Ratner's Star (37 page)

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 commercial 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.

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.”