Mortals

by Norman Rush

  His tendency to fear what was coming in certain situations with her grew out of what, in him? It grew out of the fear that something she was saying was the precursor to I am going, goodbye, You are nothing. He thought, Cocteau called it the storm coming from the depths of time or something close, which can be anything from personal death to You are really nothing, my dear.

  “I’m sorry,” they both said.

  He asked what it was she had been about to say.

  “I’m suffering. There’s something I haven’t told you, Ray.”

  I knew it, he thought, in agony.

  “You are determined to kill me. Go ahead and tell me.”

  “I wrote Ellen a check, for a lot. At the last minute. At the airport.”

  “Oh in the name of God, Iris! So what? You terrified me there.”

  “For a lot, though, Ray. Three thousand dollars.”

  “That’s perfectly okay.”

  “We can still stop the check.”

  “We don’t need to. It’s fine, it’s fine. Come on.”

  “I felt guilty about leaving her. It was an impulse. I need to discuss it with Davis. I don’t like that I did it so impulsively, Ellen is almost in and out of reality, almost to that point. So I wrote the check.”

  He squatted, got the carry-on straps over his shoulders, and stood up, with difficulty.

  As he turned to lead the way out, he saw or thought he saw what he wanted least of all at this moment to see … Morel, dodging out of sight into the Tiro ya Diatla fabrics stand. Rage filled him.

  I could be wrong, he thought. It ought to be easy with someone who had a short leg, because his gait would betray him, normally. But Morel’s gait was perfect. He had trained himself to hide his condition and done that admirably.

  “What is it?” Iris asked. Clearly she had seen nothing. And it had been brazen. Clearly Morel had been hiding in among the skirts at Tiro ya Diatla and scanning the arrivals scene. Ray had to get Iris out of there. He felt like telling her what her limping swain really was. He was a paranoid. He had a universal diagnosis for the world’s ill, which if it wasn’t paranoid was close to it. In his humble opinion her glorious boyfriend was a panacean, so to say, not that he would ever really be her boyfriend, so help him God. Of course something was wrong with the world, clearly. But what was wrong was hardly just one thing, like the existence of national languages with the cure being Esperanto. And what’s wrong isn’t that the workers don’t rule, either, he thought. And who was the one who said it was all due to people not having orgasms, a German? Reich, another panacean, he thought. It was possible he had coined the term, right there.

  A porter drifted toward them, but he waved him off.

  “Why don’t we get a porter?”

  “No this is faster. The porters make you wait while they go for their carts.”

  “But we have time.”

  “No, I want to get home.”

  He was making for an exit door at the extreme north end of the terminal.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Over there.”

  My life is taking forever, he thought.

  “Where are you parked, Ray? Why are we going over there?”

  He had no answer.

  “Why are you running?” she asked.

  How she had managed these monstrously heavy bags was something he wanted to know. She was strong. Or he was getting old.

  There was no kiss, he thought, with pain. It was true that the recommended protocol for expatriates in Botswana was decorum in public. The Batswana were supposed to find kissing objectionable. The injunction was in the embassy orientation pamphlet. Even the Westernized younger Batswana who took up kissing would, he had been told, rub their forearms across their lips before they went at it.

  “Why are we here?” she asked. She meant Why had they emerged into an overflow parking area not in use, with barrier booms down at its entry and exit points? Their Volkswagen was in the main lot. They had doubled the distance they had to travel to reach it by coming out where they had.

  He was making a show of scanning intently around.

  He said, “I thought I saw Moyo come out here. I need to talk to him about St. James. You have to catch him when you can. He has no phone. Well if he was here, he’s gone.” It was the best he could do.

  “Africa,” Iris said. “I need my sun hat.”

  “Take mine,” Ray said.

  “Yes, and kill you. You’ll get a stroke as it is. We should have gotten a porter.”

  He toiled on. She would warn him about his knee, shortly.

  “Why don’t you rest for a minute, Ray?”

  “Because we need to get home.” And because Morel could be anywhere, he thought. He had wanted to get her away because an encounter with Morel would have wrecked the homecoming. Now he was wrecking it himself. There had been no pleasantries from her about how good it was to see his face, nothing. He had done everything he could think of at home, including buying a new pair of shoes for Fikile.

  “Please let me take one of those, Ray.”

  “There’s the car. I’m fine.”

  “I worry about your knee.”

  “I know, but it’s fine and that was years ago. What have you got in this big one, anyway?”

  “Something I have to tell you about. There’s a huge manuscript.”

  “What manuscript?”

  “I’ll explain it later. It’s your brother’s.”

  “Oh God let this cup pass from me. Don’t tell me this. What am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Read it.”

  “But what is it, a memoir, something embarrassing about his miserable life?” A bitter triviality from the stupid past thrust itself on him. For a long period, growing up, Rex had gone out of his way to claim that his favorite thing to eat was mashed beef-stew sandwich, saying this on those occasions when children were expected to answer with spaghetti or hamburger or chocolate cake. Their mother had been proud of her boeuf bourguignon. And rightly so, as everybody seemed to say these days. And at one point Rex had childishly mashed his beef and carrots and pearl onions into a spread and clapped it between two slices of bread. He had given Ray a bite. Ray had found it delicious. But when Ray had tried to make the same sandwich for himself, his mother had turned on him and he had been prohibited from doing such a thing. It had been fine for Rex because he was, and apparently continued to be for years, a baby. Rex had been able to make sandwiches out of his boeuf bourguignon for as long as he chose to. And he had chosen to for years, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips and even elaborating the process, to taunt Ray, dropping capers into the mixture, or olives.

  And now he had written a book. Ray wanted to write a book. Ray had a book to write. But now he had his brother’s book. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want it. He had Morel to crush. He had no time.

  “I have talked so much to Rex,” Iris said.

  “So describe this manuscript.” My problem is that I was raised by idiots, first two idiots and then just one, so of course I grew up to be an idiot, he thought.

  “I don’t know how to. I don’t know what it is, exactly. It says faits divers in large letters on the title page but that’s crossed out. It’s fragments. I’ve read here and there. It’s very fragmentary. I’ll explain what I can, which is not much. He sent it to me to bring to you because he wanted to be sure it didn’t get lost. It’s called Bright Cities Darken.”

  “Poetry?” Poetry wouldn’t be a problem, because any poetry by a family member, private poetry, secret, was ninety percent of the time going to turn out to be pathetic.

  “Oh no, prose, definitely.”

  I was raised by idiots, he thought. He wanted the last line of Moby-Dick and couldn’t get it, something about I alone have escaped.

  He said, “I was raised by idiots.”

  “Oh I know,” Iris said. “You can see that in Rex’s book.”

  They had reached the car. He was exhausted, but he managed to load up and get them
all set to go with celerity. His knee hurt.

  First she had wanted to go into her den, her study, and sit there in the baking silence for a few minutes with the door closed. The mail, sorted out on a huge platter by him, she had ignored.

  Afternoon was dying.

  They had laughed at the alp her travel tunic made, dropped on the floor.

  He waited.

  She was lying full length on the sofa in the living room and he was preparing to rub her feet, at her request. He had aimed two electric fans toward her, one at her head, the other at her midsection. Nothing had been said about the house, the way it looked. He was back with the Nivea cream.

  He sat down. Her naked feet were in his lap.

  He said, “Do you want to pull off those elf pants, me to pull them off?”

  “You want sex,” she said.

  “Of course, but this is a separate matter because those things look hot. They look uncomfortable.”

  “Stirrup pants is what they call them. You may remove them.”

  “I am not sort of crushingly out for sex, my dear.”

  “Oh mais non.”

  “Well I’m not.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “Well I am and I’m not, you know how it is.”

  Her perfect legs were out, there, perfect things, gleaming.

  “You can have it if you want it,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “It won’t be full-dress. I’m so tired. But you know me. I’m happy if you need to.”

  “Non, merci.”

  “You have a right.”

  “No I don’t. There is no such thing.”

  “Please,” she said. “Please. Be real.”

  She began rubbing her eyes with her knuckles, producing a sound, a creaking sound he hated to hear. It was too organic.

  “Ray, I can accommodate you anytime.”

  “No I think I’ll wait instead of taking advantage of a lagged-out wreck of a darling and guaranteeing that when I die I’ll go directly to hell.”

  He sat at the end of the sofa and took her feet into his lap.

  She had her forearm over her eyes. It was possible she was concealing tears, trying to.

  She asked, “Did you masturbate?”

  He hated this. It was mere liberationism. She knew who he was, for better or worse. He was someone used to there being more of the unsaid in love-talk, love-communications. I’m almost fifty, he thought. Of course this might be an attempt at seduction, getting him onto the slippery slope and then getting sex over with so she would feel better because she had taken care of an obligation.

  “No,” he said, lightly, as lightly as he could. This subject was sediment stirred up, he was certain, by the weekend Antichrist, Morel, whose doom was coming. He would arrange it. He thought, He thinks I’m Bottom … I’m Tamburlaine … He’ll see.

  He rubbed Nivea cream into the soles of her feet.

  She was persisting. “Really not?”

  He moved back so that her feet were decently remote from his genitals.

  “No. It was part of waiting for you to come back, Iris,” Ray said. It was perverse, what she was doing.

  “Did you have wet dreams?” she asked.

  “Iris. Yes, I had wet dreams. Since you ask.” Suddenly, he was enraged. She was pushing him around.

  “I masturbated,” she said, which was more cheap fucking damned liberationism, offensive, offensive.

  “You did?” he said, but lightly, calmly, falsely, to his ears. He wanted to ask her if she had thought of him, if he had been involved in her imagery, if imagery had been involved in the act, which would be a tremendous mistake on his part.

  “Did you think of me?” he asked, thinking that if she hesitated before saying yes, it would mean hell, of a sort, was here. She had not even glanced at the mail. Where was she?

  “No,” she answered, not hesitating, which was a plus, a great plus. He loved her for her truthfulness.

  Now the worst thing he could do next would be to ask further along this line rather than being superior to it. She could save him from ignominy by volunteering something, images from the movies, something innocuous he could live with. This was not like her. Why was she doing this if she loved him? She thinks she wants truth, he thought. Truth for him, when he saw her at the airport, would have meant some act like pressing his hands along her physical outline in the world, hard, like an idiot, a scene.

  Tears were leaking out from underneath her forearms. She was trying to disperse and spread them around with arm movements so he wouldn’t notice.

  Here we are, he thought. The tears could be over anything, anything, her sister, secret adventures, anything.

  Her panties were red lace, ones he liked but not his greatest favorites, the one or two high-cuts she was willing to wear only for sex.

  “Stop staring at my mons.”

  “I’m not, or not exclusively, anyway. I’m staring at your whole pleasant body.”

  “Peasant body?”

  “Pleasant.” He enunciated.

  “Sorry, my ears are still clogged from flying.” She tried to work up a yawn, but failed.

  Now she had both arms crossed over her eyes. Her tears increased. At least she seemed not to be actively crying. Her rib cage movements were slight. She wasn’t heaving out the tears, it was more like leakage, an overflow. He decided to let her weeping run its course, to say nothing until he was solicited. It was always possible he was going to hear that these were tears of relief. He kept kneading the soles of her feet, feeling like weeping himself. What was it about individual vigorous pubic hairs poking here and there through the lace at her crotch that he liked to see, loved, in fact? It was festive, was why.

  She said, “Tell me everything.”

  “I think I kept you pretty up to date on the phone. Let’s see. Around here, not much. We’re still waiting for the Boka Report. There’s been plenty of funny business in the Housing Authority and it’s possible the vice president will be hurt. There’s a new press law, very objectionable. Somebody in admin at the embassy posted a complaint about the Batswana leaving rubbish behind when they eat in the building. The word pigs was used. Barrage of apologies.

  “South Africa is looking okay. You know de Klerk got sixty-seven percent in the white people’s referendum. The oil embargo is off, not that it was ever really on.

  “What else … I would say it’s going okay except for Natal. The killing won’t stop in Natal. And you know that Winnie and Nelson are separating.”

  “I heard that. She seems to be awful. But it’s sad.”

  “She had lots of boyfriends, apparently.”

  “Well, but Ray. He was in prison for years. What do you want from people?”

  “I know.”

  “Why even mention that, when it was about that insane football club she ran and that boy they killed?”

  He said, “I had a dream last night. I dreamed there was an ad in the paper for see-through spandex shorts or something. I was going to buy some for you.”

  “You don’t need to convince me you’re concupiscent. My offer is on the table. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried. Let’s see. The drought, bad here but patchier than in Zimbabwe. The maize crop is bust.

  “Nothing definite on Dwight Wemberg, although there are theories that he’s gone to ground up north. And by the way, I’m getting the distinct impression that I’m supposed to bring him in. Me. He’s my responsibility. I may have to go up to Maun. There’s no logic to it. Whenever there’s a fugitive around here the conventional wisdom is that he’s hiding up in the swamps. Like the mass murderer. Lord Lucan. They thought he was in the Okavango.”

  “No, the Tuli Block.”

  “Same thing. The imbroglio at St. James you know about, except the latest. There was the Too Much of Cabbage rebellion and then there was property damage, then the school was shut down. And where it is now is that the parents want somebody to give the miscreants a big punishment event, with the m
iscreants getting lashes. All hands refer to the students as miscreants, by the way, myself included.

  “So, you know Curwen. He won’t hear of any lashing business. There’s a standoff and I don’t know how long we’ll be closed. The House of Chiefs, big surprise, has come out against Curwen.

  “You met Pony, the young guy who worked in the bursar’s office. Curwen was grooming him for bursar, although I guess he had never gotten around to hinting to Pony that that offer was coming, being a Brit. Anyway Pony has disappeared.

  “Which we think has to do with something else. The government finally drove our friend Samuel Kerekang into the wilderness, literally. He was creating incidents over everything, it’s true. He came out with the claim, probably true, that the country is already about ten percent seropositive for HIV, which nobody wanted to hear. He couldn’t get work anywhere. And, um, there were a number of mishaps connected with his paper The Mattock, copies disappearing on the way to the distributor, and then a fire wrecked his printery. And then somehow the Anglican women’s guild got very interested in taking control of his gleaners group. And now they’ve done it. Suddenly they had all kinds of money.

  “So Kerekang decided to pull back to Galilee, if you know what I mean. He has a family claim to land in one of the villages way the hell up on the Cunene River, almost into the Caprivi Strip. And he’s organizing some sort of commune up there, turning the northeast into his version of Yenan, is what the government thinks. Now that he’s out of town they’re even more hysterical than before. Domkrag want something done! The Mattock, or rather Kepu, because it’s three-quarters in Setswana now, is circulating again. He puts a lot of poetry in it, by the way.

  “What nobody likes is that a number of kids from the university dropped out and followed him. Some of them are sons and daughters of big men in Domkrag. Sons, I should say. Only two young women are among the missing, versus seven guys.”

  The flow of tears had stopped.

  She said, “Don’t press so hard on the top of my foot, there’s no flesh there and you’ll bruise me. In fact, thank you, but you can stop now. I am so sorry about everything, Ray.

  “My sister. My sister. Ray, I encouraged her to have this baby. I don’t know if I was identifying or what. I thought it would be fine. People are doing it all over. I am coming back to you a crock of woe, just what you need. I kept trying to find a metaphor on the plane for how I am and that was what I came up with. Woe is you. I mean woe is what you get. From me. I am responsible for my sister. I mean … I don’t know what I mean. I mean beyond the thousands I gave her, I have to do more. Thank God for the way you are. You are my God, you know, which is the problem, Davis would say, but he would be so wrong. We have gods. I don’t know. My sister. I am responsible. Now she has Margo.”