Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  Billy moved slowly around the gym, keeping close to the walls. At the exit stood Calliope Shrub, casually slapping herself with the handkerchief. When his hostess was alone, finally, Billy approached her.

  “What’s under discussion here anyway? I thought this was supposed to be a discussion group. Everybody’s standing around whispering. What’s the topic under discussion? I came here expecting to hear something discussed.”

  “We’re discussing you,” Desilu said. “You’re the topic under discussion. Not only that but you’re scheduled to address the group in about two minutes flat.”

  “What’s supposed to be my subject?”

  “Matches and coins was my understanding. A combined demonstration-address.”

  “While I’m still here, what do you know about a book that’s in very feverish demand, I hear, because of its pictured deformities.”

  “Deformities in what context?”

  “Tails and pouches.”

  “The feather baby is my all-time favorite,” she said.

  They made a point of staying away from the kitchen. Faye reached in there once to get something from the refrigerator but was careful not to look toward the sink. Her arm came around the door frame and her right hand groped for the upturned handle on the old Crosley Shelvador. She quickly snatched what she needed and slipped back out, lizardlike as possible, keeping body to wall. At no time did she look toward the sink or toward whatever was growing in the sink, whatever boneless archesporial horror. Occasionally they heard a knife or fork slide off a stack of dirty dishes and fall into the wan lymphatic solution that had begun accumulating many meals ago and that apparently had spawned the thing itself, the horror, the overripe science-fiction vegetoid. Of course, they didn’t really believe something was growing in there. It was an extended fantasy, a joke arising from the fact that the material remains of roughly twenty meals were packed into the sink, everything sitting in semiliquid matter due to a clogged drain. Occasionally they heard tiny gargling sounds, flatulent rondos, a plate (or something) sliding across the face of the plate beneath it. They laughed at these noises, continuing to avoid the kitchen.

  It was Faye who first referred to the thing as a vegetoid. It was her theory that the vegetoid threatened something even deeper than their lives. It would not bite or sting. It would not emit a deadly stench. Instead the vegetoid would absorb them. It would continue to grow until it slopped over the rim of the sink and eventually filled the apartment. They would be powerless to move. People in such situations were always powerless to move. This became Faye’s theme. Absorption by the shapeless mass. Total assimilation. They would be incorporated, transformed and metabolized. They would become functions of the inner liquid maintenance of the vegetoid. More extreme than death, this was de-occurrence, the most radical of cancellations. It was funny, a funny theory. They shared a number of laughs over it. Occasionally they heard a stacked glass overtilt (somehow) and fall into the equatorial blend. Their speech began to deteriorate.

  “Coming to get, get, get you.”

  They sent the dog in there several times but it always emerged unchanged, conveying no sense of traumatic creature-experience. They spoke to each other like very small children, making up scare words, using mimicry to ridicule. They heard more sounds from the kitchen. They joked some more. They talked of laying cinder blocks in the doorway and pouring cement. The vegetoid will ooze under, Faye said. It will seep through. We are powerless to move. That night Billy was awakened by the wordless cries of the scream lady who lived across the airshaft. It was the first time she’d ever screamed loud enough to interrupt his sleep and he listened for a time, failing as always to distinguish a word or two. Then he heard a second noise and it came from the opposite direction, the kitchen, and he sat up and concentrated, the sink maybe, the drain, a prolonged watery gasp, suction-whirl and a general settling of utensils, and he got out of bed and took the stunted poolstick with him into the kitchen, where he turned on the light and saw that the thick colorless fluid had drained from the sink, taking with it whatever hellish anomaly, if any, had been engendered there earlier and leaving behind nothing worse than the massive litter of dishes and pans, and so he turned off the light and went back to sleep and in the morning someone told him the scream lady was dead.

  “She was no worse than some I could name,” Faye said. “Naming no names but I’ve seen worse.”

  As a first-grader with his friend Natasha in what was left of the schoolyard at P.S. 32, he was confronted one day by Aniello Vaca, the eleven-year-old son of a man reputed to have tentacles—the metaphorical kind that reach into every area of legitimate business. Aniello himself had an operation going here and there and liked to use the relevant terminology, often describing the cash results of his extortion activities in and around the schoolyard as “a tremendous envelope.” This particular day he approached the two first-graders, addressing his remarks to Billy.

  “I want to see how smart you really are. Let’s say I give you a job. You work for me thirty days. Running numbers, makes no difference, doing anything, I don’t care. Now you can get paid two ways. Listen to this, because it’s up to you which way. I give you ten thousand dollars right up front and you do thirty days’ work. Or, listen to this, I give you a penny the first day, two cents the second day, four cents the third day and I keep doubling it for thirty days. You start with one measly cent. You work thirty days right through, Sadays and Sundies. I double each day. Or you get ten thousand big ones, straight up and down, I peel them right off, cash on the barrelhead. So which way is it? I want to see how smart everybody says you really are.”

  “Penny first day and keep doubling.”

  “Why is that, jerko?”

  “I end up with lots more.”

  “I’m ready to peel off ten thousand chibonies and you stand there and look me in the face and tell me this penny-ante deal is a better envelope. Tell this girl to stop squinting, hey. This girl gets on my nerves, this girl.”

  “I end up with five million three hundred and sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and nine dollars and twelve cents. Penny the first day and keep doubling for thirty days.”

  “This girl squints one more time, I’ll kick your ass.”

  “Why my ass? Kick hers. Or maybe you’re afraid she’ll kick back.”

  “That I’d like to see.”

  “Natasha, kick.”

  “I’m waiting and hoping,” Aniello said.

  “She won’t kick today. But that doesn’t mean you’re safe forever. Let’s see you come back tomorrow. Bring your friends. She’ll kick every ass that gets in her way. That’s the way she is. Some days she really feels like kicking ass.”

  On Mr. Morphy’s first day as special tutor he asked the small boy to add all the numbers from one to twenty-four. Billy knew there was a key. The number one went with twenty-four, two with twenty-three, three with twenty-two and so on, each pair totaling twenty-five. The key was twenty-five, which was simply to be multiplied by the number of pairs, obviously twelve. It was like climbing a ladder. You went up to twelve and then from thirteen down the other side to twenty-four (a ladder, he’d one day reflect, or a stellated twilligon) and it was easy to see that every corresponding set of numerals added up to twenty-five. The number twenty-five also possessed a certain immovability, refusing to disappear or even change places when raised to the second, third, fourth or higher powers. While the resonant number twelve matched one-to-one the letters in his fictional name, the scrawl on his birth certificate (William Denis Terwilliger Jr.) represented a unit length that totaled a satisfying twenty-five.

  Babe began to spend more time at the window, sipping Champale and looking across the street at the playground four stories down. The reason was Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. Raymond was seven feet, two inches tall but his finesse on the basketball court contradicted this fact. Although Babe wasn’t a basketball fan he couldn’t help being impressed by Raymond Odle, a senior at DeWitt Clinton High whose moves were already leg
endary among the syndics of the tristate basketball underground, heralding the age of the little big man. When people witnessed his implausible wrist-dribble or his zero-gravity double-pump fadeaway jumper off a pick at the high post (a shot that often concluded with the metal-gripping drollery of backspin and dead-rimming), they knew they weren’t seeing just another demonstration of giantism engaged in a parody of faunlike grace. Raymond was truly fluent and his moves were essentially those of a guard or small forward. His touch was light and deft, his movement toward the basket an uninterrupted medley of hip-swerves and epigrammatic deceptions. When he came off the boards with a rebound he seemed to drop more slowly than the other players, able to pause up there, a final ripple of his body, easily shaking people off in the course of his serene descent. The name NOSE CONE began to appear in headlines on the sports pages. Also spray-painted on the walls of buildings. Raymond’s largesse as an athlete, his fullness of style, was most evident in the free and easy atmosphere of the playground games. Babe watched from the window. People stood outside the fence, nodding. In the playground the little kids chanted: “No’Co, No’Co, No’Co.”

  Billy was just starting at Bronx Science when Raymond Odle was a senior at Clinton and they rode the same bus. One day he found himself sitting next to the seven-foot-two-inch athlete. The length of Raymond’s fingers almost made Billy faint. Dusty brown bones. Leathery sticks. So ancient and breakable. How could fingers that long and fierce seem delicate as well, seem readable, ten numbered documents made from the stems of aquatic sedges. He was sure one blow from Raymond’s thumb would be enough to disfigure him for life. Yet he felt secure next to the long man, figuring no marauding gang was likely to attempt a raid on any bus that contained Raymond (Nose Cone) Odle. So whenever possible he shared a seat with the basketball player, squeezing nervously past Raymond, who got on a stop earlier and liked to sit in the aisle seat and stretch his legs. There was a lot of conversation on the bus, most of it from Raymond’s schoolmates, directed Raymond’s way, particularly before an important game.

  “Lose their shoes, No’Co.”

  “No’Co, shoot the eyes, little-big.”

  “Throw the rock, No’Co.”

  “Put some hurt on their heads, No’Co pivotman.”

  Billy sat in the window seat, huddled in his mighty parka, a book or two opened in his lap. There was an intricate knowingness to the voices, the ever tensile quality of street experience, something old and secret, possibly dangerous to hear. He liked the fact that Raymond never replied to comments made by the other boys. Raymond was above it all. Raymond had the moves.

  “Bring us a move, No’Co.”

  If in the right frame of mind, on the right day, he would oblige by doing a silent little sit-down version of one of his moves on the court. He did this by bouncing in his seat and simultaneously tapping out an abbreviated foot-routine without bothering to uncross his legs. He wrung out every such move in deadpan fashion while his schoolmates went wild, pounding the sides of the bus and uttering near sobs of joy. In all the months they shared the same seat Billy heard Raymond speak but one sentence and it was directed at him, Billy, in evident wonder at the disparity between his age and the involved titles of the mathematical texts he carried and gingerly read, sometimes two at a time.

  “What I got sitting downside me here is getting to be nothing but two eyes and a head.”

  Babe made crazy faces to entertain the kids, among them Ralphie Buber, who was twice Billy’s size but appeared to be sharing his brain, as Faye put it, with a silent partner. It wasn’t unusual to see him coming along the street carrying a live crab taken from one of the fish markets on Arthur Avenue. He would hold the crab in his right hand and improvise a prehensile claw with the left. Then he would stand on a corner and leap out at passing cars, left hand and live crab extended, making as he leapt a strangulated glottal sound that may have been intended to represent what crabs say when trying to scare automobiles.

  “Movies are the dreams I never had,” Faye said. “They say everybody but everybody dreams. It’s just a question of remembering is how they usually put it. I’d like to believe that, mommy, but it’s no go. In my case it’s not a question of remembering. It’s a case in my case of sorry lady no dreams for sale. Movies take place in the dark. That’s their magic for me. I saw them all, every one of them I could get to go see. At the Fairmont, the Deluxe, the RKO Fordham, the Paradise, the Valentine, the Ascot, the Fox. I went everywhere and saw every picture, the greats and the stiffs, great and stiff alike. What’s great is that they were all great, even the stiffs. Because they took place in the dark. Because everybody wore costumes. Because it was like something you were remembering instead of seeing for the first time. We talked back to movies then. You could do that then. If somebody in the picture said something stupid, you said something back. If you wanted action, you told them to stop kissing behind the ear and get to the swordplay. The ushers went up and down the aisles with their flashlights, trying to shush people up and telling people to get their feet off the seats. Boys tried to pick up girls. People squeezed in and out of the aisles through the whole movie, going to the bathroom, going for candy and soda, going to the lobby to just hang around. Meanwhile the balcony is a total zoo with smooching, arguments, heavy necking, candy wrappers flying around, feet up on the seats, talking back to the picture. Now if I want to go to a movie I have to go downtown. Around here they’re either shut down, or supermarkets, or high crime areas with chandeliers. So it’s TV for me. No great loss as long as they keep showing the classics. The movie industry perished in about the nineteen forties anyway. Artistically it just dropped dead. Maybe the war killed it. But they were great all the same, pictures then; I vouch for every one of them, swordplay or no swordplay. I was a little girl. Then I was a grown woman. It all happened in the movies.”

  There was a shooting on the second floor late one night. Babe went down to watch the police outline the body’s position in chalk. People stood in the doorways clutching their own arms. Little kids slid out from the massed adults and played in the halls, running up and down the stairs in their underwear. A transistor radio played Latin soul. Babe was the last person to leave the scene, having observed the details with the same degree of attention he lavished on construction sites and people changing flat tires.

  “Who was it?” Faye said.

  “Alphonso Rackley.”

  “Do I know him?”

  “Fishnet shirt.”

  “Wears a T-shirt underneath?”

  “Him.”

  “Do they know who did it?” she said.

  “There was talk his brother-in-law. I overheard a remark or two being passed. Common Saturday night occurrence.”

  “Overheard who—cops?”

  “Ballistics team.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They marked the body,” he said. “It was spread up and down four or five steps, so it took them a while to mark it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Put him in a body bag and carried him down. Three patrolmen. Two front, one rear.”

  “Do they have the brother-in-law in custody?” she said.

  “He fled the scene.”

  “What about the blood?” she said. “Do I have to walk through a pool of blood on my way downstairs tomorrow?”

  “The super cleaned it.”

  “It must have left a gorgeous stain. I never talked to this Alphonso person in my life. Now I’ll be avoiding his personal bloodstain for the next ten years.”

  “D.O.A.,” he said. “That’s the way they’ll log it in their log books when they get him to the morgue.”

  “Dead upon arrival.”

  “I talked to a detective on the scene. He asked me any family. I said the only family’s the guy that shot him. I told him I knew the deceased. I told him we talked in the hall once or twice. The deceased carried a small lead pipe in his back pocket everywhere he went. So with me and my poolstick, it gave us something to talk about whenev
er we saw each other in the hall. He was quiet and soft-spoken. Never had much to say. Everybody liked Alphonso. I told him that. I told him I couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to do a thing like this to a person like the deceased.”

  Raymond Odle’s grades were not good. Naturally this fact alone wouldn’t have prevented most colleges from recruiting him. There was a worse problem. He had accepted a sum of money (four figures, it was said) in return for lending his name (or nickname) to a recently incorporated ice cream franchise operation that had outlets in all five boroughs. Double Dribble Nose Cones. It was Babe’s opinion that the young man’s amateur status should not be shattered by one minor mistake. Strict legality prevailed, however, mainly because the case received a great deal of attention at the height of a public outcry against pampered athletes and questionable recruiting practices. In the end the only school that would accept Raymond was an unaccredited junior college that specialized in maritime studies. The school was located on an old supply ship permanently at anchor near the Shackleton Ice Shelf. The basketball team played only four or five games a year. A pickup team of scientists from a research station near the Ross Ice Shelf flew in every six months, weather permitting, and the forty members of a New Zealand basketball club, the Christchurch New Celtics, took a chartered flight down to Antarctica whenever they found themselves with surplus funds. So Raymond Odle’s moves on the court, those effortless serifs of his, were destined to be witnessed only by novices, fellow students and a few bearded meteorologists.