by Don DeLillo
All through summer the ripe nights were full of stroboscopic motion. Open hydrants lowered the water pressure and women screamed out of top-story windows at the boys and girls standing in the wide cockscomb spray they’d created by putting a bottomless keg over the mouth of the hydrant. Billy and his father stood on the stoop with a man named Consagra, a recent occupant, heavy and squat, said to be an illegal alien. Kids scaled the playground fence, ran and stopped short, jostled each other in elaborately designed war rhythms whose immediate purpose was the baring of homemade weapons, no more (in these early stages of the evening) than simple disclosure, a promise (as glancing as oblique light) of later improvisations. Whenever Consagra’s attention was diverted, Babe would turn toward his son and make a crazy face—crossed eyes, buck teeth, bunched-up lips. People ate fudgesicles with the wrapper twined around the stick.
“There’s a thin line between exterminator and roach,” Babe said.
A squad car cruised past a man in the playground systematically breaking bottles. Figures came up from the basement rooms where carriages were stored. There were card games and radios. Naked children on fire escapes. Warm-weather flesh and the dismal ash of burning garbage. Inside, small bugs were sucked out of the dark to carom off the TV screen. Faye and Billy sat there watching a senile teenage epic (“Hey, kids, we’re gonna be late for the luau”) while Babe scoured ashtrays for a smokable butt.
“So what kind of movie?”
“Sit-throughable,” she said.
“I’ll need the set in ten minutes.”
“Nertz to you, bozo.”
“Ten minutes and counting.”
“You only wish.”
“What kind of junk is that to be showing the kid with skeighty-eight colleges showing interest? You should keep him away from awful stuff like that.”
“It’s a special kind of awful,” she said. “You’re not a movie person, so don’t even ask me to explain. It’s the kind of awful you have to have a feel for. Why don’t you call Izzy with some batting stances?”
Much of local violence had garbage at its heart. People’s leavings were too significant to be consigned to grunting trucks, omnivorous burrowing machines that deprived the streets of their distinctions. In street fights, garbage was a weapon to be tossed. In arguments between neighbors it was garbage that was trailed across a doorway. Communal protests featured garbage mounds in flames. Garbage was a source of insult, a proud burden, a fester never ending, a mode and code of conduct (often air-mailed from windows to ease a burdened mind). The dead were sometimes found in garbage cans. Consagra looked across the street to the bottle-breaker speaking to the broken glass around him. Babe made crazy faces.
“Crabman versus the guinea wop,” Ralphie Buber said.
The Bronx Zoo was several blocks east of Crotona Avenue. In a fairly remote part of the zoo was a series of ornate metal cages where the big birds lived. On rotted logs and long branches in the last of these cages the hooded vultures squatted. Impossibly large and indolent, bleak velvet-brown feather massed and hooked beaks stark as nickel silver, the five vultures dwelt in desultory camouflage, more majestic than the other birds (eagles, condors, hawks) because they did not beat their wings in grand futility, hating even freedom. Signs, omens, portents, auguries and foretokens. Even an auspex of old, gazing upon these adepts of dead flesh, might muse that bird divination had seen its better days now that squatting was the vogue.
“I wish there was a hooded vulture rental agency,” Natasha said. “It would be perfect for people our size who want to kill themselves. You go to the agency and rent a vulture and it would pick you up with its powerful talon claws and fly to a great height and then drop you. They would be trained to drop you anywhere you wanted to be dropped. You could be dropped right in front of your own house if you wanted to get even with your mother and father for being your parents. Or you could be dropped over a big green valley or into a lake. Hooded vultures would be the best way for people our size. Imagine how everyone would feel, reading about the body being found.”
Ralphie Buber spent his nights and days on the verge of a lunatic drool. Although he performed acts and committed social misdemeanors that far exceeded drooling, his basic nature seemed best defined by drivel and slime. He was oversized and extremely flabby and for these reasons smaller children liked to knead and beat him. Ralphie, seen purely in physical configuration, was designed to be punched by little fists. It was a daily occurrence, this informal mauling, as was his reaction to such assaults, an attitude of corpulence offended. Billy, for one, aimed many an unprovoked blow at Ralphie’s haunches. It was never any problem avoiding a counterattack. Often the boy forgot to make one, staring at his assailant with the knowledge that something had been done at his expense but hardly an inkling what; and when he did respond it was with loose flesh bouncing and both hands tearing at his own hair, more dangerous to himself than others, a living marvel easy to evade. It was odd then that Ralphie of all the local oafs should choose to mock the bulky Consagra. Fusion and swirl everywhere. Multiple-flash effect. The street heavily textured with desperate energies. From the stoop of their building Babe and Billy watched Ralphie Buber approach holding a live crab stolen from the fish market. Consagra, who resembled poured cement, was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, rolled-up chinos and work boots. He looked down at Ralphie with barely evident contempt, a slight narrowing of the eyes, a tension about the jaw, the hooded scorn a laborer has for discrepancies in the landscape.
“I’ll bite off your ass,” Ralphie said. “I’ll stick my both pincers all the way in to your kidney liver. Then I’ll eat your eyes, dumb nuts.”
“Who you talk?”
“This is Crabman speaking. Attention all cars. I got a man on the stoop with his armpits showing. Sound the alarm, all units of the crab patrol. There’s a man here that’s acting like he’s white, male, human. Free food on the stoop. Hurry all cars.”
“Shut up you face,” Consagra said.
“Crabs at sea, we have an imported human in the area. All units at top speed. This is Crabman signing off for now.”
“I kill.”
“This is Crabman back on the shortwave in his pale-green panel truck. Emergency call, sound the crab alarm. Free meal, free meal.”
“Go the other street or I break you hole,” Consagra said. “Keep talk, nice-nice, I come there kill.”
“These here are called pincers, mister egg-fart face. They reach all the way in to your lung muscles. Crabman saying man on the stoop that tastes of steak meat. Last chance to get your free bites in.”
Ralphie was talking into the crab’s abdomen, using the creature as a microphone as well as alternate persona. When Consagra started down the steps, however, the boy thrust the crab toward him, employing it now as talisman or actual weapon. As he held the crab extended he made throttled aquatic sounds. Consagra responded by making a fist and biting it. It remained for Rosicrucia Sandoval to come outside and step between them, her disorganized upper torso making Billy think that two or three abandoned infants might be clinging to her breasts.
LET HIM WITH UNDERSTANDING RECKON THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST FOR IT IS A HUMAN NUMBER 666
A week’s pay in his pocket, Babe came bouncing down the steps of a Third Avenue bus late one night and headed east alongside the high curving stone wall of a hospital for the incurably ill. When he first saw the other man the distance between them was about one hundred yards. He slowed his pace. The other man was just emerging from the unviewable part of the bending wall, figure more than man, something of a puzzle, coming as he did not just out of the darkness of Quarry Road but from a second surface really, a concealed extension of the curved line occupied by Terwilliger. There was no one else in sight and the only streetlamp was back near the bus stop. The other man wore a long coat and walked in a strange many-legged way, taking several short steps for every long slow stride Babe took. As the gap between the men diminished, Babe worried about that long coat. It was a dark coat, extremely long,
much longer than his own coat, and this worried him. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would wear a coat that long except as a weapons carrier or mobile receptacle for stolen goods. The other man, drawing closer, naturally began to grow to his true size (perceived from Terwilliger’s viewpoint—as if he were the ultimate source of the other man’s size) and at the same time he seemed to be getting smaller and smaller. But this was only because Babe had feared and expected someone very large and kept waiting for the other man’s mammoth dimensions to be made known. Babe himself was six feet four. But his coat, in a relative sense, could not begin to compare with the other man’s coat in terms of size and threatening color. The other man wore a hat and Babe did not. He kept his hands in the pockets of his long coat while Babe’s hands were clenched at his sides. The high stone wall was to Babe’s right, the other man’s left. He was ready for anything the other man might attempt, too ready perhaps, over-prepared, displaying not grace but hysterical petty belligerence under pressure, for when they drew to within a yard of each other the quick-stepping man skidded on a bit of squashed fruit and Babe reacted massively, overreacted perhaps, jumping no more than an inch in the air but in that brief time and space twisting his body toward the other man (who was trying to keep his balance by running in place on the slippery fruit) and landing with feet strategically set apart, body firm and ready, well established in a lower and more advantageous center of gravity, hands now unclenched and knife-swiping at the air in short clean lethal strokes. “Kill-kill-kill!” he shouted. Again and again. “Kill-kill-kill!” The sound surprised even Terwilliger and in its pump-action ferocity literally knocked the other man off his feet. Babe could not stop shouting. The other man, now seen to be not only extremely small but also very, very old and almost surely Chinese, was on his back on the sidewalk, near the base of the wall. Babe was not able to come out of his frozen gladiator pose. The other man remained on his back, expressionless, his legs bent in and up with knees locked in at chest level, his small old hands crumpled near his face, the hat still on his head, the folds of his long coat parted by the upthrust legs. In time Babe stopped shouting. Slowly he began to circle the other man, careful not to relax his defenses too much, the right hand still slashing perfunctorily at the air. The other man was pivoting on the small of his back in order to keep Babe’s movements in his line of vision. It was a pretty funny sight, this old man turning while on his back like an armored beetle, limbs bent inward to protect his body, felt hat still on his head. As Babe, circling, reflected on the comic aspects of the situation, his right shoulder brushed against the stone wall. “Ya!” he shouted. “Wha-ya!” He shouted just twice this time, only moderately startled by the contact, but the noise was sufficient to force the old Chinese into a supreme display of body fortification. Still spinning on his back, elbows providing most of the impetus, he slowly raised his head toward his knees, giving Babe a better look at his face, and then bared his lower set of teeth, digging them into his upper lip. Even with teeth bared the other man couldn’t be said to have undergone much of a change in expression. His face was undisturbed, even serene, and it was possible to interpret the teeth-baring not as a gesture of self-defense but rather as a philosophical maneuver designed to show Babe that nothing less that a living skull occupied that old felt hat, an Oriental brain-case, a nearly timeless object indifferent to decay, erosion and the violent chemistries of men. In this manner, the one man supine and flashing his lower teeth, the other ripping at the air with his large right hand, they made one more full revolution on the dark and lonely sidewalk.
A path led him through a grove of ginkgo trees, their fanlike leaves dipping in the breeze from sea-light to dense shade. It was a narrow path, not often trod it seemed, rough-edging into grass and shrubs, leading nowhere special, the kind of country lane that peters out in carpetweed. Coming toward him was a woman wheeling a small carriage. She wore a long crystal-pleated sepia dress and was almost un-endurably lovely, her face uncovered from some lost medallion, an ancient oval coin dug up and rubbed alive. Rose-white woman. She had eyes saturated in light, a fresh wet smile. Tall, a drifting walk, her body all radiant flux. Outside the strict limits of balance, evenness and line, all body-timed to lure the casual student into erroneous raptures about purely chance perfection, was a creature’s awesome grubby joy in sensing the very air, detecting automatically those things beyond analysis. Brownish hair blown forward over her shoulders. Long hands, slender, cool and white. There was the baby carriage to be considered as well. Draped in semitransparent white fabric it was the single most surprising thing Billy had yet come upon at Field Experiment Number One. But he couldn’t bring himself to think of anything but the woman, who had already paused, as he had, to pass a word or two. How did he react to her beauty? As a substance capable of being magnetized. She bounced the carriage softly, the merest creak issuing from its under-structure.
“I’m Myriad.”
“Then I know your husband.”
“Dear sheer Cyril.”
“How’s his arm?”
“Fine, thank you.”
“When I saw him, he was just taking it off.”
“Were you startled? He gets testy if people aren’t startled.”
“I tried not to show it.”
“That was a mistake.”
“I think he knew, because nothing testy happened. I’d like to see it take place again sometime, knowing the situation. I hardly got to see the stump. I’d be readier the second time. How’s the stump?”
“Very well, I gather.”
“Did he define the word ‘science’ yet?”
“He never tells me about his work,” she said. “What about you and your work?”
“What do you want to know, outside zorgs?”
“I’ve been wondering if anyone could tell me whether mathematics has a muse. A spirit or bountiful power. A sort of would-be minor goddess to look after people like you.”
“I never heard of one.”
“Young people need looking after,” she said. “Think of that beautiful boy Galois. People felt there was something secret in his character. They were right. The secret was mathematics. His father a suicide. His own death a horrible farce. Dawn in the fields. Caped and whiskered seconds. Sinister marksman poised to fire.”
I need all my courage to die at twenty.
“Then there was Abel, not much older, desperately poor, Abel in delirium, hemorrhaging. So often mathematical experience consists of time segments too massive to be contained in the usual frame. Lives overstated. Themes pursued to extreme points. Adventure, romance and tragedy.”
I will fight for my life.
“Look at Pascal, who rid himself of physical pain by dwelling on mathematics. He was just a bit older than you when he constructed his mystic hexagram. The loveliest aspect of the mystic hexagram is that it is mystic. That’s what’s so lovely about it. It’s able to become its own shadow.”
Keep believing it.
“The tricky thing about mathematical genius,” she said, “is that its sources are so often buried. Galois for one. Ramanujan for another. No indication anywhere in their backgrounds that these boys would one day display such natural powers. Figures jumping out of sequence. Or completely misplaced.”
He tried to smell her, wondering what she smelled like, a woman this sensational, but the fruit on the trees in the area supplied a strong odor of their own, unpleasant, overpowering whatever shy variation of jasmine or sweet cicely might have flowed from Myriad’s pores.
“Numbers have supernatural harmonies, according to Hermite. They exist beyond human thought. Divine order through number. Number as absolute reality. Someone said of Hermite: ‘The most abstract entities are for him like living creatures.’ That’s what someone said.”
“People invented numbers,” he said. “You don’t have numbers without people.”
“Good, let’s argue.”
“I don’t want to argue.”
“Secret lives,” she said. “Dedeki
nd listed as dead twelve years before the fact. Poncelet scratching calculations on the walls of his cell. Lobachevski mopping the floors of an old museum. Sophie Germain using a man’s name. Do I have the order right? Sometimes I get it mixed up or completely backwards.”
“You went too fast for me to tell.”
“The spirit of obsession. Isn’t that the crux of it? An entire life dedicated to a number, a figure, the properties of a geometric point.”
“Too much obsession’s no good.”
“I know you don’t believe that,” Myriad said. “You say it only to preserve the secret.”
“What secret?”
“The secret of your fierce existence.”
“A geometric point has no properties, by the way. It just has location.”
If, earlier in the day, he’d allowed himself to be barbered, slit open and computerized (as the lapsed gypsy had suggested), he would probably be standing here right now, left-brain-crazy, wondering about Myriad’s birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, young womanhood, marriage to Cyril, the lost arm, the honeymoon, the eventual conception, pregnancy and so on. He eased his way to the side of the baby carriage, in better position to look through the netting, if possible, in order to feed speculations, brain-crazy or not, on what kind of radical malformation of their baby’s body would force parents to acquire a carriage so unusually small, so obviously custom-made, so shielded by overhanging fabric.