Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  High on the northeast gradient Maurice Wu spotted a small opening in the hard earth and commenced inching his way in feetfirst. In minutes he was standing in a narrow passage full of dripstone formations whose intricacy made him think of the valves and piping of the body. He walked through a calcite basin into a small chamber. Here he decided to take off his pack and sit down a while, not really feeling the effects of the long climb until he was settled in a restful position, the labor of the ascent recalled in his breathing, a series of deep respirations easing off eventually into murmurs of de-accelerated fatigue. He looked around him now. The light from his headlamp caught a rimstone pool in the middle of the chamber. Not much else of immediate interest in sight. The sound of rushing water he’d heard on his way up the slope was so faint now as to be part of the texture of the silence in the cave. As always in caves he felt he was here to remake himself. It was as though his senses had automatically emptied out just as he’d slipped into the opening. He was entering with a sense apparatus featureless and unformed. Caves were a test mechanism for the redevelopment of his animal faculties. Because the environmental demands were few, he was able to record the smallest irregularities in the silence and semidarkness with brilliant quickness and clarity. This enabled him to build within himself a separate presence, something unremembered, a receptive mentality that seemed to make him part of something more than the living cave around him at the same time as it set him adrift from what he could only regard as his distinctness, his Wu-experienced causal reality. At any rate he was less fearful here (although stimulated by such pure awareness that it amounted to something very much like fear, if fear could be called restlessness in expectation of danger) than nearly anywhere else. What we need, he believed, is a way to reinvent the human brain. As now constituted it can be viewed in cross-section as a model for examining the relative depths of protohistoric and modern terror. Cycles and swamp terrains of fear and periodically recurring depressions and earliest wetland secretions of dread (brain stem and midbrain), not to mention Mr. Mammal as paranoid grandee of the grassy plains, that (limbic) region of emotional disorganization, falling sickness, psychosomatic choking, another way of saying terror of the veldt, he thought, which is fear not really of lurkers in long grass but of the veldt itself, its terrifying endlessness, its obliteration of both singularity and pluralism, its lack of soul-cozying nooks, its tendency to disappear into itself, leaving us, he thought, with the geometry, music and poetry of our evolved, cross-referencing and highly specialized outer layer of gray tissue (cerebral cortex), not to mention celestial mechanics, medicine, the research and development of wars, not to mention voiceless cries in the night, utterly neomammalian this last activity, a cortical subclass of fear itself itself itself, thought Jean at her typewriter, staring at page twenty, numbered but otherwise blank, and wondering what it would take to “remember through” one’s individual being on out into phylogenic space, that part of us not subject to conscious observation, out through breast-seeking mother-clinging babyhood into that segment of our ancestral mentality possessed in abundance by nonprimate forms of animal life, not to mention the age of the human brain, Wu thought, its unique status a matter of millions of years of neural variation from the brains of our taxonomic relatives. Oldness was becoming an obsession of his. Everything and everybody were turning out to be a lot older than anyone suspected. It began for Wu when he first learned about the charcoal-burning hearths and human skulls found half a century earlier in the caves at Chou-Kou-Tien. Everybody everywhere was being re-evaluated. In the Transvaal, Mexico, Europe, Indochina, the East African rift valley. Flint tools, jawbones, bark paper, shell necklaces, ivory weapons. One way or another the findings were pushing everything back, with ramifications broad enough to include the possibility that truly upright “men” coexisted with relatively erect “hominids.”

  “Hee hee,” Softly remarked to Lester Bolin.

  A nullifying plunge through history’s other end to all those ancient and naïve astronomies of bone and stone.

  He smelled it then. Having crossed the rimstone pool to wander at the other end of the chamber, he stood absolutely still, noting the acidic moldy odor of bat shit. He saw a crawlway leading to another chamber. As he emerged from the crawlway the carbide flame opened up into an immense petalous moon-vase of light, revealing the chamber to be much larger than the one he’d just vacated. He stood at the edge of the guano deposit. They were everywhere, roosting, probably by the hundreds of thousands, bats upside down, apparently blinking in response to the intruding light, their eyes becoming constituent glint-points of a vast flash effect that surged across the broad ceiling. Packed together as tightly as the colony was, it resembled some slowly gathering cave disease, a tissue anomaly that carried its own alien pale pigmentation. He stepped into the guano, careful of his footing, relieved to see it was only knee-deep. He checked the heights of the cave for cannibal bats, megaderma, never failing to find it incongruous that someone of his sensitivity would look forward (however buried the urge) to seeing these spike-nosed marauders attacking, killing and eating smaller bats. He didn’t think they even belonged this far north but here they were, one gliding past him right now, impressive wingspread, nose-leaf, outsized ears, long pointed teeth, a bat fond of dismemberment, quick enough to kill in flight, capable of plucking the odd gecko from a temple wall. Of course, it was those aspects of the event considered apart from the actual killing and eating that appealed to him, considered apart from the seizure behind the smaller bat’s ear, considered apart from the fact that megaderma eats everything but wings and head, considered apart from the blood and body fragments. It was the abstract phase of things for which he reserved his virtuous appreciation. The bat’s flight path. The bat’s sound-beaming apparatus. The mathematics of a moving target. The evolutionary logic that provides cannibalistic bats with fangs that enable them to grasp and slash.

  m. Speech therapists regard certain words as “cues to anxiety.”

  n. Since words are attempts to relay impressions about the world, we must ask what shattered aspect of the world causes people to experience a conflict between the need to speak and the anxiety that weaves through a particular word.

  o. Are there as many shattered aspects as there are people who experience conflict?

  p. I’m tempted to say: together we blurt out the components of world consciousness.

  q. This leaves unexamined what has remained unsaid.

  In Endor’s room the boy rocked in the wooden chair. It was strange how a nearly bare room could seem so dense with exhausted thought. The bulb hung at the other side of the room. The clock was on the wall to his right. On the wall facing the clock was the imprint that extended from a line a few inches above the floor to a parallel line several feet below the ceiling. It was not unpleasant to sit here rocking. The fact that the chair was a rocking chair made a difference, he felt. In a conventional chair he would have been more bored than he was. The rocker definitely belonged. It was just right for this kind of room. When Endor had mentioned the “psychological security” of his padlocked room, he must have had the rocker at least partly in mind.

  There were no windows. Across the clock’s face was the word “Coca-Cola” in upper and lower case letters. The clock was not the digital type, which definitely would have been out of place here. It was an old clock with pointed hands. Digital clocks, he felt, told time too bluntly. He had to concentrate for a second or so before he was able to place the digits in a meaningful context related to morning, afternoon, evening, an appointment here, a train to catch there. It may have been that most arrays of numbers had deep associations for him—mental connections that tended to develop freely when he looked at a clock that had no dial, no moving hands, no slashes to mark the minutes. But it was more than that. Digital clocks took the “space” out of time.

  It didn’t take him long to realize that the hands on the clock in the room hadn’t moved since he’d entered. This was in no way surprising. In a room wi
th scuffed floors and an old rocker and a single dim bulb hanging down, it appeared to him that a stopped clock was more or less appropriate. He took it to be an element of the restfulness that Endor had claimed for the room. Although disappointed at first, Billy was beginning to think that Endor knew what he was talking about. A place to think. A room to comfort one. A measure of security. There was something about the near bareness and the relative placement of the objects violating this bareness that made him feel the “inexpressiveness” of the room had been designed in highly precise terms. No lacquered sewing table or creamy portraits or mahogany tea caddy. Something else, however. Maybe just the rocking. The fluid viewpoint produced by this rhythmic motion. Maybe the light. The degree of grim scrutiny suggested by a naked bulb. Maybe the lines in the floor or the sound of the rocker or the tone of exhausted thought. The more bare an area, it would appear, the deeper we see. It was beginning to occur to him that something about the Coca-Cola wall clock was a lot more interesting than the fact that it was stopped.

  What the clock said, the time it told, was twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds after two. It was there to see, clear as could be. The second hand had stopped precisely on the mark denoting fifty-seven. The minute hand was exactly two marks shy of half past the hour. The hour hand was between two and three, shading toward two.

  Two (p.m.) was the fourteenth hour after midnight. Fourteen hours, twenty-eight minutes, fifty-seven seconds. This of course was the pulse array transmitted by the ARS extants. Fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-seven.

  At first something had been missing. The twenty-eight was there. The fifty-seven was there. It had taken him the length of several breaths to realize that two o’clock, if viewed as postmeridian time, corresponded to fourteen hours.

  He had been right in believing the ARS extants used a positional notation system based on sixty. As he’d already determined, their number 14,28,57 corresponded to our number 52,137. It wasn’t until now that he realized the significance of the latter number. Seconds after midnight. Time. They were giving us the time. It happened to be the case that the sixty-based system coincided with our current method of keeping time. What he envisioned briefly was a paired set of figures appearing in a drizzle not dissimilar to his own brand of handwriting:

  The code then was just barely mathematical. There had been little to solve really. The simplest arithmetic did the trick. What was required was merely to see that the numbers in question referred to a time of day. The ARS extants were intent on alerting us to a particular hour, minute and second. No more than that. Apparently they wanted us to know that something might happen at twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds after two p.m. on a day yet to be determined.

  That was it then. He’d deciphered the message, found the answer, cracked the star code. Not through mathematics as much as through junk mail—a plastic key that fit a particular lock.

  He thought of the people who’d preceded him and failed. Those before Endor. Then Endor himself. He wondered now about Endor’s motive in mentioning this room in the first place. Was it just security and comfort he cared about? Or did he know the answer was written on the face of that clock?

  It was possible that Endor was living in a hole and feeding on larvae not because he’d failed to figure out the message but because he’d succeeded. In other words he’d interpreted the answer in a negative sense. A very negative sense. A sense so negative he’d gone looking for a hole in which to live.

  In the lunar urn of the bat cave Maurice Wu excavated an area littered with broken pottery. Together the shards began to suggest certain characteristics he’d spotted in other pieces and it wasn’t too long before he was ready to guess that these were fragments of a lead-glazed pottery bowl (early Han), the thickness of the glaze at the rim indicating that the piece had been fired upside down. The bowl, if assembled and properly restored, would most likely turn out to be simple in appearance. This he found disappointing. Wu liked to be dazzled. He’d several times been a member of elaborately equipped prospecting teams that had discovered previously unknown sites and eventually found, investigated and identified such items as T’ang amphoras with handles designed to resemble dragons’ heads; miniature jade vases with spiral ornamentation; a Ming figure identified as a Taoist divinity whose clothing, whose posture, whose facial expression, whose accompaniment of symbolic animals had associations that branched back hundreds and thousands of years, every such conjunction sub-scattering then into increasingly cryptic motifs involving taboos, legends, reincarnations, composite gods. How enriching he found this sort of thing, never one to overlook the fact that religion and art probably began in caves and having always viewed religion as nothing more or less than an integrated system of art in which a superhuman element is variously invoked, beseeched, prattled at and adored. A religion’s success or failure, for him, was based solely on the conscious efforts of its practitioners to express their veneration in ways that reflected, expanded and altered the mind’s conception and the senses’ external arrest of what is beautiful. In Wu’s scheme of things, Hinduism, for example, was an overflowing success, a plague-chronicle of diversities, cycles, soul wanderings and richly depressing cultural practices; while, for instance, the eerie Protestant disciplines that stressed hymn-singing and Bible-reading struck him as being deficient in those contemplative delights that color the oriflamme of art. Guano dropped nearby. He troweled and sorted in the dimness, wondering why it was that systems of religion were so often used as frames of reference for the clarification of ideas that were in no way related to spiritual attitudes. Self-contradiction. The flailing brilliance of initiates in those unspecifiable realms deemed so central to being. Newton resorting to the idea of God as an absolute encompassing structure in his theory of mechanics. Leibnitz in the heyday of his mysticism using binary arithmetic to try to convert the Emperor of China to Christianity.

  Wu mused on latent history. Not the negative chronology of years B.C. but a class of intelligible events too fine to be collected in the sifting mechanism that determines which sets of occurrences are to be recorded and analyzed as elements in a definite pattern and which examined merely for their visibility as the coarser of the particles in the mesh. Latent in any period’s estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane. Diametrically opposed entities, Rob had said, partaking of each other’s flesh. Does syncretism really permeate all my thinking? Lost historic categories. Appearing neither in patterns nor as radioactive flashes. One might extend this search for lost categories to a subject as choicely off-putting as guano. The history of guano mining. Worldwide guano markets. Effects of guano on agriculture, trade, society. Bird matter vs. bat matter. Soil renewal and patterns of economic decline. Techniques of vacuum-pumping bat guano by the ton into enormous cylinders which are hauled out of the caves by an aerial conveyor system, and the profits thereof.

  Not far from the fragments of pottery he found a circular bronze mirror, its reflecting surface shattered, the rest of it in remarkably good condition. This was by far the most interesting thing he’d come upon since he’d started exploring these caves. He estimated its period as late Warring States, which coincided well enough with the lead-glazed bowl. He used his pocket magnifier to examine the back of the mirror, its concave rim, the concave band encircling the small fluted knob at the very center. Between rim and band was the ornamental field. He was both surprised and undazzled by the mirror’s design element. Abstract geometric patterns executed in thread relief. A ring of figures that made him think of the ambiguous markings on the stone at Sangkan Ho. What was surprising was the fact that the design was so purely non-representational, apparently empty of any attempt on the craftsman’s part to stylize animal or other figures or in any way to sacrifice reality to principles of design; most likely there’d been no thought at all of an antecedent reality. What was undazzling about the mirror was the fact that it was so completely free of the swarming ornamentation, the animal motifs, the dragon scrolls,
the cosmological diagrams, the visual puns, the syncretistic juxtapositions and the b’ai kiu or play-verse as well as other types of inscriptions that characterized centuries of Chinese mirrormaking. He spotted several corroded areas that would have to be swabbed with a chemical solution to remove the offending copper chloride, an agent of what is known as bronze disease. Of course, oldness was one thing. Europe, Mexico, the Transvaal, the East African rift valley. Oldness was one thing but reverse evolution was something else; probable mental progression in the wrong direction; advancement backward. It was one thing that the findings were pushing human origins back to a point in time much more remote than anyone had believed possible; it was quite another thing (as he was reminded in thinking of the Sangkan Ho stone) to find signs of advancing culture the deeper we probe. With his trowel he drew and marked a figure in the powdery dung.

  So we begin to see not only that we go back much farther than previously estimated but also that there is no aspect of the natural history of the brain or femur that makes it obligatory to deduce that evidence of our extended lineage must show ever increasing primitivism—smaller and smaller cranial volume, cruder tool types, nonhuman skeletal organization. Given the questions that still existed concerning the early atmosphere of the planet and the age and nature of the first living organisms, given the factors not yet taken into account (there are always factors not yet taken into account), given the relative speed with which complicated molecular systems developed and the nonrigorous estimates of the time involved for these designs to elaborate themselves, it seemed to Maurice Wu that an element of poetic truth might be contained in the speculation that humans and their precursors filled that huge primordial blank in the fossil record (a blank just beginning to be systematically roughed-in). Not being a specialist in biochemistry he had the advantage of nearly free-reined conjecture and used it to imagine a form of accelerated evolution (a process consisting, after all, of nothing more than life plus time) taking place in some lost fold of our genetic beginnings, long before the firemakers, the cave painters, the crafters of bone daggers, the brachiating primates, the bipeds who sucked nonopposable thumbs. This expeditious, this somewhat cursory emergence would be followed, in his scheme, by a gradual decline to the point where cranial capacity measured well under a thousand cubic centimeters, which is precisely where things at the Sangkan Ho strata began to get interesting. Poetic truth usually raises more questions than the fledgling poet is inclined to answer; nevertheless, he believed, we are on to something here.