Ratner's Star (20 page)

“That one I can guess.”

The trifling nature of this last question made Billy feel better. It was one of the sillier questions, almost as dumb as umpteen dimensions, and it tended to negate the effect of Nut's discourse on Dedekind and Riemann. Billy didn't like the way he'd referred to them as “a Dedekind” and “a Riemann,” as if he'd been talking about a peach and a pear. But it was true he knew their work to some extent. Doubly fortunate then his question about Nutean surfaces.

“We've stopped moving,” Hoy said. “What do you think? Are we still moving or did we just stop? Even as you hear the sound of my voice, I am sensing a stoppage.”

“If that's good or bad, I think it's bad.”

“Two men, both giants, each in his own field,” Nut said. “It now becomes the turn of the younger of the two to question the older thereof.”

“Maybe later.”

“No hidden levels.”

“Why not?”

“All meaning restricted to one layer.”

“You had extra layers.”

“Zorgs excluded.”

“They're my field.”

“We're here,” Hoy said. “The door is opening. The door has opened. We can step out. I knew it. I have a sixth sense. Who heard me say it? We're here. They fixed it just in time. We won't fall after all.”

In his canister Billy showered and washed his hair. He put on his terrycloth robe and shadowboxed a while. Then he sat down to work in purposeful isolation, tracing whatever relationships he could find between the common whole numbers fourteen, twenty-eight and fifty-seven, soon extending his search to include fractions where there had been integers alone, negative quantities where positive had prevailed, imaginary numbers to replace the real, managing in a remote part of his mind to watch himself at work, an old man (cuter than most) in a small old cluttered study, wearing a robe and peeling slippers, sitting at an oak desk rough to the touch because it was layered with the sprinkled pink grains of his brush eraser, thriving on plain food, irregular sleep, constant work, finding himself pleased by this history of his future, a factually accurate illusion, electric heater on the floor, desk lamp with crooked shade, manuscripts stacked in four corners of the room. Systematic inquiry. Precise definitions. Complete proof. Every new dawn brings paeans to his universality. Number-theoretic insights to big-game theory to post-Nutean surfaces to bi-level nonstandard analysis. Credited as the engineer of a vast shift in mid-twenty-first-century mathematical thinking. Age times six. Eight five seven one four two. He was distracted from this interlude of austere self-veneration by the awareness that the sheet of paper on which he was calculating was not perfectly flat, containing many distortions in the form of furrows and grooves, meager ravines, curvature rampant from point to point. He practiced his signature for a while and then got dressed and returned to the research area in which he'd spent part of the afternoon. In minutes he found the gymnasium where Desilu Espy, the clean-kneed woman, had gathered the members of her discussion group.

Here and there on the burnished floor men and women greeted each
other with elusive half-kisses. This was something he had never seen in the Bronx, the way they darted at each other's cheeks and ears, the custom of puckered conversation at short range. He'd expected his hostess to come sweeping toward him in stylish evening attire, laughing in the silvery lilting manner that people employ at such gatherings, dressed (he'd expected) in nonfunctional satins and moody little shoes, coming across the gym haunch by haunch in a motorized feline glide of supple perfection. But she turned out to be wearing the same canvas shoes, knee-socks and bacteriologist's harness she'd had on earlier. Of course this wasn't a party, he reminded himself. It was just a discussion group. They were here to discuss something. However, the lights were low and there was that pigeon-kissing everywhere he looked. She took him past the swimming pool and introduced him to Commander and Mrs. Burris Shrub. The commander was large and broad-chested. He wore a gray business suit, double-breasted, with enormous sagging lapels. His wife was decrepit, a pink-white woman who kept striking herself in the face with a lacy handkerchief. Every dreamy swipe released a pinkish mist of face powder from the outermost stratum.

“I'm Calliope Shrub,” she said. “Are you one of us?”

“Depends what you mean.”

“She means outsiders,” the commander said. “I'm here merely to observe. Possibly learn a thing or two about hypothetical weaponry. Mrs. Shrub is vague at times. Pay no mind. Happens to people married to dominant figures. I understand you're planning to do some tricks with matches and coins.”

“She's hitting herself in the face.”

“Historical inevitability has changed since my day,” Shrub said. “There's no longer any grand sense of sweep to the affairs of men. Where are the complex historical forces, the tides, the currents? What happened to the wide canvas on which we were supposed to play out our roles? It was simpler in my day. We could talk about the surge, the tragic pageant.”

“Does your wife know she's hitting herself with that hanky?”

“No and I don't want you telling her.”

“I won't.”

“She's better off not knowing.”

“Why does she do it?”

“That's something I hope I never find out.”

“Nervous habit maybe.”

“I'd rather not know.”

“I won't say a word.”

People moved through the dimness, touching and murmuring. He took a walk around the gym, finally choosing the parallel bars as his vantage point and sitting in a folding chair that was set beneath them. Involuntarily he began thinking about the code. It had never really left his mind of late. It was part of him now. It was distinct from everything else but just as much a part of him, conditionally equal, the problem located in whatever neocortical region nurtures the intuition, that contrapuntal faculty his mathematics relied on. It was as though he had two existences, right and left terms in an equation, and was obliged to face the danger that one of them, the mathematical, might overwhelm the other, leaving him behind, name and shape. To consider invisibility as a skill. To forget your own existence in the will to persist. He'd always felt, Billy had, that thinking constantly about a problem was tantamount to solving it. A neatly dressed man with a thoughtful goatee squatted alongside his chair, whispering a name, Haroun Farad, knees creaking as he settled into his crouch. He wore a black armband. Risks in this system of fixed idea.

“In my dog-ravaged land they would rip each other apart to drink as we drink here.”

“I was told discussion. Is it refreshments too?”

“My voice whispers,” Farad said. “The book in the inside pocket of my suit coat is in very feverish demand here. Three-dimensional photos. Babies with tails. Antlered men. A woman with a pouch. Meet me at an arranged site and we'll discuss terms.”

“Let's see some samples before I say.”

“A duck-billed lady.”

“Who died if you're wearing that black on your arm?”

“It's for the aborigine,” Farad said. “A little joke we started up.”

Desilu Espy approached the parallel bars with a glass of eggnog
wobbling on a tiny saucer. Billy retreated into shallow darkness a few yards away. People stood in small groups, speaking quietly. He watched Haroun Farad get to his feet and accept the glass.

“Milk content?”

“Someone said you were thirsty.”

“What is the milk content?” Farad said. “If the number of drops is more than there are letters in the world
Ilah
, the drink must be re-purified. Take it out please. Remove the milk.”

“And they told me you had no sense of humor.”

“I'm serious when I say this thing to you. Take the milk out or I won't drink of it.”

“Terrific, the richness and variety of native forms of humor.”

Nonintersecting straight coplanar lines, he thought. Given a straight line and any point not on this line, it is possible to draw through this point only one line that is parallel to the given line. Once upon a time, he thought.

“In my dog-ravaged land we don't make cheap gestures in the direction of friendship. The dogs make such things impractical, shall we say. They roam the country in packs of ten thousand or more. At the smallest provocation they're at each other's throats, snarling and ripping. In this environment of large thirsty dogs there is not the time for gestures. We live, those few of us who still live, in a state of concurrent but separate existence vis-à-vis the dogs. The land is lean and bare. So is the conversation. Submission to the rightly guided one is the only accepted form of behavior. Milk is the subtlest of insults. These are the realities. The dogs have made it so. We don't expect others to understand. In our ability to coexist with the ravaging dogs, we have made the beginnings of something mysterious.”

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.