Don Delillo - Ratners Star

Ratner's Star

Don Delillo

ADVENTURES

Field Experiment Number One

1 SUBSTRATUM

2 FLOW

3 SHAPE

4 EXPANSION

5 DICHOTOMY

6 CONVERGENCE INWARD

7 REARRANGEMENT

8 SEGMENTATION

9 COMPOSITE STRUCTURE

10 OPPOSITES

11 SEQUENCE

12 PAIRS

REFLECTIONS

Logicon Project Minus-One

I TAKE A SCARY RIDE

I GET A LITTLE BACKGROUND

SEE LESTER EXIST

LESTER TELLS US ABOUT ROB

I READ MY MAIL

BILATERAL SYMMETRY

ROB DOES A TRICK

Make Formal Prize Announcements

EDNA GETS ANNOYED

I GET INTERVIEWED AGAIN

FEMALE HAIR DOWN THERE

INTERVIEW

ROB TALKS IN QUOTES

I MEET MAINWARING

I DON'T FEEL SO GOOD

MORE ON BATS

LESTER TRIES AGAIN

I LOSE MY BREATH

I AM NOT JUST THIS

I TAKE A DRINK

SELF-BETTERMENT

SELF-BETTERMENT CRASH PROGRAM

A LOT HAPPENS

I SIT A WHILE LONGER

AN UNUSUAL SOUVENIR

I MAKE AN ENTRANCE

A DESPERATE MEASURE

THINGS GO THE OTHER WAY

About the Author

ADVENTURES

Field Experiment Number One

1 SUBSTRATUM

Little Billy Twillig stepped aboard a Sony 747 bound for a distant land. This much is known for certain. He boarded the plane. The plane was a Sony 747, labeled as such, and it was scheduled to arrive at a designated point exactly so many hours after takeoff. This much is subject to verification, pebble-rubbed (khalix, calculus), real as the number one. But ahead was the somnolent horizon, pulsing in the dust and fumes, a fiction whose limits were determined by one's perspective, not unlike those imaginary quantities (the square root of minus-one, for instance) that lead to fresh dimensions.

The plane taxied to a remote runway. Billy was strapped into a window seat. Next to him in the aircraft's five-two-three-two-five seating pattern was a man reading a boating magazine and next to the man were one, two, three little girls. This was as much nextness as Billy cared to explore for the moment. He was fourteen years old, smaller than most people that age. Examined at close range he might be said to feature an uncanny sense of concentration, a fixed intensity that countervailed his noncommittal brown eyes and generally listless manner. Viewed from a distance he gave the impression that he wasn't entirely at peace with his present surroundings, cagily slouched in his seat, someone newly arrived in this pocket of technology and stale light. The sound of the miniaturized propulsion system grew louder and soon the plane was in the air. Its angle of ascent was severe enough to frighten the boy, who had never been on an airplane before. With Sweden at war, he had received his Nobel Prize in a brief ceremony on a lawn in Pennyfellow, Connecticut, traveling to and from that locale in the back seat of his father's little Ford.

It was the first Nobel Prize ever given in mathematics. The work that led to the award was understood by only three or four people, all mathematicians, of course, and it was at their confidential urging that the Nobel committee, traditionally at a total loss in this field, finally settled on Twillig, born Terwilliger, William Denis Jr., premature every inch of him, a snug fit in a quart mug.

His father (to backtrack briefly) was a third-rail inspector in the New York subway system. When the boy was seven the elder Terwilliger (known to most as Babe) took him into the subways for the sheer scary fun of it, a sort of Theban initiation. This was, after all, the place where Babe spent nearly half his conscious life. It seemed to him perfectly natural that a father should introduce his lone son to the idea that existence tends to be nourished from below, from the fear level, the plane of obsession, the starkest tract of awareness. In Babe's mind there was also a notion that the boy would show him increased respect, having seen the region where he toiled, smelled the dankness and felt the steel. They rode the local for a while, standing at the very front of the first car to get the motorman's viewpoint. Then they got off and went along a platform in a deserted station in the South Bronx and into a small tool room and down some steps and along a passageway and through a door and onto the tracks, where they walked in silence toward the next station. It was a Sunday and therefore reasonably safe; these were express tracks and no such trains ran on Sunday along this particular line. A local went by, however, one track over, shooting slow blue sparks. In this incandescent shower Billy thought he saw a rat. Wide bend ahead. For comic shock effect, Babe made a series of crazy people's faces-tongue hanging out, eyes bulging, neck twisted and stiff. Within ten yards of the next station he singled out a key from the ring of many keys he carried and then opened a small door in the blackened wall and led his son into another tool room and then onto the platform. And that was all or almost all. A walk down a stretch of dark track. On the way home they sat in the next-to-last car. A tripping device failed to work and their train, braking late, ran into the rear of a stalled work train. Billy found himself on the floor of the car. Ahead was stunned metal, a buckled frame for bodies intersecting in thick smoke. Then there was a moment of superlunar calm. In this interval, just before he started crying, he realized there is at least one prime between a given number and its double.

The stewardess arrived, driving a motorized food cart. Billy preferred looking out the window to eating. There was nothing to see, just faded space, but the sense of an environment somewhere beyond this pressurized chunk of tubing, a distant whisper of the biosphere, made him feel less constricted. He tried to think in a context of Sumerian gesh-time, hoping to convince himself this would make the journey seem one fourth as long as it really was. That wedge system they used. Powers of sixty. Sixty a vertical wedge. Sixty shekels to a mina. Sixty minas to a talent. Gods numbered one to sixty. He'd recently read (handwriting cunning and urgent) that the sixty-system was about four thousand years old, obviously far from extinct. More clever than most, those Mesopotamians. Natural algebraic capacity. Beady-eyed men in ziggurats predicting eclipse.

He squeezed past the man and his little girl tribe and went back to find the toilet. There were eleven, all in use. As he waited in the passageway between doors he was approached by a large rosy man nearly palpitating with the kind of relentless affability that the experience of travel never fails to induce in some people.

"My mouth says hello."

"H'o."

"I'm Eberhard Fearing," the man said. "Haven't I seen you in the media?"

"I was on television a couple of times."

"I was duly impressed. You demonstrated an absolute mastery as I recall. 'Brilliant' doesn't begin to say it. Loved your technical phraseology in particular. Mathematicians are a weird breed. I know because I use them in my work. Planning and procedures. Let's hear you say a thing or two."

"I'm not brilliant in person."

"I want to assure you that I admire your kind of intellect. Hard, cold and cutting, sir. What's your destination?"

"Not allowed to say."

"Flying right on through or deplaning along the way?"

"I do not comment."

"Where's your spirit of adventure?"

"First time in the air."

"Nervous, is it? Let's hear some mathematics then. Seriously, what say?"

"I don't think so for the time being."

"No room for cunctation in any line of work. But yours especially. Gifts can vanish without warning. Reach sixteen and it's all gone. Nothing ahead but a completely normative life. Shouldn't you be smiling?"

"Why?"

"We're strangers on a plane," Fearing said. "We're having a friendly talk about this and that. Calls for smiles, don't you think? That's what travel's all about. Supposed to release all that pent-up friendliness."