Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  Billy kept on rocking, enjoying the illusion that the room was gradually emptying itself of exhausted thought. Dense sensations reduced themselves to points, lines and planes. The unshaded bulb. The rectangular imprint on one wall. The pattern made by the grain in the hardwood floor. The hands on the clock. The angle at which light climbed one wall. The continuous functional shift in the room’s configuration (noun to verb) due to his movement in the rocker. Something may happen at fourteen hours, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven seconds on a day yet to be determined. The correct number of objects. The objects spaced at fitting distances. The distances defined in varying degrees of light and shade. The light and shade informed by a converse moderation. Space and periodic solids. Continuously filled transitions. Acts of the time-factoring mind.

  Several ravaging bats swept past an outcropping of rock and then flashed toward the ceiling. Wu was unable to observe the subsequent kills at the precise time they took place (due to megaderma’s quickness and his own delayed reaction) but did manage to “re-record” events (or fit them together) as the discarded parts of a number of roosting bats hit the floor of the cave. Deciding to inspect these particular in-edibles, presumably wings and heads, he got up and walked toward the other end of the cave, filled with a childlike mingling of aversion and thrill, the severed and no doubt bloody extremities concentrated in an area dense with limestone formations. When he got there he realized he would either have to squeeze past some jagged rocks to reach the leavings or enter the area through a small crawlway. In a prone position he began to work his way through the opening, which was of no greater length than his own body but more cramped than he’d expected. He was nearly to the other end when the flame in his headlamp went out. The darkness was total and he was frozen to the stone. He tried to think beyond the level of unchecked hysteria. The core of his immobility was a whirl of (psychic) motion. He told himself to remain calm. He tried to fight the illusion of rush, of speed, of overwhelming events. He couldn’t move his arms to reach the matches in his coveralls. With a lighted match he could easily find his way to the backpack on the other side of the cave. In the backpack were candles. In the light of one of these candles he could easily refill the carbide lamp. But he couldn’t seem to move. He told himself to think into this problem calmly. After a while he was able to grasp the possibilities. Either he couldn’t move because his fear had made him rigid. Or he was wedged. He realized he was not breathing properly and then felt chills in his upper body. He tried to gauge his panic, to talk to it, to determine its contents. Again he told himself to proceed with utter calm. He summarized the situation and calmly measured the depths of his terror. It was difficult to maintain a thought for more than several seconds. He attempted to concentrate on the problem of movement, on involuntary rigidity versus being wedged. This is unreal fear, he told himself. This is fear based on unreasonable foundation. This is unfounded fear. In a series of incomplete summaries he tried to tell himself what had happened, where he was, how he felt, when he would be able to move again. But being wedged. The possibility of being wedged kept occurring to him. Being wedged meant something he did not give a name to. There was still the feeling of speed to contend with, the rush of events (although obviously nothing was happening), this uncontrollable hurry in his mind, this nullifying plunge. He tried to recall precisely what had happened. Was darkness all that happened? Or did his shoulders become stuck in the crawlway as well? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember. He was afraid to try to squirm backward. He thought this might confirm his being wedged. He thought his feet, his toes might be able to move slightly, his hands, his fingers, thus establishing that it was not fear that caused his immobility. His body itself would be stuck fast. Then he would know he was wedged. There was no dark adaptation, or adjustment of the eyes, in this total blackness. This was not just complete absence of light but a state of its own, the quality of authentic darkness, that aspect of nightlikeness which makes distinctions impossible. This dark had a special presence. It was far from empty. It was not just nonlight. It had a nature that dated back. It had intrinsic characteristics. It was animal. Be calm, he thought. Analyze the fear and you will control it. He began to wail then. It happened before he knew what was taking place and after a while it seemed that he had given himself over to this lamentation as one enters an irreversible state of being. What came out of him was a series of prolonged near-rhythmic sounds, intense and pitiful, marked by the fact that he was able to sustain each high-pitched cry far longer than might have been considered possible under the circumstances, any circumstances.

  r. To avoid the associations commonly attached to certain words, we have renounced ordinary language in our theoretical study of patterns of reasoning.

  s. In using symbols to denote logical operations, we have done much to eliminate imprecision, nuance, emotion, the variety of evocative “meanings” that cling to spoken and written words.

  t. In advancing toward conclusions that are by nature unshakable, we have attempted to set aside intuition.

  u. Mathematics is only as correct as logic allows it to be.

  v. We have developed in fact such tightly precise levels of argument that they have led us into the midair anxiety of that engine-stalling aspect of metamathematics in which we see only too clearly the innate limitations of formal systems, the overthrow of proof, the essential incompleteness of the axiomatic method.

  w. We are left trembling with success.

  x. Can we theorize on the existence of a link between the rigor of this logical undecidability and the strict limits that language has set around itself?

  y. Language is the mirror of the world.

  z. What we have yet to learn how to say awaits our impossible attempt to free reality from the restrictions it must possess as long as there are humans to breed it.

  Wu was engaged in a lifelong effort to become Chinese. His crossing between the spheres was becoming burdensome in many ways, with the result that what had been a tendency to examine and strengthen the Oriental aspects of his identity was now a demanding need and more. The cultural parts could not be equated; the languages were noninter-locking; the souls did not shine in each other’s light. These, it seemed, were the obstacles he faced. His own life then was a bitter contradiction of that dyadic principle of thought in which an element complements its opposite. State of being one. Singleness of purpose. Constancy and accord. Ironic that these intuitive Chinese objectives were precisely what he saw no hope of attaining in the years that remained to him (relative youth notwithstanding). During his stays at one or another division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he was never able to believe that his presence was any more than an exchange of some unspecifiable sort, a form of reciprocal scientific politeness in which a rather anonymous prehistorian from the West is allowed to stride casually in and out of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, occasionally speaking the language to colleagues, who (as per terms of contract) answer him in elaborately meaningless phrases—this entire affair, down to the length of his stride, subject to duplication in a Western university (or some such) with a slightly Westernized Chinese scientist doing the striding and with English the language in question.

  Vocal sounds in meaningful patterns.

  The language itself, Chinese, was a deeply woven structure through which he tried to guide his intercultural assumptions. To become Chinese was to rethink oneself, to yield to alien verities. Whatever was in him of that nation and race had to be allowed to find its way to definitive expression. The vagueness of such an undertaking was precisely what made it seem impossible; the generalities that had to be exposed in layers; the set of personal characteristics that had to be restaged somehow; the primary source that had to be found; the embedded part of him that had to be read and understood:

  Wu, risking the well-ordered foolishness of the man who leads an overexamined life, was determined to resist the prospect of failure. At some accessible level of his being, the prevailing theme, he
continued to believe, was simple unity. The single-cell mechanism of man in nature. The rote-prayer of centuries of science. To be only part Chinese was to be an archery target for the honed ironies his own predicament had given precise dimensions to. His thinking led in nearly every direction to some outsized metaphor, this the object of his ironic perception, that the impediment to his personal search.

  The cave was silent. He resolved to investigate this silence, to examine it systematically, to measure it in detail. It was true; he was sure of it now. Silence prevailed in the bat cave. This meant his wailing had stopped. He still felt moist chills in his back and chest but his breathing was fairly regular now and he was no longer wailing, not wailing, released from the need to wail. Events did not appear to be overrunning him any more; there was no illusion of speed to contend with. Everything was clear and getting clearer. Why had he been so confused before and why was he so nearly lucid now? He was not wedged. He knew this as surely as it is possible to know a thing. It was necessary only to squeeze backward out of the crawlway. He was certain of this. It was obvious. All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp. This he did, all of it in a matter of minutes, and it was simple and done and over, all fiction, Jean thought, wondering what it would take to “remember through” the ochre and soot of cave art to the very reason why these earliest of artists descended to the most remote parts of caves and applied their pigments to nearly inaccessible walls, the intricate journey and the isolated site being representative perhaps of the secret nature of the story told in the painting itself, all fiction, she thought, all fiction takes place at the end of this process of crawl, scratch and gasp, this secret memory of death. Breathing evenly now he reached under his coveralls and sweater to touch his wu-fu, a reassuring moment, the bat pendant cool against his fingertips, cool and faintly moist from the sweating he’d done. No longer, he thought, am I running for commissioner of shit. Time to report to Rob and get on back to the field and leave these nocturnal flying mammals to excrete in peace. After relighting the lamp he put the residue formed by the old carbide in an airtight container, where it could not harm anything living. He heard the roosting bats begin to squeak and whistle. There was motion here and there. Some were airborne now, a few, the great majority still chloroformed in roosting posture, suspended in their self-enfolding fur. As he gathered his things together, the whistling became gradually louder and more bats pelted down off the ceiling, small and barely definable presences, the dim light stung by their veering taps and caroms. Wu sat next to his pack, wondering where the opening was that would let them find their night. Crazed bat consciousness, he thought. I must have sounded part bat for a while back there or a wailing male banshee assigned the death of the fairy folk themselves. Wings everywhere. The cave appeared to be a crumbling substance transformed continually into something that grew more and more desperate to be relieved of this endemic unrest. No special pattern disclosed itself, the bats clustering in generally circular subdivisions of larger masses, the blast of beating wings increasing in volume, megaderma still in evidence here and there, cruising in their homicidal flight paths, their private little eddies of disruption and blood, all the bats guided by orientation pulses of ultrasonic frequencies, the animal charms of echolocation, he thought (children more sensitive than adults to high frequency bursts), these pulses beamed through the nostrils of bats in flight but how interpreted on their return, he wondered, deciding ears alone were not enough and that the brain must be involved, some clever acoustic center that enables each aeronautic creature to classify in transit the nature of the object that intercepted and returned the original beamed sound. The cave was like a living madness now. Bats perhaps in the millions. It was becoming easier to detect the spaces between bats than individual bats themselves. Then even these spaces began to vanish. Wing-thundering echoes on the level of some heart-stopping natural calamity bearing down on a town. Wu began to laugh. He didn’t know what was going on. He’d been in dozens of bat caves but had never witnessed the mass exit and could not place it in some logical context. It was an incoherent event. The incredible storm roar of wings. The sense of insane life rising out of what had been only moments earlier a set of limestone surfaces. The sheer number of bats. The frenzy of their withdrawal. He watched small groups of bats separate themselves from larger clusters and fly on out past a limestone column toward what he assumed was the passage that led to open night and he imagined himself on the other side of this opening, able to watch the colony emerge, first in small sets and groups and clusters, then larger units, these advance swarms followed by the main body, all flying close to the mouth of the cave as the rest of the bats came pouring out, the withdrawal taking a very long time, circles stacking up, increasingly precise figures in a vast wavering column, the wind blast deepening, the column growing taller, the cave emptying finally, no longer the slightest wisp of individual motion, all one now, a great spiraling flight that whispered into its season beyond the trees. And because he liked to be dazzled, Wu in his corner of the cave, pondering the reflecting mechanism of this means of navigation, sat laughing into the night.

  I SIT A WHILE LONGER

  Billy rocked in Endor’s chair as Edna slept as Softly left his bed, took the elevator, crossed the catwalk, climbed the metal ladder, emerged from the canister, walked through a series of corridors and stopped before a particular door. What was unusual about this door was the fact that it had a metal bolt on the outside. Softly slid this bolt into its socket, then headed back toward the elevator.

  Jean Sweet Venable stayed awake to test her own steadfastness, the persistence of her bleak resolution to confront the pain of being self-aware. The onset of the danger of true belief. The end of one’s utter presentableness. The imminence of fear itself. (She relied on the convenience of titles.) What a settlement of sheer plantation ease we might occupy if only we could choose to hide now and again from thought, perception, feeling, will, memory and morbid imagination. Sleep is no help. The period before sleep was her time of greatest mental helplessness, in fact. A sense of semiwaking awareness artificially induced. Anesthesia not quite complete. Involved mental processes of deadly repetition. Blank horror. Fear in spaceless combinations. A fixed design that included death and something else as well. Sleep itself is an improvement but not always. The period after sleep is usually not as bad as the period before sleep but there are times when it is worse, when the lack of control suggests once more a treacherous anesthetic. Why isn’t it possible for us to rest from time to time in some tropical swoon of nonentity? Because no matter the drugs, the cures, the sleeps, the disciplines, the medications, there is no escaping (she was on the floor now, looking for a particular blank page) the unlikelihood of escape. Maybe she had concluded prematurely that the woman in the book wasn’t like her at all, at all. The name he’d given her. Impossible to think of herself with a name like that and yet names are the animal badges we wear, given not only for practical necessity but to serve as a subscript to the inner person, a primitive index of the soul, and how could she be certain, sibylline instincts or not, that the name the novelist had given her would not in the end find its rightful soul to wear. The dialogue he’d written. Nothing at all like something she would say and yet how could she know what word or words were still to be spoken. The character had fainting spells. The character sometimes sat all night in doorways. The character’s underwear stank. Successive reflections. Halfway through Eminent Stammerers, Jean had imagined herself as a Modern Library Giant. Sticking with her title even after she discovered that it was not quite as technically precise as Eminent Stutterers would have been, she filled a limited number of pages with a relaxed commentary (it wasn’t the deepest of texts) on the neurosis of the speech tract; on the possibility that stuttering (interruption of word-flow) is, like glossolalia (extended word-flow), an example of learned behavior that
calls for negative practice or unlearning; on the phenomenon of being alienated by one’s own voice; on word-fear as a threat to sanity. She wondered, now, crawling for her blank sheet, how she’d ever expected to complete the multitude of pages necessary to qualify one’s book for candidacy as a Modern Library Giant. Surely to those who suffered from it (Aristotle, Aesop, Darwin, Dodgson, Moses, Virgil, among those eminent enough to be mentioned in the text), stammering to some extent represented the “curse” of verbal communication, the anfractuous blacktop route from the pure noise of infancy. It was also a “recording” of one’s mental processes, a spontaneous tape of that secret pandemonium to which childhood is often prone. Imagine, nonstammerer, the terror of this simplest question: “What is your name, little girl?”