Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “There is no ultimate number. Mathematics depends on infinity. You can keep on counting forever. It never ends, the number series.”

  “The others grow fativi on bulk orders of goods and orderables. Real money is germed and clumsy of usage even if capable of spendfulness. We call it the negauchable currency in the transargot of cartel regulation. The curve, however, is pure. It is ours to control with the help of your precisionized brain. Think of yourself enwrapped by lady-people. Such will be the fame of your power. A penthouse manned by women. All sizes dressed in filmed subgarments. Merely agree to follow the curve. Otherwise beyond the last number is the faceless chaos, which is just a gateway to the abysm itself. All limits twisted out of shapule. Impossible to converge thereon. Your existenz becomes unthinkable in this warped region. But this is just a warm-up, for beyond the big abysm is the voidal nicht y nacht. Metamathematik. Zed to the minus zed power. Much más than that I don’t even dare to whisper.”

  “Máslessness,” Grbk said.

  “Beware of that over there. His hands are verging on the shirt. This means he dwells in the fixed idée of unbuttoning. Double conical protuberances. Nipples as nipples. This is something I as myself have no wish-inclination to look upon. As observer I remain but as myself I am very much repelled by the erotic corruption of children. He’s done this to many boys and girls, the publication of nipples, but up to now I’ve yet to see it as myself.”

  “Tell him I’m fourteen. If he knows this, he may not want to expose to me. I’m a lot older than I look. He probably likes to expose to younger kids. Tell him he won’t get anything out of it, my being older than he thinks. I’m getting up and leaving unless you start explaining fast. I know there’s no reason to run. It’s just a man’s nipples and all he wants to do is show them to me. In my mind I know this. But I’m running anyway.”

  “Decommence,” Troxl said to his assistant. “The boykid is determined not to join us. No point in depraving the air further. I say haltung and rebutton. You’re contractually bound to obey me. Don’t take that shirt ovsk. Decease at once, fetid mammal.”

  Billy was away, bumping out the door and hieing himself to the play maze. From here he staged his escape, coming eventually to a small and lavishly mirrored room, a barbershop in fact, all tile and ivory, smelling of coroner’s tonics. There was no barber in sight and only one chair, occupied. The chair was angled in such a way that the occupant’s head was about five feet off the floor. Since the head was wrapped in a towel and the body covered with the customary tonsorial bib, all he could see was the person’s shoes. Slowly he circled the chair, halting immediately when he saw a hand emerging from the sheet, fingers extended. There was nothing repulsive about the hand—no warts or raised and rampant veins—and so he took it and shook it.

  “Shlomo Glottle,” the man said in a smothered voice. “I knew it was you from your footsteps. Where’s the barber?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I fell asleep and dreamed I was screaming. When I woke up, no barber. I’ve been hoping to meet you for a long time. When I heard you were coming here I couldn’t believe it. Then word reached me that you were actually here. ‘He’s on the premises, he’s in the building.’ Imagine how excited I was, a person who’s always wanted to chitchat with someone like you. Have you met the aborigine?”

  “I’m having a little trouble hearing you.”

  “Let me rephrase the question. Nobody’s actually met the aborigine. The aborigine seems to be unmeetable. If he exists at all, we’ll have to depend on poor old Mutuka to act as spokesman and since Mutuka’s gone back to the bush, that ends that. Were you at the demonstration? That’s the question I should have asked in the first place.”

  “There’s a towel on your face.”

  “Talk up. Don’t be shy. Use some of the lung power you were born with. It’s my understanding the aborigine visited more than one planet when he traveled to Ratner’s star. I was the person who informed Mutuka at the outset that we were receiving signals from Ratner’s star. Mutuka then consulted with the aborigine in the bush and eventually brought him here for the demonstration and it’s my understanding and correct me if I’m wrong that at the demonstration the aborigine was quoted more or less parenthetically as having claimed there is life on more than one satellite of Ratner’s star. Space Brain has now confirmed a two-satellite configuration. We have computer confirm on this. The white-haired one didn’t just say life, life, there is life. He said more than one world, more than one planetary body, making your work here no less urgent more than ever. ‘He’s on the premises,’ they said. ‘He’s actually in the building.’ It is you, isn’t it? Those are your footsteps, right? You’re the math wizard, aren’t you?”

  Shlomo Glottle’s right hand had been so free of imperfection that Billy, watching the same hand now unwrapping the face towel, unreasonably feared the effects of some awful law of reverse compensation, a counterbalancing deformity of the face perhaps, Glottle’s face, a half-mouth maybe or exposed mucous membrane, the face that at this moment was coming out of the towel, and so, knowing it was stupid on several levels, he left the barbershop and hurried toward the source of the odd toneless music sounding along the corridor.

  “I tell the truth about people.”

  In an antique chair sat a small wan woman playing a string instrument triangular in shape, its neck unbent and body obviously carved by hand from raw reluctant wood. The room was soft with dust and shadow, everywhere the ruck of clustered objects, most of them plainly put together and left to themselves to grow into the look of familiar things, every angle, plane and coloration recalling the hush of some mellow room where beaded dresses rest limply on the arms of rocking chairs. In a wide glance he saw old piano benches and cellos in repose; medieval wind instruments; puppets, toys and small statuary; ceremonial spears and halberds; a white tricycle; stoic bamboo bound in corners; two-string Oriental violins; and finally an enormous organ with neon tubing for pipes.

  From her chair the woman, at eye level with the boy, seemed to smile him into the room, almost imperceptibly, her eyes measuring his hesitation in the melting desert light.

  “People come to me to discuss their names, if interesting and strange. It’s my avocation, my serious amusement, the study of names. Naturally I have other work here, crystal structure, but often I wonder which is more useful, silly hobby or vital science.”

  She continued playing the crude instrument. The sound it produced made him uncomfortable. It was stark and dry, lacking all resonance, a small voice howling through cork.

  “I like literally to segment a name until nothing remains. Few names yield completely to this practice. I remove one letter at a time, retaining meaning, it is hoped, to the very end.”

  “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Siba Isten-Esru.”

  “Pretty good.”

  “Seven Eleven.”

  “Serious?”

  “These are number words of a people who go back to the very dawn. The half-name Isten is of special consequence to me. Isten is the word for the number one in Assyro-Babylonian. We can ask ourselves what this particular number one contains. By removing the first letter, the i, we arrive at the root word sten, indicating narrowness, as in the Greek stenos, or narrow. This inclines us to be encouraged, this stenos, since what we are engaged in is the very process of contraction. What next then? We remove the s from sten. This yields ‘ten,’ our second number word, this one in English as you’re well aware. But there is more to this particular ten, for it is contained within isten, giving us ten and one, or eleven, which is doubly curious because my full surname, Isten-Esru, means precisely that, eleven; or, expressed literally, one and ten, isten stroke esru. This eleven, which we’ve discovered not only in my full surname but in the English ten contained in the Assyro-Babylonian one, is the loveliest of two-digit primes, an indivisible mirror image of itself. Remaining with ten a moment longer, we know that in Roman numerals it is written large X. When we shri
nk this monster, we are left with an unknown number, not to mention an illiterate kiss. So thus far we have severed twice, to sten and ten. We now remove the t of ten. Our segmentation would seem to weaken here but not if we gaze carefully into the artful enate process taking place. For here we have a reversal, a sudden shift from the narrowing trend to a new phenomenon, one of growing outward, of expanding. In English the fragment e-n is often used to make verbs out of adjectives, adjectives out of nouns, and is likewise added to nouns to make verbs—‘lengthen’ and ‘heighten,’ for instance. To grow, to increase, to gain. Reversing the letters e-n for a moment, we concentrate on the Greek nu, or n, and we see that it comes from the Phoenician word for ‘fish,’ which in turn developed from a Semitic root meaning ‘to increase.’ So there it turns up again—expansion. Now the Greek e, after some refinement, turned out to be the reverse, graphically, of the Phoenician e, which itself was somewhat Chinese-looking. In the parlance of my own field, crystallography, these e’s are enantiomorphic, unable to be superimposed because one mirrors the other. To conclude our stimulating discussion of the fragment e-n, I would like to refer to the ancient practice of gematria. In the Greek form, epsilon is assigned the number five, nu the number fifty. The resulting fifty-five, totaled in digits, equals ten, or esru, of which the digital root is one, or isten. Not uninteresting, eh? Now to the final contraction. We have removed the i, the s, the t, and now we take away the e, leaving us with lonely n, the well-known mathematical sign for an indefinite number. This suggestion that precise limits are lacking tends to reinforce the sense of expansion inherent in contraction. There is also large N to be considered. This is Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s cosmical number, his symbol for the total number of particles in the universe. And little n is as well the abbreviation of the Latin natus, meaning ‘born,’ which returns us full-belly to the word ‘enate,’ growing outward, and to its fetal twin ‘enatic,’ related on the mother’s side. So we begin with isten, or one, and through shrinkage, growth and reversal we have come finally to an indefinitely large quantity, giving birth to blank space and silence.”

  The wind-dry music cried from her hands. She wore several layers of pale yellow material and her feet were encased in monumental sandals.

  “People ask about their names in an attempt to add to their self-knowledge. Anyone of woman born is by nature superstitious. We stand in awe over the unseen and half-known. Our work here helps us escape this tradition. We try to leave the dark behind. Positive numerical values. Bright shining stars.”

  He thought of a passage in an old textbook. Back of the chapter where review questions lurk. Acres of windswept italics.

  When do we say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small?

  We say that a variable quantity becomes infinitely small when its numerical value decreases indefinitely in such a way as to converge toward the limit zero.

  “Your name is a contraction, is it not?”

  “Terwilliger was shortened by subtracting e-r at the beginning and e-r at the end.”

  “With your permission I’d like to examine the result.”

  “Twillig.”

  “Obviously a highly artificial name. This is good. I like this. It’s a silly name, true, but it vibrates with felicitous little ripples. My first reaction is strictly a sense impression. Twinkle and twig. I see and touch star and stick. ‘Twinkle’ is cute, insufferably so, a verb put together solely for the nursery purpose of reiteration. I believe it derives from the Old English word for ‘wink,’ suitably enough, and it has some relevance, I suppose, to your work on the star code. It’s a fact that centuries ago in my part of the world men studied mathematics in order to become astronomers, to ponder the heavens. Astronomy was not the ultimate goal, however, but merely a preparation for astrology. ‘Twig’ is perhaps more germane.”

  “So far I don’t see myself at all.”

  “Undoubtedly twigs were employed as one of the earliest means of numeration and most likely evolved into the tally sticks and counting stalks used at the very dawn or soon thereafter by the most advanced peoples of the Near, Far and Middle East. But let’s to more important matters get.”

  She moved her body as she spoke, side to side, and his eyes were on her hands at rest on the rough wood rocking in her lap.

  “There are two distinct parts to your name and they comprise the essence of my analysis. Twi—two. Lig—to bind, as in ‘ligate’ and ‘ligature.’ Is it your destiny then to bind together two distinct entities? To join the unjoinable? We all wait for your answer.”

  “I don’t know how I’m destined. Nobody knows that about him- or herself. I’m surprised somebody in crystal structure can expect an answer to a question like that.”

  “Considering your name, it’s the obvious question to ask,” she said. “It would surely be remiss of me not to ask it. We anticipate a reply at your earliest convenience.”

  “Is it possible to leave without feelings being hurt?”

  “Twi, it’s important to note, means not only ‘two’ but ‘half,’ while lig can mean ‘constrict’ as well as ‘bind.’ I think of half-light, or twilight, and further of twilight sleep, that self-erasing condition induced by drugs and designed to ease the constricting pain of childbirth. But who or what is being born?”

  “You’re the expert.”

  “It’s your name,” she said. “That means you’re responsible for whatever pointed references I can shake out of it. You’re the two-part toy and boy in a made-to-order carrying case. Names tell stories. Twinkle and twig. The first two bites of the suppertime story poem. Naturally names that go back to the very dawn have greater storied content than modern names, most of which are merely convenient denotations packed with noise value.”

  “I make no reply.”

  “We conclude,” she said. “Twalif, Germanic compound, gives us two left over, two beyond ten. So both two and twelve figure in your story. We follow the root word through various twists and forks in the road until we spy the Old English twigge, or ‘branch,’ which justifies my original sense impression and returns us to ‘twig,’ ‘stick,’ ‘stalk.’ Enough, it’s over, run.”

  “This room and these old things,” he said. “What are these old things doing here? It’s like a storeroom. What’s all this stuff for?”

  “These are Endor’s effects. Henrik Endor had these things sent here soon after he arrived. This is all his. He was a collector. He used to collect things. This room wasn’t being used, so he had everything put in here.”

  “Is this Endor’s room?”

  “Endor’s room is padlocked. This is the hobby room. Nobody has been in Endor’s room since he started living in the hole. They padlocked Endor’s room and named this the hobby room. Those are the two changes we have witnessed since Endor departed for the hole.”

  “I’m leaving now,” he said.

  “Names tell stories and so do numbers. Zahl and tale. One coils continuously into the other. Zahl, tal, talzian, tala, tale. Number, speech, teach, narration, story. Not uninteresting, eh? Whorls of a fingerprint. Convolutions of tree-ring chronology.”

  “Here I go.”

  “Is that an idiomatic expression?” she said. “Here I go?”

  “Charming speech form. Very peculiar to itself. I must remember to use it at the first opportunity or soon thereafter. I wonder if you’d mind repeating it for me just once.”

  “Here I go.”

  “I think I have it,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  Her fingers returned to the strings of the singular instrument. The lost sound commenced, toneless and hollow. He decided to take a walk on one of the broad lawns that stretched nearly to the synthesis telescope. It was still light. Sweet mist was suspended in the air, making everything tremble. He saw someone in red kneeling at the base of a distant tree. Everything else was aquamarine, a sunken meadow, fresh scent of vespertine breezes, sounds he’d never heard before, how the wind made forests seem to verge on bursting and where a hidden stream
failed in sand, all tempered within by vanishing light, the abundant sundown blush that made this oceanic hour whisper to the senses. The figure was that of a man wearing a cassock that was fire-engine red. At first he appeared to be meditating but as Billy drew closer he realized the man was looking at something as he knelt in the grass. A small hill. A nest of some kind. An ant hill. The man had silver-white hair with a perfectly round bald spot in the middle and he was studying the ants as they moved from one opening of the nest to another and then out again. Billy got down on one knee for a closer look.

  “Armand Verbene.”

  “Say again please. What language is that?”

  “It’s my name.”

  “I thought you were telling me welcome in a foreign language.”

  “Armand Verbene, S.J. Forty years a priest. A condition wholly accidental to beatitude. These are my ants, my red ants. For years I’ve been trying to convince the scientific power structure that red ant metaphysics is a hard science.”

  “I hear you’re opposed to the cycloid as a geometric figure because it has valuable properties even when it’s upside down.”

  “My work deals with the proposition that the divine essence is imitable outside itself. There’s nothing soft here. This isn’t long-range weather forecasting. I study my ants rigorously. I use rigorous methods. Every creature possesses a divine likeness and therefore attains to the divine ideal through assimilation. This is in theory. For proof we cite the creatures of the physical world as evidence of the reflectability of selfward-tending teleological perfection, rightside up, red ants in particular.”

  “I draw a blank.”

  “What kind of ignorance am I dealing with here?”

  “How many kinds are there?”

  “As many as the mind of man can catalogue. Don’t they teach ignorance in school anymore? In your case I believe I’m dealing either with antecedent causal ignorance or consequent causal ignorance. If antecedent causal, either compound antecedent causal or simple antecedent casual. Of course, consequent causal ignorance always follows upon culpable retention, which can be caused and spread by three subsidiary kinds of ignorance—affected, connatural and crass.”