Ratner's Star

by Don DeLillo

  “That takes in a lot of territory.”

  “Scientist or not, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by it all. I mean the sheer allness, the sheerness of it all. To cite an example, what do you suppose happens to a person after death?”

  “He remains in that state.”

  “My wife is dead, you know.”

  “Nobody warned me.”

  “What kind of system permits this sort of finality?”

  “Death?”

  “It’s so definitive.”

  “Buried or cremated?”

  “She’s in an icebox in Houston,” Wismer said. “Left her body to science.”

  “What will they do with it?”

  “I hate to tell you.”

  “Stick needles?”

  “At the very least,” Wismer said. “The whole thing depresses and worries me, not least of all the question of what happens in the first few seconds after electrical activity in the brain ceases forever. Personally I think there’s some kind of turning inside out. That’s my theory. An unknotting of consciousness in a space of n dimensions. A turning outward. Not that I’d say the word. I’d rather commit the act than say the word. Particularly in front of a lady.”

  “What word?”

  “Evaginate.”

  They entered a huge operating theater.

  “So what’s this electrode we’re seeing demonstrated?”

  “It’s a device that would greatly simplify manned space missions. Probably increase an astronaut’s capabilities a thousandfold. Which means I’ll be a very interested observer today. Of course I don’t know what they want to use it for.”

  Two men entered the theater. They were dressed in surgical gear—masks, caps, gowns, gloves. Dr. Wismer greeted them and then took a seat high above the floor of the operating theater. The room was full of wires, cables and monitoring devices. There was so much wiring in fact that nine or ten different colors had been used to enable technicians and others to distinguish between the strands. Wires were bundled, twisted and interlaced. They connected various machines, ran along the walls and floor, hung in clumps from a section of ceiling where panels had been removed.

  “Ignore this mess,” one of the men said. “It’s the equivalent of making prophecies by studying an animal’s entrails. Now that we’ve got the Leduc electrode, all this paraphernalia gets junked. My name is Cheops Feeley.”

  “I’ve heard of your medal.”

  “That’s not the only thing named after me. There’s a science fair, two research centers and a gypsy health clinic.”

  “You’re a gypsy?”

  “Lapsed.”

  “I heard your medal’s given for work that’s crazy in places.”

  “Madness content,” Feeley said. “Nobody mentions it aloud but we all know that strict scientific merit is only one of the elements considered. The dark side of the award is what appeals to most people.”

  There was a large shipping container in a corner of the room. Billy noticed a scrawny old cat looking out over the top of the box. Cheops Feeley took a long step forward, putting both his hands on the boy’s head, probing with his fingertips.

  “You’ve got it, all right. Just as I suspected. I was sure it would be there.”

  “What would be there?”

  “The mathematics bump.”

  “If there’s a bump, it never hurt.”

  “It’s a life passion of mine, skull conformation. Yours is very distinct. Definitely a bump for mathematics. That settles it.”

  “Settles what?”

  “Everything,” Feeley said. “You’re definitely the person we want. The Leduc electrode is only part electrode. It’s a bundle of extremely tiny wires able to stimulate and record brain activity. But here’s the stroke of genius. These wires are attached to a microminiaturized disk that functions almost exactly as a computer does. But not just any computer. The Leduc electrode has Space Brain capability. And it’s small enough to be implanted under someone’s scalp. Through a tiny incision that leaves no scars. Once it heals. And the hair grows back.”

  All he could see of the men were their eyes, two sets, very steady, green here, hazel there, pinched in by mask and cap. Slowly the cat worked its way over the top of the box, followed by two others just as mangy. Billy looked up at Skip Wismer, who seemed to have dozed off.

  “The Leduc electrodes are in that container to your right.”

  “Who’s that on my left?”

  “That’s Leduc.”

  The other man nodded. At least, Billy thought, everybody’s identified. One of the cats lazily climbed back into the box as three others emerged. Cheops Feeley went over there and lifted out a pink disk with wires attached. Terrific hygiene procedures. Watch him clean it off with some spit.

  “We ordered blue and pink. But they only sent pink.”

  “Are they different besides color?”

  Feeley shook his head.

  “Here’s our thinking on the matter. You with your enormous powers of abstraction. Space Brain with its unsurpassed superfine computations. A single dynamic entity. With no scars. And hair that’s guaranteed to grow back.”

  “Sounds familiar, talk of this combination.”

  “We have massive backing. The resources of a very powerful cartel. Once the electrode is buried in your head, assuming you agree to such a procedure, all I have to do is notify them and you get paid a generous retainer for a period of time not to exceed the life of the appliance.”

  “They want to regulate the money curve, right? That’s their only interest in life. The two strange talkers. Tell them my head stays shut.”

  “You don’t have to decide now. This is just a trial run. I want to point out that subcutaneous implantation is no great problem in and of itself. Although there’s a slight inconvenience in this particular case.”

  “Cat hairs.”

  “Listen closely,” Feeley said. “The problem with the device as now constituted is that it tends to overstimulate the left side of the brain. This will result in an overpowering sense of sequence. You’ll be acutely aware of the arrangement of things. The order of succession of events. The way one thing leads to another. This is a side effect of carrying the appliance under your scalp but it’s not too great a price to pay for the kind of madness ratio we’re getting, not to mention scientific value. True, you’ll find yourself analyzing a continuous series of acts in terms of their discrete components. Eating a sandwich will no longer be the smooth operation you’ve always known it to be. You’ll experience, should you agree to host the electrode, a strong awareness of your hands, your mouth, your throat, your stomach, whatever’s between the slices of bread, the bread itself. You might even find yourself in retrograde orbit, so to speak. Bread, bakery truck, bakery, flour, wheat and so on. There is so much involved. Our lives are so dense. The baker’s hands, the farmer, his barn, the paint job, the latex, the trees. There is so much and all of it will be apprehended, as you eat the sandwich, should you agree to the implantation, in related sequence. In consecutive order. In proper succession. You’ll be involved in a very detailed treatment of reality. A parody of the left brain. But is this reality of yours less valid than ordinary reality? Not at all. You’ll be establishing fresh paths of awareness. Taking nothing for granted. Dealing with unlimited data. Every breath you take will be subjected to a thorough sequential analysis. Heart, lungs, nostrils, oxygen, carbon dioxide and so forth. There is so much involved and it’s all right there for the asking.”

  The scabby cats seeped in and out of the box where the electrodes were stored. Cheops Feeley explained once more that Billy would be given ample time to decide whether he wanted to take part. This was just a test exercise, a dress rehearsal for the actual implantation. The procedure, should he agree to it, would be carried out in a chair-shaped operating table to save time between barbering and incision. He asked Leduc to get the table in question, as a practice maneuver, and then, handing the pink disk or “appliance” to the boy, went to look for a comb
, pair of scissors and hair clipper. Finding himself alone with the dozing Dr. Skip Wismer, Billy moved in deliberate stages to the nearest exit. He eased his head out past the door frame and into the corridor, ready to follow it with left foot and leg. Someone was drinking from an ornamental fountain in a circular area about fifty feet beyond the end of the corridor. It was a man, dark-skinned and absolutely naked. Billy was motionless now, watching. As the man raised himself, his hands uncupping from his face, the boy could see that he was white-haired, although of indeterminate age, and that his chest was painted with geometric figures.

  He stepped back into the operating theater. Leduc entered through another door, wheeling the chairlike device, which included among other things a battery of pen recorders poised to scribble brain rhythms on a continuous sheet of graph paper. Cheops Feeley arrived a moment later, carrying a barber’s kit.

  “Hercule, you do the hair,” he said. “Just pretend, of course. Move the clippers over his head.”

  “I do not give permission,” Billy said.

  “Why so formal?”

  “I’m just saying there’s no point doing any more of this, because I’m not agreeing to do it. I don’t know how I let it get this far.”

  “Nobody’s going to force you. I thought I made that clear. Take part in the trial run, that’s all we ask. Help us get our timing down pat. Then, later, should you change your mind, we’ll be able to function smoothly, as befits an undertaking of this magnitude.”

  “How can a gypsy be lapsed?”

  “A simple announcement usually suffices,” Feeley said. “Now, please, take a seat in our device. Leduc will make clipping motions over your head.”

  “I get these foot cramps. I have one now. If I sit down, I’m finished. The only way to get rid of it is to give the blood a chance to circulate. That means to stay in a standing position.”

  Feeley looked at Hercule Leduc, who spoke for the first time, his voice blunted somewhat by the surgical mask he was wearing.

  “It is convenient for you to believe you have a cramp,” he said. “All of physical reality is a matter of convenience. Does A lead to B? Or is it simply convenient to believe that A leads to B? Both and neither. When we have succeeded in wedging an exception between the external world and our awareness of it, then we will discover that the divinity of the spirit of consciousness is based on the risks we are willing to take in order to fabricate pure terror and Olympian love. It was convenient for you to see an aborigine a few moments ago. This is poetic espionage undertaken by the senses to counteract the suspicions of void we harbor regarding existence itself. We are most a victim of the principle of intelligence when we try to conceal our lonely terror and pursue a style of incessant self-deception.”

  Dozens of cats climbed in and out of the shipping container. The two gowned men conferred for a moment. Billy still had the electrode he’d been given earlier. He sidled over to the box and dropped it in among the cats and the other pink disks. Then he stood there shaking his foot as if to stimulate increased blood circulation in that area.

  “Do I believe you?” Feeley said.

  “About what?”

  “The cramp,” he said. “Hercule, do we believe him?”

  “It’s numb at the same time as it buzzes, if you want to compare it with your own both experiences.”

  “We agree to believe you on one condition,” Feeley said.

  “Let’s hear.”

  “That, whether or not you agree to the implantation, you seriously consider being put in a package. Lecture tours, talk shows, a quickie biography, T-shirts, funny buttons. The ancillary rights alone could set us up for years. Endorsements, puzzles, games, mathematics LPs. The talent is obvious, it’s there, you’ve got the bump. I see you taking on the world’s greatest adult mathematicians in a series of international matches. Problems devised by a distinguished panel. Broad media coverage. Or maybe a package with an older person for contrast. You go on joint tours with deluxe accommodations. Discussion groups, lectures, wrist watches, funny buttons, debates. Can it possibly miss? I envision you dressed in a silver lamé kimono or a vinyl poncho. Once the incision heals. And the hair grows back. Leaving you without a scar. We’ll package you with somebody you really admire. There must be one special figure in the world community of scientists. Who’s your hero? Tell us and we’ll get him.”

  “People from the Bronx don’t have heroes.”

  It was Rosicrucia Sandoval who told Billy that the scream lady was dead. Rosicrucia was a short broad woman with breasts so bunched up and shapeless under her housedress that they appeared to be still in the process of formation. Her estranged common-law husband had been following her for months, his right hand inside his jacket, a theatrical mannerism meant to signify the presence of a weapon. Wherever she went she saw him, Sixto Ortiz by name, until finally she asked Faye for permission to use the Terwilligers’ fire escape to get in and out of the building. Since the fire escape was at the back and led down to an alley, which in turn led to the basement doors of five different buildings, Rosicrucia felt she’d be able to move freely without being seen. Babe okayed the arrangement on the condition that she take the garbage with her on her way out the window. The setup lasted only one day because of the attack dog’s reaction to someone coming in from the fire escape. Babe told Faye to inform the beleaguered woman that she had less to fear than she thought.

  “Hispanics only shoot from cars,” he said. “Tell her not to worry until he starts following her in a car. Hispanics shoot into crowds from speeding cars. Of course, there’s always the chance he plans to knife her. A car is no good to him then.”

  About a month before the scream lady died, Rosicrucia sat on a folding chair in front of the building and, while keeping an eye out for Sixto, told Billy about the scream lady’s recent operation.

  “They gave her an ectomy. Three hours on the table. Complications, I heard. But now she’s quiet since they did it. Only screams once, twice a day. It’s how they quiet certain people.”

  “Ectomy,” he said.

  “That’s right, ectomy, they did an ectomy. It’s what they do to quiet a woman when they get to a bad age. Take out the hysterical organs. Three hours on the table plus. When she screams it’s different now. Not so much an animal, you know?”

  “Maybe they took out the wrong organ,” he said. “They should have took the throat.”

  “The throat is not hysterical,” Rosicrucia said. “Only hysterical organs come out in an ectomy.”

  That same day he entered the building behind his own and climbed four flights of stairs to the scream lady’s door. He had dared himself to do it and so here he was. It was a period of his childhood in which he constantly dared himself to do disagreeable things. The strange piece of paper he had once snatched from her hand (cryptic numeroglyphics) was still hidden in one of his textbooks. But why, all daring aside, was he here? Maybe to ask her what the occult writing had meant. Or to hear her speak a single intelligible word. Or simply to look at her again. Nevertheless he was too scared to knock on the door. He dared himself again and again. (Knock or I’ll kill you.) But he just stood there looking at the door. He looked at it until it opened. There she was once more, dressed in two or three bathrobes, exceedingly real, her presence fully developed in the dimness, a reminder of some cavernous fear. A sense of decomposition seemed paradoxically to replenish her body. Her power derived from this physical dwindling; she gathered strength from it, prospering on the horror in other people’s eyes. Again she was barefoot and from an invisible hole in her throat came the same muted static. He backed off instinctively, edging toward the stairs. She hummed her static at him. Not once did she move, content to stand in the doorway in her furrowed robes.

  “Put it in words,” he said.

  After a while she screamed. He didn’t move. Motion at this point would have been disrespectful. He had never been this close to the scream lady when she was in the act of screaming and it was an occasion not without a certain c
ommercial solemnity, resembling some authentic and quite powerful native rite at which attendance by tourists is permitted during specified hours. So he stood where he was, afraid to violate a tender balance between the woman and her act. For that second or two he lived within the scream. It vibrated inside him and overwhelmed the air around him—horrible, of course—much more than meaningless noise, her madness in its waveforms and repetitions occupying his body, madness measured in cycles per second, her willful disintegration taking over his mind. He watched her go back into the apartment. She didn’t close the door behind her. He stood in the hall (daring himself) for several moments, or until the scream completely left his body. Then he followed her into the apartment, expecting to see stacks of old newspapers and filthy drifts of clothing that she’d gathered from the street and left everywhere to rot. But once out of the long entranceway he could see it was different, that she lived in stark circumstances, junkless, very little furniture, a cot to sleep on, both rooms nearly empty and yet far from bare. The walls. Because of the walls. Everywhere he looked there was black crayon script, her secret writing flung across the walls from floor to ceiling, uninterrupted by windows, doors, corners of the room. She sat by the open window, looking out on alleys lined with dented garbage cans. The small boy walked along a wall, trying to read the black wax, inhaling what she’d written, fumes from a hundred coloring books, that oily condiment he’d so often savored on his own two hands.

  Secret weapons held sub ground NY under neath sub way & electric line voltage tunnels/Secret TV in walls & inter/de/ception of mail by name less agent person nil of danger/US net work/Goatspill to cat licks juice protest ants according St. Marx (13:13) hated for my names sake/Magna Carta 1215 + Napoleons waterloo 1815 = 3030 years war/CHECK ME ON THIS/Addition my mission to US of ABC/Hellelujah days coming America Britain Canada/Dis (out of) ease agents functioning in lavatories/stairwells/basements to un (off of) seat the visible regime/Plague bearers/Paid to un (take off) leash germ war fare on private taxpay level/Toilet seat pisces crab cause Cancer/Poison insect bites give you/me Scorpio/Dread emitters of bull & ram para/lye/seize/Quote the zodiac at own risk & stay out of kid nap (SLEEPING CHILD STOLEN FROM HIS DREAM) & read Marx (13:17) woe to them that give suck in those days/None can eat/sit/sleep with out fear of contam or infestate by the name less provokers/Banks watched All beds micro phoned Dark nes(t) spied on for signs of re VOLT ing/For many shall come in my name (13:6)/Sub neath be under ware: China = 3 + 8 + 9 + 14 + 1 = 35 centuries B.C. (SHOPPING DAYS BEFORE CHRIST)/Coming up to sur face with secret dis (out of) guise of name & place/Meow Tse-tung/Confucius = Confuse/U.S. 551–479 B.C. = 72 = St. Marx 13/17/6/36: Lest coming of a sudden he find you asleep