Ratner's Star (5 page)

“Designed by a woman,” he said finally.

“Good work.”

“The entire concept. The execution.”

“Nice job.”

“Start to finish.”

“What designed by a woman?”

“This entire structure.”

“Big.”

“Inside and out.”

“I like the roominess.”

“Do you know what kind of sphere that is that's set into the main structure? Armillary sphere, that's an armillary sphere. Used a lot in the Moslem renaissance. Of course ours is a supermodel. Much larger than anything they dreamed of in those days.”

“Do people work in there?”

“Motion's so gradual and thing's so big they have no sense of movement. Sure, it's a working sphere. Tells time of day and year. Measures tilt of earth's axis. Measures height of sun. Measures coordinates of a star. Also houses four or five complexes and about six hundred people. This whole operation is self-supporting. Fume sewers and recycling units all over the place. Synthetic food machine-treated on the premises. Not to mention solar heating.”

“You said.”

“Did you see the antenna array on your way in?”

“Telescopes.”

“Each dish contains a reflecting mesh. The entire array comprises what we call a synthesis radio telescope. Were you surprised at the size of each unit?”

“Small in size.”

“It's the mesh,” Dyne said. “We've used unimaginably tiny components in the mesh. Makes gross scanning easier than ever.”

“Where did she put the bathroom?”

“So the combined operation is a sort of clock-radio if you want to look at it that way. Perfectly legitimate way to look at it. Between the armillary sphere and the synthesis telescope, what we have here is a gigantic microminiaturized clock-radio.”

“Is Endor here?”

“Endor is living in a hole in the ground about ten miles east of here.”

“A hole?”

“He refuses to come out,” Dyne said.

The wall continued to darken in all directions. Billy turned and saw the same thing happening behind him and on both sides. Floor and ceiling as well. No immediate danger, the maintenance man had said. Just this tension. This gradual plastic deformation of a solid object into overflowing droves of motion.

“Which way's the bathroom?” he said.

“The prebriefing is not over.”

“I won't be long.”

“How long is not long?”

“When I'm finished.”

“Tee-tee or big business?”

“Say again.”

“Number one or number two?” Dyne said.

His mother often called him mommy. It was a case of double imitation. As a small child he naturally mimicked many of the things Faye said and often she responded with loving impersonations of his original facsimile. There was not the slightest mockery intended; she
might have been saying junior or bud or skip. It happened, however, to be mommy—an endearment located beyond the southernmost border of messy affection. It wasn't until he was nearly twelve that he was able to get her out of the habit.

His mother was also responsible for the second of his unwelcome names. The obsessive moviegoing of Faye's childhood and adolescence had been interrupted only by childhood itself, adolescence itself. Her extravagant attraction to movies was almost an act of violence. She had seen everything made in that period and was content to spend the mellowing years of her motherhood in front of the TV set, viewing the same movies again and again. Constant reader of trade publications and fan magazines, she was familiar with modern theories of promotion and packaging; the star system; mystique, charisma and product appeal;
and so
, when her own small son early demonstrated that he was no ordinary Bronx boy devoted to street-fighting and venereal entertainment,
she instantly
began to think in terms of mass audience awareness. This meant a surname less humdrum than Terwilliger. Simply by removing
e-r
twice, she arrived at Twillig, which had a distinct twinkle to it, perfect for a superstar.

Before his work earned enough money to enable the family to move to a neighborhood just south of Yonkers (
laundry rooms, terrace apartments, air conditioning, kids on bikes!
), they lived in an old building on Crotona Avenue, Billy, Babe and Faye, wedged between room dividers and other debris, on the fourth floor, overlooking a split-level playground, scene of ritual mutilations. His after-school tutor was Mr. Morphy, a small black man with a likable mustache. He wore the same suit every day for nearly five months, then changed to another for the rest of the academic year.

“I should have listened in school,” Faye said. “I never paid attention. I had IQ to burn but I never listened to what the teachers told me. Realistically I should have paid attention. But I always sat so far back.”

Babe was both rangy and overweight, carrying his excess pounds with daring grandness, an easygoing and somehow apt profusion, his body conveying some of the earned fluency of a former athlete, which
he wasn't in particular, his active involvement in the playing of games being restricted to an occasional round of ace-nine ball with the submafiosi who still clung to these polyglot surroundings, men with excess phlegm in their throats, rueful mortals of the poolroom, finger-biters, masters of deliberate spitting. Babe owned a sawed-off poolstick (for nonsporting purposes) and a large black attack dog. Poolstick in hand he sometimes stood by the window looking down at the boys and girls in the playground across the street. The dancers. The nodders. The actors. The self-styled playboy assassins. He took his hand-weapon with him when he walked the dog. Faye pointed out that if he didn't have the dog he wouldn't have to walk it and therefore wouldn't need a pool-stick to protect the walked dog or a dog for the poolstick or either one of them for himself because without the dog he wouldn't be out there. Billy didn't like the dog. He had never liked it and did not assign a gender to it. The dog used to push him out of the way and chew on his books. Late one night it appeared at his bedside and seemed about to speak to him. He knew by its expression that it was not likely to produce mere animal babble. If it opened its mouth it would speak. Words, not sounds. Fleshed meaning to replace those familiar growls.

“Go back to bed,” he told the dog.

What he liked most about Mr. Morphy's visits were the new books the tutor brought along. The sweet clean shock of number theory. The natural undamped resonance of the symbols. Never more nor less than what was meant. Mr. Morphy soft-voiced and utterly dull pointed out one unchallengeable truth after another. Eventually these would lead to Pennyfellow, Connecticut. The Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. Twelve-wintered then he was, already nearly peerless.

When Babe came home from work he opened a bottle of Champale and drank it immediately. The next several took a little longer. Later he'd sometimes grip the poolstick like a baseball bat and assume the batting stances of famous ballplayers of the past. Faye and Billy would be asked to identify the man whose stance he was imitating but neither ever knew and this annoyed Babe to the point where he'd pick up the phone and call his friend from the subways, Izzy Seltzer. He then reassumed his stance, which Faye would have to describe to Izzy over the phone.

“Okay, legs wide apart, bat up in the air, hips wiggling, a lot of rear end.”

Billy spent a year and a half at Bronx High School of Science. The daily journey wasn't easy, two long bus rides each way, and most of the ground covered was part of a landscape renowned for incidental violence. Gangs often made raids on the bus. In the afternoon they came out of the sun like Kiowa braves, nine or ten teenage boys, riding the rear bumper, pounding on windows, forcing the back door and improvising scenes of flash-terror. He liked Bronx Science but was glad when the Center offered him a place.

“This isn't an ordinary dog,” Babe said. “It's an attack dog. I say the word, this dog lunges. I say the word, everybody better beware. This is a highly trained attack guard dog. With this dog at my side I can go into any neighborhood in the city.”

“K.b.i.s.f.b.,” Faye said.

“What's that mean?”

“Keep believing it, shit-for-brains.”

“Nice talk in front of the kid,” he said. “Where'd you hear that?”

“The kid brought it back from Connecticut.”

Many times Faye and Billy stayed up until two or three in the morning, drinking coffee and watching old movies on TV. Across the airshaft a crazy old woman screamed and cursed. He could never make out what she was saying. Some nights he came close to understanding the sense of a particular shriek or the last several words in a long medley of invective. But it always eluded him. Although at times she seemed to be arguing with someone, there was never any voice besides her own. Most of the time she simply screamed a lot of fabricated words. People called her the scream lady. He was afraid of her but wanted to know what she was saying.

Faye took him to a department store on Fordham Road for a new suit to wear when he entered the School of Mathematics at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures. The University of Chicago wanted him. Caltech wanted him. Princeton was eager to get him. He was even offered a research post in Akademgorodok in the Soviet Union. The final bid came from the Institut für mathematische Logik und Grundlagenforschung in Münster. The name of the place scared
him so much he never even replied. In the end he decided in favor of the Center, one of the best places in the world to do work in pure mathematics.

One night, when the attack dog was still a puppy, Billy overheard a conversation between his mother and father. He was in bed at the time, consciousness slowly dissolving, and their voices brought him back from the sheerest drop.

“He doesn't do anything right.”

“He's young, he'll learn.”

“He does everything wrong.”

“He's little yet, Babe.”

“He doesn't listen when I talk. I talk, nothing happens. Best thing is put him to sleep. I'd sell him if I thought I could find somebody dumb enough to buy. We put him in the box and let them turn on the gas.”

“No, Babe. N-o, no.”

“We put him to sleep, Faye. He's not worth worrying about. They have a box they put them in. It's over in minutes, or maybe longer, depending on how much he weighs.”

All children know their parents plot to dispose of them. Black box. Big room. Mad and Dag fitted with other people's faces. This is place without interruption, pinpointless time, motion extending beyond its own surrender to the Outside, and whether an isolated childhood encompasses the whole of “life and death,” this converse density, is itself a question too compact to be intelligible, dimension
n
, containing the total unbroken distance over which a thing extends and the presiding energy that informs it, no “part” separate from any other, continuous being, hole to hole, nourished from below. Baggy gray faces saying
aga aga
. Mad and Dag with a reel and rhyme. Count to ten to ten. Box with Chinese insides. Gas pumped from exsanguine stomachs. Continued din of popping optic disks. Big T, little w, little i, little 1, little 1, little i, little g. Nourished from below, from below. Hopping Mad and gadabout Dag plotting to dispose. Count to ten to ten to ten to ten.

In the topiary garden about a dozen people driven outside by the shadow-flow drowsily swung in hammocks, sat on swings and lounged in wicker rockers. Hedges and shrubs were trimmed in animal shapes, such as those of baboons, mandrills and spider monkeys, but in a manner so stylized as to be nearly geometric. There were several large trees at the edges of the garden. Sunlight warmed Billy's face and fashioned precise shadows on the grass. He sat across a picnic quilt from Cyril Kyriakos and Una Braun, both dressed informally, the woman in a wide skirt, her legs stretched evenly across the grass, the man leaning back, body twisted a bit, left leg bent at the knee, a certain austerity in evidence, as though he advocated disciplined picnics. Una was a consulting hydrologist. Cyril had taught transitional logic at universities on four continents. Several other people reclined nearby and one of them soon disengaged herself to take a position just behind Billy and to his right, well placed (he suspected) to study his ear and neck. This was Mimsy Mope Grimmer, an expert on infantile sexuality.

“You're new here,” Cyril said.

It seemed he was always new. Newness was his personal curse. He was forever being told that he was new here or there or somewhere. It was an injunction to explain himself, to give his listeners a brief summary of his existence thus far. To be new among adults, however, was not nearly the problem it was when he was with people his own age. The challenge was not as direct here. It could be met with an oblique remark which those assembled would be content to ascribe to shyness.

“All I knew about coming here was I was coming to a place with this name.”