Ratner's Star (7 page)

“Mysticism's point of departure is awareness of death, a phenomenon that doesn't occur to science except as the ultimate horrifying vision of objective inquiry. Every back door is filled with the terror of death. Mysticism, because it started at that very point, tends to become progressively rational.”

“Gabble, hiss, gabble,” Hummer said.

For the first time since the “picnic” began, Cyril Kyriakos changed position. He sat upright, legs crossed, and took off his shirt. Then, beginning to speak, he unbuckled a figure-eight harness and proceeded to adjust some locks, rings, cables and joints before removing his left arm from his body. Automatically, Billy looked away even as he continued
to stare. Cyril put his shirt back on. He placed the arm and its suspension system across his lap, where the sunlight accentuated the high shine of the plastic laminate material. A small emblem set just below the triceps pad carried the words:
A PRODUCT OF OMCO RESEARCH
.

“It's been suggested that the logic I espouse isn't rigorous enough to do justice to the sheer dispersion of modern thought. But wasn't Aristotle too lax and Russell too insistent on being all-devouring? Sometimes I think I'd like to relocate, as they say in the business community. Give me algebraic invariants to play around with. Or too, too solid geometry.”

Some people in one of the lower gardens were seated in the kind of triangular pattern studied in depth by early believers in the selfhood of numbers. What was ten was also four, triangle and password,
tetraktys
, holy fourfoldness. Hummer got up and left. Una got up, smiling, and shook out her skirt. Cyril nodded, rising, making ready to go, the woman lifting the quilt, smiling once more at the boy on the grass, while the man, Cyril, headed off now, side by side with Una, the plastic arm in his right hand and held parallel to the ground, glinting a bit, still, as they moved into the distance. Billy heard the wind chimes now, tone surprisingly precise, a sequence of whole-numbered harmonies, music as mathematics whistled into.

Hours later he stood naked in his room looking around for his pajamas, a moldy sock still in his hand. He felt something of himself in the material, a corporeal dampness, the faintest sense of coating, of his own rubbed-off yeast. His fear of the body's fundamental reality had not yet fully disclosed itself. In fact he often occupied himself with thoughts of rot. His own death, wake and burial were recurring themes. Of secondary interest was the putrefaction of his immediate family and then of close relatives and then more distant and then of friends in descending order of importance and finally mere acquaintances, broken down to compost. This was formal rot to be enjoyed on a theoretical level. Equally marvelous were the jams and scabs of his own living body. Excrement worried him a bit. Shitpiss. He did not have reveries about excrement. Not his own and certainly not anyone else's.
There was something about waste material that defied systematic naming. It was as though the many infantile names for fecal matter and urine were concessions to the fact that the real names (whichever these were) possessed a secret power that inhibited all but the most ceremonial utterance. He saw a segment of pajama leg sticking out of a stack of pillowcases and other linen that sat in a basket near the bathroom door. The sock in his hand reminded him of something he'd known for a long time in the vaguest of ways, a sort of accumulated fact; namely, he'd developed a personal stink.

Among the things beyond expression in various cultures have been the names of deities, infernal beings, totemic animals and plants; the names of an individual's blood relatives of the opposite sex (a ban related to incest restrictions); the new name given a boy at his initiation; the names of certain organs of the body; the names of the recently dead; the names of sacred objects, profane acts, leaders of cults, the cults themselves. Double substitutes must be used. Carefully devised code words. Taboo variants. Oaths are duly taken. An entire bureaucracy of curse, scourge and punishment is set up to discourage utterance of the unspeakable. Copyists of manuscripts are prevailed upon to resort to the strictest kind of transliteral deviousness. No writing that touches on the life of a secret subject can itself escape secrecy and in time culthood is conferred on document as well as primary figure. Often more than one person is concealed in the cult leader's generative shadow and the names of none of those who follow can be revealed except as provided by the contextural pattern itself, however primitive its design or childlike its claim to a scientific principle of arrangement.

He dropped the sock and got his pajamas. Before stepping into them he briefly juggled his testicles. This was a bedtime routine he'd lately developed not only for the common monkey sport of fingering those boiled orbs (dimeric witness to virility) but also in earnest celebration of the fact that his left testicle had fully emerged at last, making him not only whole but reassuringly asymmetrical as well, the left drooping a bit lower than the right, as decreed by nature.

Slowly he was getting accustomed to the canister's tenuous perspectives. In his pajamas he examined the components of the limited input
module. He knew this was standard equipment for the sector he was in but he had no interest in learning how to work the thing. For whatever it was they wanted he'd need pencil and paper at most.

Someone was outside the door and now a knocking sound was evident,
bap bap
, a sort of cartoon noise,
bap
, as of an oval stone dropping on a bald infant's head. He opened the door to see a figure in oversized work clothes. The man listed slightly, giving the impression of being burdened beyond the reach of deepest fatigue, someone who sleeps in subways.

“They know me as Howie in this sector. The fume sewer man. Heard you were worth seeing. Maybe you want me to show you what's what down there, two or three levels down, what they got down where I work down there, fume sewers, evaporators, recyclers, backup spewing filters. You think this is far down. That there is a lot farer. I could take you eight levels down. Nobody goes eight levels down without a red pass.”

“I'm supposed to go to bed.”

“You're the only kid in this whole place.”

“There's another one being born.”

“Eight levels down in noise is some racket. Accelerators, storage rings, proton impactors, collision machines, Howie Weeden, always glad to meet a kid.”

“They want me to get up early.”

“Let's shake hands. People shake hands when they meet. You don't just say nice to meet you, one person, and the other person do nothing. People shake hands.”

“I still have wet.”

“What's that?”

“I still have wet on my hands from just washing up for the night.”

“They told me to come look,” Howie said. “They said there's a kid over there worth looking at for the way he adds numbers in his head.”

“That's not what I do.”

“I have a python in my room. Don't tell anybody. It's my best pet ever. Want to come watch it digest?”

“They have me on a schedule.”

“There's a woman takes a bath every night at this time and you can see her in a ceiling reflector if you look through a hole in the wall standing on a bench in the workroom over near the next sector up one level. I'm the only one that knows. I call her the water woman.”

“Let's go,” Billy said.

He put on his robe and slippers and followed Howie Weeden through the play maze to a red elevator reserved for maintenance personnel. They got off and headed down a long empty corridor. Signs of the shadow-flow were everywhere. Howie moved quickly despite a double shuffle of his right foot.

“If anything happens, grab my tongue,” he said.

“I don't understand.”

“Just be ready to grab my tongue.”

“I want to know why.”

“I never had to tell anybody before. They always knew. You tell somebody to grab your tongue, you don't have to say why. Just if I slam out, go for the tongue, that's all I'm saying.”

“How often does this happen?”

“More often than not,” Howie said.

In the workroom he stood on a bench and put his head to a metal bracket at the juncture of two cement walls. After several minutes he looked at Billy, pointed to a specific perforation in the bracket and then stepped down to the floor. Billy wasn't nearly tall enough to put his eye to the spot in question, so Howie set himself on the bench once more, bunched up on all fours, as the boy climbed up his arched back and found a foot-grip alongside each shoulder blade. His hands were flat against the wall, head twisted, right eye almost in contact with the small vertical slit. There was a hole in the wall, perhaps half an inch in diameter, directly behind this particular level of the bracket and so he found himself peering through two openings, one punched by machine into the metal bracket and the other most likely resulting from crude workmanship or premature erosion of the wall, the sector, the level, the entire structure. Beyond both holes was a ceiling reflector.

“Just remember the tongue,” Howie said. “This weight on my back isn't doing my skull trauma any good.”

In the tilted mirror he saw Una Braun. Wearing a loosely knotted robe patterned in mellow colors she stood barefoot on pentagonal tile, her body a bit foreshortened by the angle of reflection, combing, combing her hair. Bottles of perfume and baby oil stood on a glass shelf. His knees went weak and he thought he would fall. Both hands were dug into cement, not finger-gripping (he feared she'd hear the scratching) but pressed desperately, palm and heel, into the wall. It was she, Una, about to bathe, undress and bathe, water woman soon to drop her robe and step into that clear and distorting, dense and un-colored element. Varieties of light glanced off the surface borders of air and water, water and glass, glass and oil, the whole room a medium of nonuniform density, these propagating waves graining her body, soon to be rubbed and soaped and misted, transformed in displaceable mass, passing through itself, beauty bare, an unfalsifiable and self-blinding essence, not subject to the judgments of mirrors, what Euclid might have danced to in the summer dusk. Oooo naaa. She stood combing her hair, the big toe of one foot digging idly at the inmost pentacle on a cool blue unit of tile. Now she smiled at a stray thought, a memory of home or long buried song lyric, one hand dropping to the whimsical knot on the robe's sagging belt, perhaps loosening it further, the other hand placing the comb on a shelf.

Do they comb their hair
before
they take a bath?

She lowered her head for a moment, moving partly out of his line of vision, returning seconds later. When she looked up, she saw him. That very section of wall, mirrored twice in the complex placement of the bathroom's reflecting surfaces, was spread across the ceiling. There was his right eye, magnified.

“Who is that?”

He kicked Howie's shoulder to indicate trouble.

“We're caught,” he whispered.

“I heard,” Howie said.

“What do we do?”

“Ask for tits and let me know what happens.”

She hadn't moved.

“Show me your tits.”

The sound of his voice surprised him in its unreal evenness and degree of clarity.

“Billy, is that you? Do I know that voice? It's you, isn't it?”

“Show me your tits please.”

“Repulsive person. Wretched little boy.”

He kicked Howie again, more urgently this time.

“I tried asking but nothing got shown.”

“Ask for thigh.”

“You ask.”

“Who's up there?”

“You didn't tell me there'd be conversation. I expected to see things without this talk. She knows me by voice.”

“Ask for hair,” Howie whispered.

“Which area?”

“Below, below.”

“You ask this time.”

“Maybe, your age, you better stick with titties.”

She was still there, evidently defiant.

“Let's have some boobs,” he said.

“How very sad. Yes, more than anything, sad. Tragic individual. Sad, sad boy.”

“Cheer me up with a quick tit.”

He gave Howie a very light kick, as if requesting some confirmation of the brilliance of this wit under pressure.

“Undeniably wretched person.”

“Left breast,” he said.

“Demean yourself, that's all you do.”

“While I'm up here. Some nipple. How can it hurt?”

Howie pushed up.

“Cheeks,” he whispered.

“Nothing's getting shown.”

“Ask for cheeks and report back.”

“She's not showing.”

Una left the bathroom in her own time, setting things in order, replacing caps and closing lids; clearly she had no intention of scuttling
away like a maiden outraged. There was nothing for him to do but climb down Howie Weeden's back to the bench and floor. The maintenance man studied him crookedly.

“What happened?”

“Gone.”

“No bath?”

“Nothing.”

“I played a trick,” Howie said. “She already finished her bath. When I got up there I heard the water getting sucked out of the tub. I think it's here.”

“What's here?”

“I can feel it. It's here. I'm getting ready to slam. The tongue. Prepare to go for the tongue. I'm slamming out.”

The boy hurried out of the workroom and got on the nearest elevator. For a long time, in robe and slippers, he walked in and out of arcades, suede sitting rooms, meditation suites, past miniature waterfalls, around ornamental fountains, under arched gardens, through reference libraries, lush saunas, empty game rooms, totally lost, thinking wistfully of his crisp little bed. An unmanned cart marked
EMERGENCY LINEN SERVICE
went speeding by. All was quiet until he reached a transparent bridge leading to one of the upper sectors of the armillary sphere. The enormous motion of the sphere was audible, a continual muffled utterance less of machinery at work than of overwhelming mass in friction with surrounding air. He entered the sphere and stood just above one of the elliptic bronze rings. Arciform spaces. Flowing motion. To be up so high, turning, contained in material receptive to visible light, was a liquid thrill, the night sky so clear and near and living. As he was swept gradually past the edge of a steel support he saw something pierce the sky, an incandescent object dragging vapor-light behind it and needling in and out of darkness. Aloft too long to be a shooting star, it might have been a snow-maned comet, come sunward to orbit, or a supernova's argon shriek. In other places the sky was tranquil, although nowhere completely still, and he wondered whether the flash he'd seen was part of the process of a star being formed, point of light set within the fiery trigon, that name given to the first, fifth and ninth signs of the
ancient zodiac. Twelve equal parts. Thirty-degree arcs. Earth, air, fire, water. Triplicity of fire. Fire's pre-eminence. Equilateral triangle of fire. Men born under new stars are destined to lead revolutions.