I report that I myself have run into a great many problems in this area and expect to continue to run into a great many more problems. Now, I’ve spoken to you candidly and at length despite a certain amount of inconvenience, despite time lost that I could have used to better effect, i.e. the project itself, and despite repeated statements by Mrs. Lown and by me that contact with people outside the project would serve absolutely no purpose as far as our work is concerned. Despite all this I’ve granted you an interview. There’s something you can do in return.”

  “Wha
t’s that?”

  “Show me your fuzzy-wuzzy,” Lester said.

  “Is it important to you, seeing it?”

  “It’s not important, no. When you say important, I’d definitely answer no. Not a matter of life and death by any means. If you don’t want to show it, just ask whatever questions remain on your list and we’ll go our separate ways.”

  “I’d rather not show it around too much.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “Questions on my list,” she said. “Rather than questions on my list, I’d like to ask you, if you don’t object and even if you object strenuously, why you exposed what you call your male member and why you asked me to show you what you call by an even sillier name.”

  “Who could answer a question like that?”

  “Do you do it often?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Is there something about me that sort of drove you to do it?”

  “There’s something about me, I guess.”

  “What?”

  “Who could answer?” he said.

  It was at the precise second Billy lifted the canvas and stepped into his cubicle that Softly entered his own quarters, having just left the kitchen, where he’d had some timeless tea with Edna Lown, feeling suddenly glum gloomy morose dejected depressed, these states of mind unfolding in the irreversible succession of a thing singly perceived. From his briefcase he seized a packet of TriOmCon, tore it open and placed a pale tab under his tongue. He sat amid the pillows on his bed, ratchety ratchety come and catchety, eventually leaning over to untie his shoes and then removing the rest of the clothing and stretching for his robe, wondering in this interval of reaching out to finger the patterned fabric why it was that with the coupled obstacles of child size and cyclothymia he had to endure as well the thought-provoking if minor abnormality of a right testicle that hung noticeably lower than the left. What revenge was this on the left-flawed proportion that customarily prevailed? Balance of sag and nonsag in egg-shaped structures. Bilateral symmetry. He invented a zero-sum bi-level game with table of matching strategies. T’s testicles, S’s testicles. Left, right. Plus, minus. Never commented on (that I can recall) by a woman in a position to know, whether supine, astraddle, lotus-blossomed or otherwise, probably because they are so intent on the dynamics inevitably brought into play by the size of my body itself, a fact perhaps more important to their pleasure than my gracelessness, the violating aspects of my sexual presence. Child size. The innocent candor of their desire for something cherishable. In bed in his robe he tried to sustain a brief interval of unsullied stillness. Traveling upstream in microns per second, he thought. Rounded head, long tail. Traveling into warm weather and the medium of half masticated life. I am still “depressed.” This should not be the case. I will stay in “bed” until it passes.

  Billy noticed for the first time that the piece of paper left on his cot was not another display of Bolin’s notation but another piece of junk mail, evidently delivered to Lester by mistake and then deposited here. It was a promotional item that included a small plastic key in an acetate seal. He sat on the cot and began reading.

  Addressee:

  Lacking in poise, self-confidence, the ability to gesture convincingly? Millions everywhere are discovering the dynamics of elocution. Our simple techniques will enable you to speak and gesture in public as never before. These self-training methods are revealed in our—

  SELF-BETTERMENT CRASH PROGRAM

  —by which you spend only minutes a day learning how to promote yourself with poise and lasting assurance, whether in business dealings, at social functions or in casual everyday conversation. Discover for yourself how our easy-to-follow rules will give you the skills you need to make a good impression every time you talk or gesture. Our booklet—

  YOUR KEY TO ADVENTURES IN ELOCUTION

  (the plastic key appeared here)

  —can be yours free of charge when you agree to enroll in our Self-Betterment Crash Program. To receive this free booklet (and to be automatically enrolled at money-back rates if not pleased), do absolutely nothing. Those wishing neither booklet nor enrollment should write at once to: ACRONYM; c/o AAAA&A Guano Mines Ltd.; Dept. Aleph-Null; Aboard the Goo Fou Maru; c/o the Large Black Mooring; Kwang-chow Bay. Postcards cannot be accepted.

  All three items he’d received belonged in the category of junk mail but it was clear that this particular piece differed from the computer quiz and the chain letter in a major respect. It included a key. A tiny plastic key, to be sure, but still a key. A notched and grooved implement designed to open a lock. With his thumbnails he attacked the acetate seal and finally succeeded in freeing the little key. It had the cheap weightless feel of something you’d find at the bottom of a cereal box. Designed to open a lock. But what lock? He heard someone coming along the path and immediately lifted the blanket and got under the TV table. Heavy-footed Bolin again. Logician on the hoof. Again the sound of a single sheet of paper wafted toward his cot. When Lester was gone the boy crawled out from under the table and approached the lone page that rested in the middle of his bed.

  He crawled back under the table. He spent a long time thinking. Nameless danger. Time of inevitable terror. “Visit my room.” A place in and of time. A place to sit and think. Who’d said that? “Visit my room.” Endor. Endor’s room. It was Endor who’d told him that. When you are faced with nameless danger, so on and so on, “visit my room.” A place to sit and think. A room to comfort you. But Endor’s room was padlocked. Endor’s room had been padlocked since Endor left for the hole. He didn’t have to think much longer. The key. The plastic key sealed into the junk mail. The tiny plastic implement designed to open locks.

  A LOT HAPPENS

  Billy changed his clothes and headed for the elevator. He turned a handle and the skeletal lift began to ascend. Eventually he crossed the catwalk, climbed the metal ladder, unlatched the exit grating and stood, slightly out of breath, in the canister he’d once occupied. Nothing seemed very different. He went out into the corridor, expecting to see some evidence of the kind of global tensions Softly had talked about both before and since their descent. He didn’t know precisely what sort of evidence he’d expected. Sandbags maybe. Fire marshals. Boldly printed instructions for finding shelter. Blastproof cabinets full of canned goods and water. Large arrows painted on the walls. Morale-building slogans. First-aid hints. But nothing seemed very different. People came and went. The play maze was where it had always been. Linen carts were lined up along an extended section of the hallway. The voices of men and women he passed gave no indication that people here were under special stress. He found a “goal guidance phone” in an alcove and dialed INFO.

  “This is tape sector B.”

  “I want to know Endor, where he’s located, his room floor and number. Capital E-n-d-o-r. I want his room’s location.”

  “Please state your medical history and then wait for a coded response detailing what medication, if any, is indicated as advisable in this instance. Remember, cold compress for swelling. Hot compress for tight muscles and that ache-all-over feeling. This message brought to you by the Wakefield Foundation, suppliers of medical products and chemical preparations to a generation of satisfied users.”

  “Being tape, you can’t switch me to another line, right?”

  “For simultaneous translations, dial SIMO. Your medication tape is pending. Dine internationally next time you’re in Beirut. Abco-Panzer welcomes you to the newest showcase in its chain of fine eating establishments.”

  He hung up and stood there a while, looking around, a model of studied frustration. There was a phone directory in a horizontal slot precisely at eye level. Endor’s name was listed and so was his room number. Billy took an elevator up there. The hallway lighting was harsh and it was obvious the walls and floor had not been cleaned for some time. There was no one around, a fact that intensified the tone of institutional dinginess. As he approached the door, it occurred to him that yes, of course, Endor’
s room would be set up to provide a perfect contrast to this sense of desolation. The padlock was still in place, an extremely large device attached to a metal fastener. He took the key out of his pocket, recalling his visits to the hobby room and the sort of emotional warmth generated by Endor’s cluttered effects, imagining further what the room he was about to enter would look like, seeing it very clearly as he slipped the key into the cylinder. A drawing room with gothic hall chair and carved rosewood sofa. A fireplace with cast-iron grate and tasseled fabric overhanging the mantel. There would be a high-backed armchair with buttoned upholstery. There would be a hearth rug and a table with a chamber candlestick next to a chess set and a silver bottle stand. A drawing room with windows draped in layers of cloth, with a bookcase and bubble-back chairs and a mahogany tea caddy. On the walls would be large inspirational engravings and creamy portraits. Above would be a metal chandelier with frosted globes to spread the gaslight. A lacquered sewing table with mother-of-pearl inlay. A writing desk with a brass-stoppered inkpot and a curved tray for pens. On the mantel there’d be a clock as well as a vase with artificial flowers, both contained in bell jars. A drawing room with a large cabinet, shrouded in velvet, that held a tea service in bone china painted with assorted species of heather; that held biscuit barrels, toddy warmers, potpourri dishes with scroll feet, sporting ale jugs decorated with scenes of autumn; that held fruit dishes, gilded coffee cups and saucers, stoneware vases with waterweed motifs, ornamental plates that glowed in rose-splashed luster. A drawing room that provided to those who entered a sense of contentment, serenity, joy, well-being and comfort.

  But it wasn’t like that at all.

  The room had hardwood floorboards that needed waxing. From the ceiling hung a single light bulb, unshaded. There was a rocking chair, plain in appearance, located in the far corner. A rectangular segment on one wall was cleaner than the rest of the wall. The imprint of whatever had been there indicated that the object extended from a line a few inches above the floor to a parallel line several feet below the ceiling and that it was about as wide as a pair of men standing abreast. The only other thing in the room was a Coca-Cola wall clock.