Ratner's Star (45 page)

“I write in the dark.”

“Give me more like that,” she said. “I pounce on stuff like that. I eat it up.”

“Are you something Rob keeps on the side? Because it's fine with me but you have to understand he probably doesn't take this book you're doing too seriously. Wherever he goes there's something on the side.”

“I'm fairly well known in my own right.”

“For what?”

“My books.”

“Have I heard of them?”

“So I don't think this is a case of somebody keeping somebody else on the side.
Eminent Stammerers
. That was my first. Got a fair share of attention considering the limited scope of the subject matter. I've done scores of magazine pieces.”

“Anything else I might have read or know of someone who did?”

“The Gobbledygook Cook Book.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Fourteen weeks on the list.”

“Not bad.”

“So I don't think, despite appearances, that this is a case of somebody not taking something too seriously.”

“Keep believing it. I do.”

“What's the essence of your work?” she said. “I want to know what happens inside your mind. What
is
mathematics? Poincaré talked about getting flashes. Do you get flashes? He also said, I think he was the one, that mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.”

There was a trace of hoarseness in her voice, of lightly sanded cunning, somehow at odds with her appearance. Certain words she spoke seemed almost to vibrate with the kind of ironic connotation difficult
to isolate from its sexual core. There was in addition an offhand and even cavalier element to her note-taking. She scribbled what he said. Line after line of catchpenny scrawl. Not even remotely legible. Maybe, he thought, she was just thinking ahead to the next question.

“What else should I ask?”

“I write using big letters.”

“I like it,” she said. “Now this business of deciphering what the ARS extants are saying. Is this being abandoned in favor of the Logicon project?”

“I am keeping going on it.”

“You're a good subject,” she said. “Give me some more like writing in the dark with big letters. Most subjects insist on telling me about every so-called fascinating job they've had since the age of puberty, or what good athletes they used to be, or the year they spent in a beach house in shorts. I much prefer the offbeat item. Give me more, give me more.”

She liked to stand clutching herself as she talked. Hands under opposite elbows. Only one hand to elbow if she had a phone or drink in the other. Leaning back against the nearest large object as she talked. Sometimes her right foot scraping the floor. Her head sometimes tilted left. Jean believed in very little. All around her all her life people went around believing. They believed in horticulture, pets, theosophy and yogurt, often in that order, flickeringly, going on to periodic meditation, to silence and daunted withdrawals. Despite their belief in staying single they all believed in marriage. This was the collectivization of all other beliefs. All other beliefs were located in the pulpy suburbs of marriage. To entertain other beliefs without being married was to put oneself in some slight danger of being forced to be serious about the respective merits of these beliefs. Dishevelment would result. True belief. The end of one's utter presentableness. Recently ex-married, Jean had not yet detected flaws in her presentableness. But this was because she had not yet experienced the onset of the danger of belief. The links were thrilling if indeed true links, if more than mere envisioned instants.

“I think we should wear uniforms,” Bolin said.

So, if she had been standing and talking, which she wasn't, being encamped
by now in Softly's cubicle, “sorting impressions,” trying to read “notes,” there would have been on display some related version of that casual posture, that sleeveless V-neck sweater, that knit shirt, the acute crease in those flannel pants. Her husband had left without warning one morning. No hint since of whereabouts. All around her people accused him of cowardice. If willing to grant this, she realized she would have had to concede the corollary, that to live with her in wedlock required courage. (Is that really logical?) A certain marital valor. An intrepidity and grit. She didn't hate him, miss him or wonder where he was. Never a thought of some swell revenge. Among the things she didn't believe was that we learn from experience. Nothing of value accrued to her from the fact of his disappearance except for one insight, that there seems to be in men a universal mechanism, a preconscious warning hum that is activated upon mention of certain details of a woman's prior life. And so each man she met, on being told of her husband's sudden departure, would himself suddenly depart. It began to take on the rhythm of a biological cycle. All of them assumed she had made life unbearable. No doubt an expert in chaos administration. A magic-wielding bitch despite her utter presentableness. Discovery of the chromosomal hum did not interest her much, being useful only when she was in bed with someone she wanted to wake up in bed without, in which case she had only to remember not to go to sleep without first mentioning that one morning without warning her husband had left. All around her all her life all the others believed, forever attending classes to solidify old beliefs and obtain knowledge that would lead to new beliefs, grown people going to school for instruction in coloring with goo, in lifting the dress to sit on the pot, in spitting out buttons to prevent strangulation, believers, flickering.

“How are the notes coming along?” Softly said.

“Accumulating nicely.”

“They should be ready by now. I want to see them when they're ready.”

“I'm changing systems,” she said. “It's just a question of switching over to this new system. Everything's in order. It just has to be systemized anew.”

“Do it up top.”

“I want to stay.”

“Edna and Lester won't like it. They want absolute assurance nobody's hovering, nobody's listening, nobody's otherwise disturbing their concentration.”

It had been Bolin nonstop for a solid hour. Maybe more, maybe less, hard to tell. Billy thought he saw a light high on the southwest gradient, there and gone, a pale beam shifting. He was in his chair. Lester Bolin was sitting on the ground at the juncture of two partitions. Bolin on bilateral symmetry. Bolin on symbolic notation. Bolin on the subject of uniforms. Team jerseys with
LOGICON
sewed across the front. His left leg was bent at the knee, the other leg stretched out flat, and he ceased gesturing in accompaniment to his remarks only to raise his left hand from time to time in order to simulate a grooming motion over the scrubby tract above his forehead.

Exact correspondence of form and constituent arrangement on opposite sides of a dividing line or plane, Softly thought. He rejected the idea, never proposed, that there might be someone or something on the other side of an imaginary median line to match his parts and their relationships and into which he might theoretically flow. He was bundled into his bed, thumb-sucking, trying to stifle the chill that had penetrated his body on the most recent descent. Several blankets and a thick quilt. His thermal jammies. In the kitchen Lester was boiling water for tea. Edna was out near the barrier trying to get the shower to work properly. In cube one, the boy was unwavering in his marsupial sulk. Fill fill fill. Softly thumb-sucking made a series of tiny plectral sounds, as though pinching an inflated balloon. He felt a period of depression coming on. Arrival as scheduled. Activity and high excitement. Then this immense gloom. He consoled himself with the thought that it wouldn't last long and more pointedly with the clinical knowledge that a person afflicted with cyclothymia, the technical name for this condition, was known, of
all things, as a cycloid. How utterly lovely. What depths of stability and equivalence. What splendid
Einheit
or unity. Day and night of manic-depressive psychosis. Sun, heat, maleness. Moon, shade, femininity. Bless all Celestials and may they dualize forever. Pangs and lobsecs. He took his thumb out of his mouth, stepped from bed, opened the briefcase that held his hand-washables, felt around among the underwear and socks and came up with a small cylindrical inhalator. It was trademarked NorOmCol and had a screw cap, which he removed in some haste. He fitted the device high into his left nostril and squeezed once,
I went to a Chinese restaurant to get my laundry back
, releasing a colorless vapor.
Whoosh
. Wonder what a microscopic view would resemble. Noradrenalin transmission appearing on the slide like a neon sea. Cells unable to reabsorb. Active brain, racing pulse. Is this stuff psychoto-mimetic is the question. Or is it “madness”-inhibiting? He put on an old robe and slippers, pondering which came first, state of mind or effect produced by chemical agent, his nostril pleasurably scorched.

He went into the kitchen, where Bolin was pouring tea for Edna Lown, who sat before an ultraviolet lamp. Waving off a cup of tea he circled the table a few times before climbing a stool near the entranceway. Edna wore sun goggles.

“Laughter,” Bolin said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Ha ha. Just another way of saying ha ha.”

“Why don't you simply laugh?”

“I am laughing. Ha ha. A sound indicating amusement or glee. Middle English
ha ha
. Old English
ha ha
.”

Heterology refers to lack of correspondence between bodily parts, as in structure, arrangement or growth. An adjective is heterological if it denotes something that doesn't apply to the adjective itself. What about the adjective “heterological”? Is it heterological (this is Softly thinking) or not heterological? Let's work our way through the successive reflections of this logical dilemma. The mind that makes it to the other side needn't concern itself with bodily parts and whether they match or not. For isn't it true, historically (I permit myself to slip, this once, through my own blockade), that people have maintained a fascination for the subplot of erotic potential in small bumpy misproportioned men (not that I wish to exaggerate my own unevenness), perhaps suspecting us of possessing cyclic drives and impulses traceable to our more “natural” state of being; that is, our obvious lack of grace (which means, here, both effortless movement and divine favor, stressing the latter); or believing us capable of providing something deeply feared and longed for, nightmarish fulfillment, incubus asquat on the belly of a sleeping woman.

“Sign over Spanish barber shops,” Lown said. “
Algebrista y sangrador
. Bonesetter and bloodletter. Trying to solve the flow.”

The slope was dark. There were matches and candles in the pack, however. A crack of flame by the light of which a man might refuel a carbide lamp. At her desk Edna removed the heavy glasses she wore and then reached down and unlaced her desert boots. An unspoken sigh rose through her frame. The easeful stress of mellow bodies settling. Eyes closed now. Lips moving: broad-stroked Mayan lips moving slightly. What we conclude must be true in all possible worlds. True false. Tautological contradictory. Easier to reason without a sense of passing time. No systematically recurring event such as sunrise to provide a means of measuring an interval. Rest now rest. Continuous variable. Limit of an infinite sequence. Cut ever nearer the true value. Close in. Klōz in/n/n/n/n. Edna had grown children; that is, sons and daughters now adult, living with husbands, wives and real children in suburban Bellevue or some slight variation thereof. (Where's gramma, dad? She's living in a cave, shut up.) This piece of furniture was all that could be scavenged in the way of a desk, being a former chair taken apart and put back together by Lester Bolin inventively rearranging.
Despite the constant need for enterprise, the lack of material comfort, she liked it here. This was true work, what her life was all about, a summation, the terminating act of a long career that had often verged on greatness. The careers of each of them—Lester, Rob, herself—had proceeded along fairly similar routes, touching here and there, pausing to curl one inside the other, ever so lightly, never before this close to braiding together in a significant way. The atmosphere of crisis would prompt them to work harder and better. The lack of comfort. The imposed proximity. Rest now rest. It was all so enfolding. Across the fiction of pure space they studied each other intently, parents of their own bodies, listening to the listener, all gravid with formal deduction. She opened her eyes. Maurice Wu. And put her glasses back on. Yes rested well rested. Time to shake off the dross of ordinary language. Maurice Wu squatting in the guano fields. She heard Bolin begin to snore. What she found truly remarkable was the fact that it had taken her so very little time to adapt to these ridiculous living conditions. On a typewriter stand in Bolin's cubicle was an old Royal portable with a sheet of paper sticking up out of the roller. Set on the ground between the legs of the typewriter stand was a shortwave radio. Next to the stand and the radio was a small plastic desk. On the desk was a framed photograph of Lown and Bolin formally posed on a small lawn on some campus somewhere, each of them half turned toward the camera and half facing the other person, hands behind their backs, Edna's left leg extended a bit, Lester's right leg likewise set forward, the photographer's insistence on balanced composition (whatever the level of humor intended) evident most of all in the centering element of the entire picture, this being a waist-high twin-handled jug of indeterminate markings, each handle pointing (as it were) toward one of the standing figures. Above the radio, the stand, the antique machine, the desk, the photograph, draped across the full length of one partition, was a banner inscribed as follows: