Ratner's Star (59 page)
Wu, risking the well-ordered foolishness of the man who leads an overexamined life, was determined to resist the prospect of failure. At some accessible level of his being, the prevailing theme, he continued to believe, was simple unity. The single-cell mechanism of man in nature. The rote-prayer of centuries of science. To be only part Chinese was to be an archery target for the honed ironies his own predicament had given precise dimensions to. His thinking led in nearly every direction to some outsized metaphor,
this
the object of his ironic perception,
that
the impediment to his personal search.
The cave was silent. He resolved to investigate this silence, to examine it systematically, to measure it in detail. It was true; he was sure of it now. Silence prevailed in the bat cave. This meant his wailing had stopped. He still felt moist chills in his back and chest but his breathing was fairly regular now and he was no longer wailing, not wailing, released from the need to wail. Events did not appear to be overrunning him any more; there was no illusion of speed to contend with. Everything was clear and getting clearer. Why had he been so confused before and why was he so nearly lucid now? He was not wedged. He knew this as surely as it is possible to know a thing. It was necessary only
to squeeze backward out of the crawlway. He was certain of this. It was obvious. All he had to do was squirm back out, get a match from his coveralls, light the match, find his way to the backpack, remove a candle from the pack, light the candle, get the extra carbide, refill the lamp. This he did, all of it in a matter of minutes, and it was simple and done and over, all fiction, Jean thought, wondering what it would take to “remember through” the ochre and soot of cave art to the very reason why these earliest of artists descended to the most remote parts of caves and applied their pigments to nearly inaccessible walls, the intricate journey and the isolated site being representative perhaps of the secret nature of the story told in the painting itself, all fiction, she thought, all fiction takes place at the end of this process of crawl, scratch and gasp, this secret memory of death. Breathing evenly now he reached under his coveralls and sweater to touch his
wu-fu
, a reassuring moment, the bat pendant cool against his fingertips, cool and faintly moist from the sweating he'd done. No longer, he thought, am I running for commissioner of shit. Time to report to Rob and get on back to the field and leave these nocturnal flying mammals to excrete in peace. After relighting the lamp he put the residue formed by the old carbide in an airtight container, where it could not harm anything living. He heard the roosting bats begin to squeak and whistle. There was motion here and there. Some were airborne now, a few, the great majority still chloroformed in roosting posture, suspended in their self-enfolding fur. As he gathered his things together, the whistling became gradually louder and more bats pelted down off the ceiling, small and barely definable presences, the dim light stung by their veering taps and caroms. Wu sat next to his pack, wondering where the opening was that would let them find their night. Crazed bat consciousness, he thought. I must have sounded part bat for a while back there or a wailing male banshee assigned the death of the fairy folk themselves. Wings everywhere. The cave appeared to be a crumbling substance transformed continually into something that grew more and more desperate to be relieved of this endemic unrest. No special pattern disclosed itself, the bats clustering in generally circular subdivisions of larger masses, the blast of beating wings increasing in volume,
megaderma
still in
evidence here and there, cruising in their homicidal flight paths, their private little eddies of disruption and blood, all the bats guided by orientation pulses of ultrasonic frequencies, the animal charms of echolocation, he thought (children more sensitive than adults to high frequency bursts), these pulses beamed through the nostrils of bats in flight but how interpreted on their return, he wondered, deciding ears alone were not enough and that the brain must be involved, some clever acoustic center that enables each aeronautic creature to classify in transit the nature of the object that intercepted and returned the original beamed sound. The cave was like a living madness now. Bats perhaps in the millions. It was becoming easier to detect the spaces between bats than individual bats themselves. Then even these spaces began to vanish. Wing-thundering echoes on the level of some heart-stopping natural calamity bearing down on a town. Wu began to laugh. He didn't know what was going on. He'd been in dozens of bat caves but had never witnessed the mass exit and could not place it in some logical context. It was an incoherent event. The incredible storm roar of wings. The sense of insane life rising out of what had been only moments earlier a set of limestone surfaces. The sheer number of bats. The frenzy of their withdrawal. He watched small groups of bats separate themselves from larger clusters and fly on out past a limestone column toward what he assumed was the passage that led to open night and he imagined himself on the other side of this opening, able to watch the colony emerge, first in small sets and groups and clusters, then larger units, these advance swarms followed by the main body, all flying close to the mouth of the cave as the rest of the bats came pouring out, the withdrawal taking a very long time, circles stacking up, increasingly precise figures in a vast wavering column, the wind blast deepening, the column growing taller, the cave emptying finally, no longer the slightest wisp of individual motion, all one now, a great spiraling flight that whispered into its season beyond the trees. And because he liked to be dazzled, Wu in his corner of the cave, pondering the reflecting mechanism of this means of navigation, sat laughing into the night.
Billy rocked in Endor's chair as Edna slept as Softly left his bed, took the elevator, crossed the catwalk, climbed the metal ladder, emerged from the canister, walked through a series of corridors and stopped before a particular door. What was unusual about this door was the fact that it had a metal bolt on the outside. Softly slid this bolt into its socket, then headed back toward the elevator.
Jean Sweet Venable stayed awake to test her own steadfastness, the persistence of her bleak resolution to confront the pain of being self-aware. The onset of the danger of true belief. The end of one's utter presentableness. The imminence of fear itself. (She relied on the convenience of titles.) What a settlement of sheer plantation ease we might occupy if only we could choose to hide now and again from thought, perception, feeling, will, memory and morbid imagination. Sleep is no help. The period before sleep was her time of greatest mental helplessness, in fact. A sense of semiwaking awareness artificially induced. Anesthesia not quite complete. Involved mental processes of deadly repetition. Blank horror. Fear in spaceless combinations. A fixed design that included death and something else as well. Sleep itself is an improvement but not always. The period after sleep is usually not as bad as the period before sleep but there are times when it is worse, when the lack of control suggests once more a treacherous anesthetic. Why isn't it possible for us to rest from time to time in some tropical swoon of nonentity? Because no matter the drugs, the cures, the sleeps, the disciplines, the medications, there is no escaping (she was on the floor now, looking for a particular blank page) the unlikelihood of escape. Maybe she had concluded prematurely that the woman in the book wasn't like her at all, at all. The name he'd given her. Impossible to think of herself with a name like that and yet names are the animal badges we wear, given not only for practical necessity but to serve as a subscript to the inner person, a primitive index of the soul, and how could she be certain, sibylline instincts or not, that the name the novelist had given her would not in the end find its rightful soul to wear. The
dialogue he'd written. Nothing at all like something she would say and yet how could she know what word or words were still to be spoken. The character had fainting spells. The character sometimes sat all night in doorways. The character's underwear stank. Successive reflections. Halfway through
Eminent Stammerers
, Jean had imagined herself as a Modern Library Giant. Sticking with her title even after she discovered that it was not quite as technically precise as
Eminent Stutterers
would have been, she filled a limited number of pages with a relaxed commentary (it wasn't the deepest of texts) on the neurosis of the speech tract; on the possibility that stuttering (interruption of word-flow) is, like glossolalia (extended word-flow), an example of learned behavior that calls for negative practice or unlearning; on the phenomenon of being alienated by one's own voice; on word-fear as a threat to sanity. She wondered, now, crawling for her blank sheet, how she'd ever expected to complete the multitude of pages necessary to qualify one's book for candidacy as a Modern Library Giant. Surely to those who suffered from it (Aristotle, Aesop, Darwin, Dodgson, Moses, Virgil, among those eminent enough to be mentioned in the text), stammering to some extent represented the “curse” of verbal communication, the anfractuous blacktop route from the pure noise of infancy. It was also a “recording” of one's mental processes, a spontaneous tape of that secret pandemonium to which childhood is often prone. Imagine, nonstammerer, the terror of this simplest question: “What is your name, little girl?”
What she'd completed thus far, since abandoning the idea of a non-fiction book on Logicon, amounted to no more than a thin scattering of pages. Some of these pages even had words on them. A few, yes, a very few had words scribbled and typed here and there, starting from the top. The others, which she considered no less a part of the thin scattering of first-draft material, were lacking in formal content, although clearly numbered and therefore distinguishable from each other. The very page she was on the floor searching for happened to be numbered but otherwise blank and yet distinguishable from the other pages not only by number but in the nature and quality of the words she had not yet set down on this page. To overcome one's tonic block; to master
words; to live without the inner will to stammer. Her own speech had never been hesitant, spasmodic or in any way labored. What satisfaction was there (if any) in the foreknowledge (if any) that one was on the verge of a stammer? Is there a special kind of mind (scientist, fabulist, poet) that believes in the necessity of continual psychic testing, that needs to see confirmed its own logical picture of living hell? Her childhood had been relatively free of stress. She had walked, talked and played without serious complication. “Gigg” (it had been reported to her by those who called themselves her parents) was the first word she spoke. A giddy girl, a thing that whirls. The page she'd been looking for was under some clothes that were under the bed. She studied it, easily perceiving that the certain kind of writing that would eventually fill this page was different in look, in sound, in touch from the writing she would entrust to any of the other blank pages, as indeed these remaining blanks would differ from each other. Of course, from this clear and easy perception it was just a short step to the visionary insight that it was not necessary to fill in the blank pages, to entrust any kind of writing at all to these pages. These pages were already complete.
She knew
what they would look like with words on them.
It was not necessary
to think of these words and set them down on these pages. From her knees she studied the room itself. Everywhere she looked in the room were these pages, almost all of them numbered and blank, dispersed over the various surfaces of her strewn clothes. Immense bedraggled dishevelment. She stayed awake to prolong that state of near sleep that represented the most treacherous level of helplessness. It was like spending one's life stupefied in the worst of ways, permanent hesperian depression, the mind able to comprehend nothing but its own fear, the unlikelihood of its escape from self-awareness. So these pages then, these numbered pages would one day contain a fiction of her making. It would be complete when the pages were complete, hundreds of them, or thousands, blank nearly every one, easy to imagine with certain kinds of words on them. Jean decided she needed air, night air, she needed out of here, if only for the briefest time. She could not open the door, however. The door was apparently locked from the outside.
The first Latin word she'd ever spoken (according to those who
claimed to be her teachers) was
pupilla
, which has the roundabout charm of meaning “little orphan girl” while it refers to the pupil of the eye, a connection based on the fact that when a child looks at her own miniature reflection in another person's eye, she sees a female figure locked inside concentric rings, a lone doll in a coiled room, a little orphan girl, herself, confined in the pupil of someone else's eye. Whose eye is this, Jean thought, that I am looking at so closely? What do I expect to find mingled with my own reflection in the center of that frigid iris? She took off her clothes, reclined on the bed and waited for her child-sized lover to open the door and, as he did, to enter the room and the woman in the room in nearly simultaneous strokes of motion.
Softly feeling better about things was in his quarters in his bed in his pajamas, a dynast in the lounging bliss of a culminating vision. What did it matter that divergence from type had long been identified as the inescapable trait of those maladapted to their surroundings? Size, what was size? Pigmentation, what was that in the light of the passionate science of the mind? The antrum was a cave, in effect. In caves, remember, there is no need for special size, for skin color, even for eyesight itself. The unpigmented thrive here. Microscopic mossy life. Degenerate optical apparatus. To be unfit elsewhere is to count oneself among the naturally select in this inverse austral curve. Eek what a breakâis that a nose or a hose?
“Lester.”