Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  Robert Hopper Softly in a natty black suit stood in a patch of bedazzling grass, briefcase in hand, a modernistic pair of dark glasses covering much of his face. Finally the somber prow of a limousine appeared at the top of the ramp that coiled on down to the main garage beneath the cycloid structure. As the Cadillac leveled out and moved slowly toward him, Softly found himself straightening up a bit, as though trying to occupy more fully some spectral frame of authoritarian ethics.

  Something here made no sense. If, as the youngest of his colleagues had very recently stated, the lunar shadow first touched the earth at the universal (or Greenwich mean) time announced on the radio, and if only half an hour had passed from that moment to this, and if it was therefore midafternoon at the prime meridian, why, considering his (Softly’s) position in terms of longitude east of Greenwich, wasn’t it nighttime here? Not the deviant night of total solar eclipse but simple ordinary everyday night, the interval of darkness that accounts for an important part of every twenty-four hour period during which the earth completes a single rotation on its axis. Noncognate celestial anomaly living up to its name. Even if it wasn’t getting on to night, it was definitely getting on to eclipse. Yes he sensed the shadow speeding toward him.

  The driver brought the car to a complete stop. The man next to the driver leaned out the window toward Softly.

  “I don’t know about doing this.”

  “Open the door and let me in.”

  “You’re not on the docket,” the driver said.

  “I don’t have time to argue.”

  “We have a pickup to make in the other direction with delivery here.”

  “I want to go east.”

  “That’s just it,” the other man said.

  “I’m anxious to get going.”

  “In the other direction there’d be no problem taking you,” the driver said. “Being that’s the way we’re headed.”

  “Open the door,” Softly said.

  “If you were on the docket, we’d try to work things out.”

  “I’m suffering.”

  “In what sense suffering?”

  “In the sense that I feel enmeshed in extreme unpleasantness.”

  The man nearest Softly turned toward the driver.

  “He said he’s suffering. Then he defined it.”

  “I heard.”

  “It’s out of our way, where he wants to go. It’s in completely the wrong direction.”

  “How far in miles?”

  The man turned toward Softly.

  “How far is it where you want to go in completely the wrong direction in miles?”

  He stood in the dim light at the top of the elevator shaft and watched the guano buckets rising diagonally on aerial tramways, each container about the size of a living room, brimming with product.

  “Get ready to jump out.”

  “When?”

  “When we get there.”

  “Aren’t you being premature?”

  “Because I’m barely stopping.”

  Softly in the middle of the back seat looked straight ahead, fearful that even a brief glance out the side window might reveal an early trace of shadow. He was trying not to think clearly. This was a self-protective maneuver he used whenever confronted with the kind of dismal insight that caused twinges of professional shame. It was deplorably obvious, the matter he was trying not to think about. The eclipse, in a strictly logical sense, was no cause for fear, alarm, anxiety or dread, despite its unscheduled nature. Logically there is no connection between events. To believe otherwise is to fix oneself to a mystical intuition. An unforeseen eclipse is no more startling, logically, than an eclipse predicted decades or centuries earlier. That the latter event will take place is sheer conjecture. He knew this as surely as the fact that he was in distress. The mohole totality itself in no way contradicted the postulates of logical thought.

  How, knowing this so surely, did I manage to forget it?

  It wasn’t forgetfulness, he realized, but a deeper than logical fear that drove him into flight. Fear (perhaps) of eclipse per se. A wish to bang on hollow objects. A need to chew the fleshy leaves of aloe plants. An impulse to hide oneself more fundamentally than was possible in the antrum. It wasn’t his logic that had broken apart, or the world itself, but something more essential to the spiritual fact that bracketed his existence. He had never been in the path of a total eclipse. He had read about but never experienced the chill in the air, the cunning onset of dark, the sight of white villages, of animals seeking their nighttime roosts or holes, of nocturnal creatures stirring in the fugitive gloom, the general motivating tendency being one of rapid physical adaptation to a mistimed event. Was it possible that nothing more than his body had been deceived? If so, did it not follow that the phrase “nothing more than” referred, in successive reflections, only to itself? Of course, he thought, we continue to lack basic evidence that an eclipse is indeed taking place. With no simple rigid structure of judgmental data, we can’t be sure it won’t turn out in the end to be nothing more than rumor.

  Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.

  He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his suit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. Huge cylinders full of guano moved diagonally through the dimness, powder rising in clouds. He climbed into the Cadillac.

  He sat in the middle of the back seat, sweating incandescently, feeling as though his body were covered with pond scum. He lifted the briefcase onto his lap and felt around inside for the old glue bottle that contained his most extreme deliriant, a sudsy composite of lighter fluid, paint thinner, airplane glue, nail polish remover and several types of aerosol propellant. With some effort he removed the old-fashioned rubber cap (with brush attached). Then he held the sticky rim of the bottle right under his nose. He inhaled deeply several times, sitting primly in the geographic center of the back seat, his lids descending slowly behind the glasses.

  “I think I see it,” the driver said.

  “In what sense do you mean that?” the other man said.

  Softly nodding briefly into history pondered unopposed (by his own precedent) the mock battles that were fought in old Egypt and Mesopotamia to accompany the conflict suggested by various celestial events. In this way the crisis of time (of light that fades and season that ends) was made specific and personal, detached from abstraction. People translated the event into the sweating arcs of their own bodies, perhaps trying to act beyond their fear, inventing games to fill this crevice in the heavens. The briefcase was between his feet. He tapped his fingers on his knees. Fumes, nausea, salty moisture. Deciding to address the driver he opened his mouth slowly, half expecting to see a bubble emerge.

  “ ‘We’ ‘are’ ‘here.’ ”

  “Repeat,” the driver said.

  “ ‘It’ ‘is’ ‘time’ ‘for’ ‘me’ ‘to’ ‘get’ ‘out.’ ”

  “I don’t think my ears are hearing.”

  “ ‘Stop’ ‘the’ ‘car.’ ”

  The wind was fairly strong. He handed his briefcase through the open window to the man at the passenger’s end of the front seat. He stood for a moment a few feet from the car. He heard it start, turn and move off. Then he walked across the grass, still some light, and realized he was lurching even more than usual. He kept his head down. When he got to the edge of the hole he paused, syllogist of dire night.

  “My ears hear.”

  The hole was roughly rectangular in shape. One side was less steep than the others and he chose this surface for his descent. He entered the hole more or less sitting down, his feet before him performing braking maneuvers, his hands employed to balance. At the bottom he stood up and brushed off the seat of his pants. He took off the dark glasses, put them in the breast pocket of his s
uit coat and got down on hands and knees. The wind seemed to be subsiding. It was still light, still light. Some forewarning mechanism made him begin to crawl, knowing, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of violated space, the air itself infused with this infrared surprise. Experimentally he made some sounds. He crawled the full length of the hole and entered the hole’s hole. The tunnel began to slant downward as he moved into extreme darkness. The hole was low and narrow. He began to crawl faster. The rate of inclination gradually increased. His fingers scratched at the hard dirt. He made more sounds. There were sectors so narrow he had to chop and claw at the dirt walls to give himself room to move forward. The darkness was total now. His hand touched something cold and hard and he picked it up, a length of barely pliable metallic wire, twisted at one end, curved sharply at the other as if to fit over a hook or rod. He used it to clear the dirt in narrow areas, crawling faster now, the slope angling ever down. His hands felt scraps of clothlike material, thin strands of it, littered here and there along the floor of the hole. He moved forward into a large and slyly constructed object, human (it would seem) and covered (his hand determined) by whole cities of vermiculate life. Softly did not pause further to investigate for signs of pulse, heartbeat, so on. He crawled directly over the human object and straight into a solid mass of dirt. Again he did not pause. Using both hands he gouged out chunks of heavy earth. He made noises and sounds. His fingers scratched and clawed to clear a passage. He used the curved metallic object on areas where the dirt was firmest. The angle of descent was very severe. He continued to dig the hole’s hole. The sounds he uttered became by degrees more rudimentary and crude. He crawled, knowing, he scratched at dirt, he clawed the hard earth, everywhere, feeling it, a sense of interlocking opposites, the paradox, the comedy, the fool’s rule of total radiance.

  Zorgasm.

  On the surface another figure moved, this one on a white tricycle, heading the same way the Cadillac had come, madly pedaling, a boy a bit too large for his chosen means of transportation, knees bowed outward, elbows high and wide, head drawn into torso, his thumb on the small bell attached to the handlebar. He wore a jacket and tie. A measured length of darkness passed over him as he neared the hole and then he found himself pedaling in a white area between the shadow bands that precede total solar eclipse. This interval of whiteness, suggestive of the space between perfectly ruled lines, prompted him to ring the metal bell. It made no sound, or none that he could hear, laughing as he was, alternately blank and shadow-banded, producing as he was this noise resembling laughter, expressing vocally what appeared to be a compelling emotion, crying out as he was, gasping into the stillness, emitting as he was this series of involuntary shrieks, particles bouncing in the air around him, the reproductive dust of existence.

  About the Author

  Don DeLillo, who was born in 1936 in New York, is the author of nine highly acclaimed novels including Great Jones Street, Players, Ratner’s Star, Running Dog, and The Names (all available in Vintage Contemporaries editions).