Ratner's Star (64 page)

The woman wore what appeared to be a simple sheet, its ends stitched together to provide her body with rudimentary protection. Her lips were likewise stitched, literally sewn together, one of the preparations Wu had referred to. White thread hung down below her chin. Blood-crusts covered her mouth and jaw. The act of sewing and the presence of the thread itself caused her lips to jut out from her face to a grotesque extent. Impossible to judge this woman's age or place of origin. Her face, aside from the mouth, showed signs of a life clearly lacking in material comfort. Pockets of discolor. Meager sunken flesh. Eyes destitute of lenient experience. With arms bent upward she stood in the filthy sheet and stared into her curled fingers. Then she began to turn, slowly, her bare feet pressing into the earth.

They watched in silence.

Her body, performing nothing more than this slow rotation, appeared to assert the prestige of emptiness; it might take the shape of whatever swerved in its direction. She stared into her curled fingers, eyes going blank, the scant identity within them receding in nearly measurable stages. She seemed to reach a special level here; paused; then whirled,
a series of rapid turns. Her body shook briefly and she fell, remaining motionless, her face in the dirt, for an extended period of time.

Under the covers Softly's hand tried without success to promote an unequivocal erection.

She began to roll in the dirt. As she did the sheet gradually parted up her back, thread becoming undone. Her face was blotted with earth and accumulating pain. All along her unwindingly pallid body, this tidal index to a madness spaced with art, were further traces of this beaten life of hers, bruises here, broken skin, indentations. Whatever was meant to happen would not involve the others in some collective ecstasy. This woman's jurisdiction, the ascendancy of her vacant gaze, was turned completely inward. Her territorial range was nil. She unraveled before them an imbecile beauty, senseless and deserted, the negative telling element of her life. This was the power of her physical presence, of these nameless spins and tremors, that she was a mind and body able to empty out and in some decompressing play of painful craft eventually to refill herself, or so it seemed to those who watched as now the sheet completely parted, woman no longer rolling, face down on the twisted sheet, arms still bent up and tucked under her now. Birthmarked on her right buttock was a star-shaped geometric figure. All watching knew it was a pentagram, secret emblem of the ancients. The woman rose to her knees, keeping her back to the others. She raised both arms in the air, hands closed. One by one then, in synchronization, she pointed the fingers of each hand upward, thumb, index finger, middle finger, pinky finger, ring finger. She did this repeatedly, beginning to moan now, and like the other things she'd done these latest exercises drew their effectiveness (no eye strayed nor mind wandered) from the very obscurity that motivated their performance. Although she was not facing her audience it became clear once more that she was reaching a special level of enactment. She moaned steadily. The muscles in her back contracted. She continued “to count” into the air, as though fashioning a correspondence between whole numbers and the systematic maze of nature. Then she lowered her arms and, using hands to help her move, turned, still on her knees, toward those watching. She tried to open her mouth. No longer content apparently to make a single unmodulated
sound, she strained against the binding thread, using facial muscles alone, hands at her sides. Several stitches loosened, causing fresh blood to flow. She was in extreme pain but suggested a complex presence now, her eyes returning mild light to objects and forms. The lower part of her face was smeared with blood. She spat out loops of thread. Blood in starry drops fell to her breasts and thighs. With a last passionate grimace she freed her mouth of every lash of thread and cried through blood and teeth a single word.

“Pythagoras.”

They waited for more, connected by a skein of utter dumb futility. But this was all she'd come to say. Mainwaring and Wu helped the woman to her feet, put the sheet around her and took her to the first-aid unit. With her thumb and index finger Edna Lown picked a speck of tobacco off the end of her tongue. She studied it a while, then went to her quarters. Bolin put the radio on Softly's desk and turned it on.

“I guess if we're going to find out for sure, this is the way to do it,” Lester said. “Things have been going the wrong way lately. We're due for some good luck, Bobby.”

Billy looked at his long-time friend and mentor.

“Just a rumor,” Softly said.

Within the limitless range of intersecting static, an announcer could be heard.

“Greenwich mean time,” he said. “At the tone: fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-seven.”

System interbreak: eclipse track Asia: children being sold in Madhya Pradesh, eating rats to live, baring trees of bark and leaves to live, external reality, flies on whitewashed walls, old men in loincloths collecting the dust of a cycle rickshaw, oblivious mud bodies, mouths edged with coated sputum, rows of sandals set around the borders of a temple courtyard, women in saris drifting through the shops wearing muslin, bone, plastic and glass, saris of handspun cotton (in bare rooms), women spaced across the upland slush of rice fields, tending dung fires, gliding past the stalls in anklet bells and bangles, a mass of pondering
voices (in bare rooms reserved for menstruation), black disk abstracting the edge of the nurturing sun. People surround the outdoor kitchens waiting for their gruel and milk, eating grass to live, bodies of the starved abandoned on tiled verandas, human experience, electric fan moving air across a room adorned with flapping pictures of the gods. Monkeys vanish from a window, reacting to the soft beginnings of eclipse, the lunar shadow moving in a northeast arc, its path of totality a fairly standard band in length and width, its rate of speed routine, its time span roughly average. The eclipse is notable solely for its unexpectedness, the year's only scheduled solar eclipse (total) having already taken place (northwest U.S. and Canada), an image projected on a cardboard screen (two point seven minutes). As hypothetical ARS extant (transferred, by whatever means, from your nonquantum state Outside), you have the benefit of an omnidirectional viewpoint and are able to observe, regarding this event, that the earth along the eclipse path and its outer borders of partial darkness resembles a charred immensity, children with begging bowls, men surrendered to meditation. You enter a cell in an ashram, several monks in ochre robes, one of whom (bald, sleepy, smelling of hemp) tells his fellows about the hand-clapping Africans seized by the spirit of eclipse who beat on drums to make the sun return, who hide in their palm leaf huts, who fall into convulsions; about the medicine man who chews on bitter leaves and spits the curative pieces at assembled villagers; about the natives who cover their bodies with white clay to counter the darkness, whole villages white in this way, weepings and seizures, dancing mania, morbid homage to their lord. His fellow sadhus are amused, nodding in unison, the empirical source, children immobilized by gastroenteritis, scavenging to live, to know what passes above, this nearly sunset occurrence, shadow moving toward the eastmost Ganges, choleroid feces, choleroid dehydration, choleroid vomit, girls with finger-cymbals laughing in a mango grove, the cowrie, the owl of good fortune. It is as everywhere, the soul of one experience passing untouched through the soul of another, men with the white marks of Shiva, oxen on sparse farms. To redirect yourself from the Outside, as you're able to do (having learned to count to
n
), is the equivalent of entering once more your outgrown
frame of logic and language. Having dismantled the handiwork of your own perceptions in order to solve reality, you know it now as a micron flash of light-scattering matter in a structure otherwise composed of purely mathematical coordinates. The blind stand begging in places that are the same, hanging wash, some goats, as places everywhere, toy stores, colored glass, the squalor that customarily surrounds the working of miracles. To breathe but not to speak, to sleep in the earth, to live in self-inflicted pain, to aspire to blindness by the sun, to speak but not to move. Children play a shadow game in last light, small birds picking insects out of human excrement, the players safe when they make their shadows disappear. There is evening raga in a music room, girls in bare feet who hide in the shadow of a water tank, the arguments of crosslegged men all fiercely disposed to the notion of suffering as macrocosmic sport, this girl and that in obliterated twilight, cries of their pursuers. You perceive completely. Women with twig brooms. Children dead in darkened archways. The girls slowly rise from their enfolding shadow, aware the game has been absorbed, all shadows subtotaled in this nightstreaming dye. A woman touching a mote of vermilion to her forehead. The insistent density of hand drums, tamboura and sarod. You see the itinerant mystic's dinner plate with its orderly dole of almonds, the real world, this man of sect marks and open sores. A student sits on a pallet repeating phrases from a textbook, his voice half prayerful with drowsiness, as everywhere, mathematics coinciding with the will to live. In cities built, the T-squared temporary cantonment, the practical means to survive, in oceans crossed (he reads) it is mathematics that makes the way for the whittler's sleight, gives directional reference to the man at the bridge rail adjusting a small-boned instrument of navigation. At the contact line of nature and mathematical thought is where things make sense, things accede to our view of them, things return to us a propagating wave of reason. On his pallet, drowsily, on pocked floorboards beneath a shuttered window, the young man mutters back to his book, a printed seed of the race no less than some Vedantic text, India (from the Sanskrit for “river”) being the source of positional notation for the decimal system and of the symbols for the numbers one to nine, cane baskets on women's heads, lifelong celibates
grinning out of broken teeth, children begging for a cracked fragment of biscuit, the physical universe, eating crumbs to live. Then northward here, vultures hunched in trees, the shadow curves on eventful waters, fishing boats, bamboo rafts that carry bodies dappled with jasmine and rose petals, these being children spared the pyre, and there is sandalwood afloat. What is the universe as it exists beyond the human brain? The sadhu stands naked in his cell, body lacking hair at every point. Mathematics is what the world is when we subtract our own perceptions. In your earthly study of the subject, you went beyond its natural association with the will to live and found that it contained a painless “nonexistence,” the theoretical ideal of
n
-space. And so you beamed into the heavens a clue to the limitations not only of (y) our science but of human identity as well, that very possession this naked monk seeks to dissolve in his methodical swallowing of the world's offal and mold. You hear the temple priests and vendors, the mendicants in wooden beads, the will to live (he reads) being an attitude embedded in the prolongation of order, a condition defined by mathematics. As everywhere, the ghosts of these experiences pass through each other, the beating of clothes on stone, sex inside mosquito nets. The shadow crosses into Bangladesh, thousands waiting on line and for each at best some pebbles of unleavened bread, control maintained by men with sticks. You read the grieving man's belief in the everydayness of the absolute. Families set down their mats and prepare to sleep on pavement, the empirical source, children stealing to live. To be Outside is to know an environment infinitely less complex than the one you left. Far from wishing to revisit misery, you are nonetheless able to experience once again some of the richness of inborn limits. You see our rapt entanglement in all around us, the press to measure and delve. There, see, in annotated ivory tools, lengths of notched wood, in the wave-guide manipulation of light and our nosings into the choreography of protons, we implicate ourselves in endless uncertainty. This is the ethic you've rejected. Inside our desolation, however, you come upon the reinforcing grid of works and minds that extend themselves against whatever lonely spaces account for our hollow moods, the woe incoming. Why are you here? To unsnarl us from our delimiting senses? To offer protective cladding against our cruelty and
fear? The pain, the life-cry speak our most candid wonders. To out-premise these, by whatever tektite whirl you've mastered, would be to make us hypothetical, a creature of our own pretending, as are you. Geometric space of any number of dimensions. Awareness of not being self-aware. The metaphysical release at the center of the value-dark dimension. Intones the bony old man
sannyasa
in his scrambled loincloth
sannyasa
mud body oblivious to the vast ashen inevitability of all things that pertain to his particular snag of earth. With burial grounds full, people deposit bodies in shallow graves long bared by local dogs. Tourists photograph the corpses, human experience, scheduled collections made of bodies in the street. The shadow passes into the state of Assam, leaving behind these trophy bones of epic death, families sitting in the dust outside a feeding center, external reality, their eyes suspended forever in this medium of exaggerated nutrient humanity, surrounded as they wait by clamor, lamentation, audible drone of sacred names, as everywhere, all the plain-weave variations of supplicating noise, shadow moving swiftly into map-blue China, system of hushed assumptions.

Robert Hopper Softly in a natty black suit stood in a patch of bedazzling grass, briefcase in hand, a modernistic pair of dark glasses covering much of his face. Finally the somber prow of a limousine appeared at the top of the ramp that coiled on down to the main garage beneath the cycloid structure. As the Cadillac leveled out and moved slowly toward him, Softly found himself straightening up a bit, as though trying to occupy more fully some spectral frame of authoritarian ethics.

Something here made no sense. If, as the youngest of his colleagues had very recently stated, the lunar shadow first touched the earth at the universal (or Greenwich mean) time announced on the radio, and if only half an hour had passed from that moment to this, and if it was therefore midafternoon at the prime meridian, why, considering his (Softly's) position in terms of longitude east of Greenwich, wasn't it nighttime here? Not the deviant night of total solar eclipse but simple ordinary everyday night, the interval of darkness that accounts for an
important part of every twenty-four hour period during which the earth completes a single rotation on its axis. Noncognate celestial anomaly living up to its name. Even if it wasn't getting on to night, it was definitely getting on to eclipse. Yes he sensed the shadow speeding toward him.