Ratner's Star

  “Research.”

  “I don’t see what they have to do with a book on the Logicon project.”

  “The more I research mathematicians, the more I know about you,” Jean said. “I want to know all I can about all the people here. I can’t achieve any depth unless I do that. That’s why I ask about influences. Was it Sylvester or Cayley who said the best inventions of analysis result from our probings of the continuous as it exists in our own perception of space? Direction. In mathematics, don’t you try to build a sense of direction into ideas like space, time and motion? Make it a game, isn’t that it, with specific rules that govern every operation.”

  “We’re not allowed to talk about this,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Rob doesn’t allow it. He said to skip people in history. He wants me to concentrate on Logicon.”

  “Is this a formal ban?”

  “I’m only telling you what he said.”

  “We can say what we want, pigsney. Don’t let Rob talk you out of anything.”

  “Would you be interested in some special material for your notes?” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I have a hunch I’m going to die soon.”

  “More,” she said. “More like that. Give me everything you’ve got.”

  Not what something really is, Softly thought, but how we think of it. Our struggle to apprehend it. Our need to unify and explain it. Our attempt to peel back experience and reveal the meaning beneath. The task is to attempt a logical design that may or may not duplicate the structure of the thing itself. His desk, unlike the others in the antrum, thrown together and wobbly, was an elaborate sectional apparatus with automatic drawers, a pop-up typewriter, modular shelving and a built-in pencil sharpener that operated on batteries. The desk ran parallel to all but one side of the cubicle, where the entrance was located. The cubicle itself was considerably larger than the other living units, hardly suited to the word “cubicle” in fact. The bed, adorned with huge silk pillows, had little in common with the cots elsewhere in the area. Sweating excessively Softly undid the belts on his leather briefcase, lifted the worn flap and began sifting among bottles, tubes and packets of stimulants, relaxants, euphoriants, deliriants, sedative-hypnotics, local anesthetics and animal tranquilizers. Among the collection a sample-sized bottle made him smile, containing as it did the high-grade synthetic intensifier he’d given Maurice Wu to chew soon after the latter had first arrived in the antrum. The label included a warning: Insightful experiences may intensify existing psychosis. Far from showing panic reaction, however, Wu had emerged from a period of chills, irregular breathing and slurred speech with a tentative and rather engaging idea about counter-evolution. Softly found what he wanted now. He lifted out a vial, twisted off the cap, removed the cotton packing and shook a capsule into his hand. He swallowed it without water and then got into bed, wearing socks, slippers and his robe. He became drowsy almost at once. His perspiration smelled less tense and septic. Another ephemeral chemical event, he thought. Opiate receptors functioning nicely. Sense data less demanding. He stuck his thumb in his mouth, thinking suddenly of the peculiar demonic genius of street games, the secret vernacular passed down for centuries, the sense in so many games of something fearful transmitted through certain words or the wile of simple touch. He began to vomit calmly. Tag—you’re it. What was it but something or someone too evil to be named? Hoodman blind. Hango seek. Skin the cuddy. He raised his head from vomiting position, eyes closed (to avoid seeing the ejected matter), and then leaned back on one of the pillows and thought of the game he and the boy had more or less jointly invented, halfball, a “meaningless formal game” designed to be played almost anywhere—street, pasture, alleyway, an empty green in summer’s murmuring dusk. Elements of rounders, baseball, tag, cricket, one o’ cat, stickball and children’s verse. The task is to work out an abstract scheme which may or may not reflect the composition of the thing itself. Convenient fictions, he thought. Děń sə-tē, he thought. Water flowing along a gutter on a city street. A figure trying to hail a cab. Umbrella and suitcase. This was Mainwaring, a well-barbered man of middle age—tall, ruddy, fit and trim, emitting an executive scent. He knew the large puddle beyond the curb was an invitation to cab drivers to veer this way and splatter his clothes but he wasn’t worried, being certain he could step aside in time and seeing the entire process (from the driver’s viewpoint) as an exercise in perceiving functional relations between entities (puddle, figure, vehicle). It was his conviction that taxi drivers are no more than theoreticians of massive insult, delighted by the prospect of splattering or maiming, having no inherent need to think beyond relationships to the literal disfigurement of objects or people. The truly brutal ones were bus drivers. Give a bus driver a nearly empty bus during an off-hour with no one waiting at the designated stops and he’ll go smashing down the avenue, pupils dilated, a convulsive hum bubbling up from his throat, Softly opening his eyes, the great painted van careening down on stray dogs, derelicts, children, an interior point system in effect. He dipped the umbrella and a cab stopped just short of the puddle.

  “The international airport,” Mainwaring said.

  “Right or left side of the street.”

  “Either, I suppose.”

  “Near corner or far?”

  Edna Lown’s spectacularly archaic undies were hanging up to dry. Nearby, working, was the woman herself. This happiness puzzled her. Every symbol she wrote in her notebook seemed to possess the resolve of a finished work, an isolated operation neatly free of assumption and shaved of the danger of intuitive reckoning. This work was all there was. Her life had been reduced to a process of selection and refinement. This was merciful, she believed, considering the atmosphere of horror that so often prevailed in the world outside. Nothing in her work was accidental. This is the single theme variously affirmed, tested and modified. She realized she hadn’t seen her own face since taking the ramshackle elevator down. The past, the whole chromium world, none of it was more than meek recollection, the negative image of colleagues, family and friends; of university towns, fellowships and travels; of visits to suburban Bellevue. It was puzzling, this happiness she felt, an extended measurement of the textures we’re able to achieve beyond the sum total of events that compose our lives. In this hole in the ground Edna knew she lacked nothing, wanted nothing, could easily dismiss all past associations and all prior honors. She lived in the grip of scientific rapture. The complicated longings of the woman who had made her way in the world (through the force of intellect alone) were so subordinate now as to be nearly nonexistent. Ambition, love, friendship, the pleasures of giving and of winning away, the comfort of professional acceptance, the soul’s snug glow at the failure of others—all those fitful inclinations, those urgencies and yearnings were so much dead air compared with this simple and total absorption, holism, a state of unqualified being. Edna Lown was entering herself just as surely as if she’d been able to bend her arms into her mouth and swallow them to the shoulders; arms, legs, torso; a bewitchingly comic meditation technique; leaving the head balanced on a cushion, head and skull, abode of the layered brain, everything we are and feel and know; the universe we’ve made.

  The small craft began its vertical descent. Despite the many hours of travel, the plane-changing, the time zones, Mainwaring remained fresh, his hair brushed straight back, faintly gray in places, his jaw seemingly locked into position with cotter pins. Across the aircraft’s fuselage was the inscription: OmCopter SkyHop. The entire journey had been made at night. Different parts of different hemispheric nights. One long night.

  Edna’s wet underwear dripped onto a stack of papers she had set on the ground. She read the previous session’s notes. These were notes essentially for her own nonspecific use, not the kind of background material she’d given the boy to read and not more immediate work directly applicable to the Logicon project. She’d been jotting down these particular notes and others like them for a number
of years, simply to order her thinking, to clarify certain general areas she believed worthy of investigation. It is both silly and useful, she thought, feeling completely relaxed now, very ready, working well ahead of the pencil.

  f. It is both silly and useful to conclude that human speech derived from the cries of animals.

  g. As conjectured, it was specifically the mating calls of animals that directed early men and women toward their own variety of speech. Language thus became a communication associated with sexual activity. This connection imparted to language an erotically powerful duplicating property.

  h. I’m tempted to say: it also made talking fun. Words became a playful analog of sexual activity.

  i. All language is innuendo.

  j. We imagine the (primitive) child learning to speak in the arms of its mother. Here we have the essence of play. Mother and child. Language and sexuality.

  k. Thus language, classed by gender, is undoubtedly female.

  Jean Venable sat in her room high above the antrum. Her notes were all over the floor, unreadable, and there were packets of research material stacked under the bed, unread. She was beginning to think Softly had been right when he’d accused her of viewing the whole thing as a lark. If she were to make a prediction she would predict that she was on the verge of something strange. A decision about her book. What it should and shouldn’t be. “Strange” in the sense of previously unknown; in the sense of unfamiliar; in the archaic sense of alien or foreign. What kind of rotgut prose would she write about a project she hadn’t really been interested in since the very beginning? What was she here for if not to test herself against the dangers of true belief? What good was solitude to a writer if it didn’t lead her into something deeper in the way of living and thinking? The fact that she was having nearly continuous sex with a child-sized man seemed to confirm (in an inexplicit way) that she was ready to take a nervous little step into the coiled room she’d seen from time to time mingled with the reflections in a train’s dusty windows or in the glass halves of a tenement’s outer doors. Sex with Rob was very much a part of the isolation she’d been submerged in since coming here. Not that she didn’t enjoy it on “a purely physical level.” Softly was an antidote to fantasy. His very dimensions mocked those drowsy episodes she used to devise apart from reality. What were these mental images but fairytales for adults, whimsical tintypes that did little more than confirm the childish appeal of illogical relations (maidens, amphibians etc.)? From her reaction to the bluntness of Rob’s marred body, his special unalterability, the abrupt initiatives of his sexual nature, she readily inferred that fantasy, her own, had reached its vanishing point, an event that returned sex to those locations she felt it had long abandoned, between the actual legs, in and around the actual mouth, on the breasts and under the testicles and in the hands, on the tongue, in the actual hole. Together they filled a natural space. There was a real feeling of bodies giving out, signs of rashes, skin burns, bruises and teeth marks, her mind distantly aware of chancing the wastes of nonentity, a prospect that forced her to speak her physical involvement, to pant out sounds against this break in the continuity. Funny how she and Rob avoided every preliminary gesture, even a hint of a kiss or nonfunctional caress. Kissing him would have disgusted her. It was his organ of copulation her body craved, the Latinate folds between her legs that stirred him to ithyphallic meter. Funny all right. It made her laugh at past loves, at the banality of the past itself.

  1. In no time at all we enter the cloud of modern thought. Here the limits of childhood involve the shattering of perspective. This could just as easily be called the formation of perspective.

  m. Growing, the child perceives a difference between itself and its class. The child’s mother is no longer the sole teacher of “words.” The erotic content of language begins to dissolve.

  n. The “truth” about language is not available to us. Only play-talk, the lost form of knowledge, can express what is otherwise unspeakable. Is there a connection between these sentences?

  o. Play-talk is the natural mode of brute locution. It alone is free of disguise and ambiguity.

  p. What do we mean when we say that the function of a logically perfect language is to set severe limits? It’s possible we have things backwards. We should ask ourselves whether we are correct in establishing more boundaries or in completely destroying what now stands.

  q. Great scientists never fear being slightly wrong; their errors, if such, are total.

  r. I’m tempted to say: to pass beyond words as we know them is “to mate.”

  s. The secret task of logic may be the rediscovery of play.

  Charming, Edna thought, perhaps a bit wearily, hearing Softly’s peculiar footfalls as he went past her cubicle, picturing him in a suit, vest and dark tie, those resplendent little shoes, all of which he was in fact wearing as he made his way to cube one, where Billy was found to be in bed, hands clasped on his head, knees upraised, a general sense of adolescent languor in the air.

  ROB TALKS IN QUOTES

  “Where’s the ball?” Softly said. “I’m in the mood for some exercise. Some distraction. We all need a little distraction.”

  “What ball?”

  “Didn’t I see you pick up a rubber ball recently?”

  “A rubber ball,” the boy said. “I brought it in here, I think.”

  “Get it out and cut it in half.”

  “What for in half?”

  “You really are socked in, aren’t you?”

  “Halfball, is that it? You want to have a game of halfball.”

  “About time,” Softly said.

  “I don’t want to play.”

  “You love halfball.”

  “Not in the mood, that’s all.”

  “It’s your game,” Softly said. “Yours and mine. Get the ball, cut it in half and let’s go play. Maurice cleared away an area just beyond the crates. He’s cutting down a mop handle now. Jean’s going to play too. You like Jean. You and Jean get along. I’ve taught them the rules. Edna and Les will watch. It’s more fun with spectators.”

  “I thought the fun was over.”

  “You need a fresh dose.”

  “Maybe I’ll feel like playing later on.”

  “Wee Willy, hit ’em where they ain’t.”

  “I want to either stay right here in this dirt room or get completely out of the whole place.”

  “Look, we’ll go out on the ‘field,’ loosen up a bit, play one game of halfball and then you can come back here and ‘rest.’ Halfball is a beautiful game. You love halfball. It’s exactly what you ‘need,’ some ‘exercise,’ a period of ‘distraction.’ So what do you say, hey?”

  “I want to stay here.”

  “Why the sudden obsession with immobility?” Softly said. “What kind of dopey routine is this? Some kind of mystic trance you’re falling into?”

  “No.”

  “Because if it is, you know what I have to say to you.”

  “I know.”

  “Musjid pepsi kakapo.”

  “What else?”

  “Huwawa djinn.”

  Billy had always enjoyed the unfamiliar word clusters that Softly used to counteract serious remarks about religion, the supernatural or the fuzzier edges of quantum physics. What he didn’t like was his mentor’s very occasional tactic of pronouncing certain words as though they warranted quotation marks. The practice seemed to have a source deeper than mere sarcasm. Softly sometimes employed this vocal rebuke, if that’s what it was, in circumstances that appeared to be completely unsuitable. He would refer to a table, for instance, as a “table.” What sort of inner significance was intended in such a case? It was one thing for Softly to use a sprinkle of emphasis when speaking of someone’s “need” for “rest.” But when he put quotes around words for commonplace objects, the effect was unsettling. He wasn’t simply isolating an object from its name; he seemed to be trying to empty an entire system of meaning.

  “If you’re not ready to play, are you r
eady to work?”

  “Definitely.”

  “You’ll do whatever Edna and Lester ask?”

  “Yes.”

  “See, I told them you’d come around. And I haven’t even had to get mean. My displays of adultism are minor legends wherever children congregate.”

  “Do I have to play halfball?”

  “No,” Softly said. “Just give me the rubber ball and I’ll have Maury cut it in half.”

  The game was played on the negative curvature of the small clearing. Softly removed his jacket and tossed it to Lester Bolin, who sat with Edna on a crate. The fey spectacle about to unfold brought to Edna’s face a look of delighted expectation laboring to hide the strain that went into its manufacture, as though she were attending a garden party for the criminally insane. Wu cut along the seam of the rubber ball with his penknife, then pocketed one half of the ball and gave the other half to Softly, who began to warm up, being the bunger, or thrower. Jean had a lot of trouble holding on to his deliveries. The ball behaved erratically once or twice (when Softly tossed it end over end) but very smoothly at other times (when he gripped it along the edge and hurled it in a sidearm motion straight in or went three quarters to fashion gracefully breaking slow curves). Wu stood off to the side taking lazy stylized practice cuts with the sawed-off mop handle. The field was marked with rocks and cans set apart from each other in complex patterns. When everyone was finished warming up, Softly addressed the spectators.

  “Strict rules add dignity to a game. At specified points in the contest, certain verses have to be recited, certain moves and countermoves have to be made. There are no bases, as in baseball. There is no wicket, as in cricket. However, there are runs, hits, errors and breaks for tea. In halfball, errors count in the errormaker’s favor. Imagine a scoreboard if you will. Runs, hits, errors. The final result depends on all of these, not just runs. It is the total array of digits that determines the winner. If a player keeps making errors, he adds to his sum. Once his errors get into double figures, the total spills over to the run column. Therefore, you say, it is necessary only to make error after error in order to win. Not so, I reply. For while one player is making errors, his adversary is scoring runs. The errormaker must balance the gains he is making in his error column against the gains he is allowing the other player to make in the run column. I am the bunger. Jeanie is the munch. Maury is the doggero. Normally we’d have a lippit as well but I think we can do without. As the game progresses, we switch positions. The objects scattered on the ground are either skullies or wacks, depending on the situation. The purpose of each will become clear as we go along. Please don’t leave until we’re ready for tea break. It annoys me no end when people leave before tea break.”