Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Like an egg opening in his mind and disclosing a jewel, he had the whole thing end to end. He loved his brother. Rex, I love you, he thought, commencing to sing, loud.

  He threw himself into the whining, petulant, portentous tone the thing needed, needed to be real, be what it was, then. His brother was dead. His brother was dead.

  The force to really sing was coming from somewhere, deep somewhere …

  He sang,

  “When you’re young and so in love as we

  And bewildered by the world we see

  Why do people hurt us so

  Only those in love would know

  What a town without pity can do …”

  He hoped they wouldn’t hit him because the denouement was coming. He went into it.

  “If we stop to gaze upon … a star

  People talk about how baad we are

  Ours is not an easy age

  We’re like tigers in a cage

  What a town without pity can do …”

  He had sung it deeply whiningly, emphasizing but not mocking the stupidity. How stupid had his brother been to love this crap, except that of course, of course he understood why now, the gay implication, okay. He went on. To a really stupid bridge part.

  “The young have problems, many problems

  We need an understanding heart

  Why don’t they help us, try and help us

  Before this clay and granite planet falls apart …”

  Poor bugger, he thought, Rex, poor bugger, I wish I had loved you.

  There was a funny something going on. People, thugs, were being brought in to hear him sing. The room was fuller. He could feel that. He didn’t care. Rise into it, he thought.

  “Take these eager lips and hold me fast

  I’m afraid this kind of joy can’t last

  How can anything survive

  When these little minds tear you in two

  What a town without pity can do …”

  He was thinking that if you were able to add up the amount of fun anyone had had in their lives, fun had, a quotient, it would tell you something. This singing was fun. It was deep.

  He sang hard,

  “How can we keep love alive

  How can anything survive

  When these little minds tear you in two

  What a town without pity can do …”

  Then, really hard and wild,

  “No it isn’t very pretty what a town without pity

  Ca … aan do …”

  He had inhabited a song that had been a curse to him. Now he would sing like someone else, because he was not through singing, no.

  “Come in,” he said to no one.

  Now he would sing as himself. He was lost in himself. He would sing “Carrickfergus” the way Joyce would have sung it, may have sung it, he had no idea. How he knew this song, he had no idea. He had heard it sung at a party and he had heard it on a record at another party and because of God he had it, most of it, the greatest song ever written expressing being totally drunk, it was being drunk at its best, stupid best, and he had remembered it and at another party he had volunteered to sing it and Iris had said No in the name of God, no, don’t. Because it would embarrass her because he had been at the time very drunk. But then that part of their life had come to a close long ago and he had been fine since.

  And he was starting to sing before he even intended it, and not as himself, as a drunken soul, the inspiration of this expression … He was full of song.

  He wanted to startle them with his loud sound.

  He did.

  “I wish I was … in Carrickfergus,

  Only for nights … in Ballygrant

  I would swim over … the deepest ocean,

  Only for nights in Ballygrant.

  But the sea is wide and I cannot swim over

  Nor have I wings … so I could fly!

  I wish I could find … a handsome boatman

  To ferry me over … to my love and die …”

  He was certain there was an assemblage in the room. Someone began to applaud but the act was quashed. Ray seemed to have nonplussed his tormentors, for the moment. He felt a little triumphant. He even felt a little drunk. They could applaud if they wanted. He had sung piercingly, Irishly.

  Someone was softly laughing. Ray wanted water badly. He thought he could sing the part about the handsome rover singing no more till he got a drink. His throat was dry. It was stinging.

  “Ah in Kilkenny … it is reported

  There are marble stones there … as black as ink.

  With gold and silver … I would support her

  But I’ll sing no more ’til I get a drink.

  For I’m drunk today, and I’m seldom sober,

  A handsome rover from town to town,

  Ah, but I’m sick now, my days are numbered,

  So come all you young men and lay me down.”

  He relished the silence that his effort had produced.

  “I’ll take a drink, now,” he said, retaining a touch of the character he had sung as.

  There was laughter, and some murmuring, and then like a slash water was flung in his face. He caught some, enough to make a decent swallow. He had been ready. It was a triumph. He had bitten some water out of the air, was the way it felt.

  “Tomorrow you’ll give us another show, meneer. Yah, man, but with less music.”

  Ray was unstrapped from the chair without ceremony, roughly. His hood was jerked fully down and retied more tightly than was necessary. He was pulled to his feet and pushed forward. He almost fell, but saved himself by clutching onto Quartus’s table and leaning on it until the whiteness behind his eyes receded.

  Definitely they were rougher, hustling him along, two of them, than before. Everything is a signal, he thought.

  Crossing the open ground back to his cell was hard, at the faster pace being forced on him. He wasn’t being allowed to place his feet tentatively enough to knock rocks and pebbles and other impedimenta out of the way. He needed his shoes back. He was in stocking feet and the soles of his socks had turned planklike with sweat and filth, which was some help. But he wanted his shoes. And he wanted his wristwatch and he wanted to know how he looked, as a subject of abuse. He was curious. His beard was coming in. He wanted a mirror. He needed a haircut. He needed Iris, his barber. He was going to have to go to barbers, regular barbers, after she went away. She was going to. He knew everything that was going to happen.

  “How do I look?” he asked stupidly, as he was thrown into his cell. He did the drill, stood with his back to the door while they took his hood off and then left, leaving him standing there locked in, with more to say.

  “Okay,” he shouted after them.

  He needed help. He collapsed onto his pallet and all his injuries began pulsing in unison. He felt like an ad, a display.

  The whiteness in his head was back. He was yielding to it. He couldn’t help it. But tomorrow would come and he was not through singing.

  Night came and went. It was very cold. He was given food and water the next day, but that was the limit of the attention his captors paid to him, and then it was night again. He slept well in spite of the cold and spent the day following in a condition of anticipation that proved to be pointless. Again he was fed. But no one came for him. He wondered whether he was being deliberately ignored, whether that was part of the protocol, or if it was the press of other business that was the explanation. In any case he was weathering it. He was learning that he didn’t need to attack each onset of dead time with games or exercises or purposive thinking. He could enter the absences and stay in them with everything shut down, the associative thought-chains fading out. It was unusual to not be thinking and to be aware of it, thinking about it at the same time. If he was correct, this condition was a prize that mystics labored to grasp. There was nothing blissful about it, at least not in the scraps and fragments of the state he had attained to so far. He could do without it.

  Night came again.
r />   32. The Subject Matter

  He came out of sleep raggedly, resisting coming out. The eruption of noise and light, whatever it had been, was already over. It had been brief. There had been flailing shafts of light, a crashing sound, unlocking and slamming and relocking of the shed doors. Now there was nothing evident. He had been dreaming and then his dream had been wrecked around him and he was out of it, in the black present.

  He felt he should be afraid, but he had no energy for it. He should be afraid because there was a change. He was no longer alone in his prison room. Someone was breathing heavily and brokenly muttering and beginning to move around.

  Ray waited to do something. He thought that probably he should get into a fighting crouch, but it was all he could do to sustain the sitting position he had achieved, his back to the rough wall. The darkness was seamless and absolute.

  There were different possibilities. This could be part of the torture. A madman could have been dumped in on him. That kind of thing was done. It could be someone who would keep him awake. That was torture and more than torture in the shape he was in. It could be an animal. It wasn’t an animal. It could be someone injured in some way he would be unable to do anything about, who would keep him awake.

  He was going to say something as soon as he could penetrate what the new arrival was doing. He was doing something. He was apparently crawling around the edges of the room, feeling out the space. That was not an unintelligent thing to do. He had no idea how much the new arrival had been able to notice when he was hurled into the room. Not much, he would bet. It would be better for Ray to say something to this person before, in his explorations, the man stumbled across him.

  He was going to say something first. That would be best. And instead of the plain Dumela greeting he would use the more honorific Dumela morena, Good day sir, why not? And then it would be O tswa kae, to find out where his new mate came from, was journeying from, and then finally O mang, Who are you? And he would watch his delivery, keeping it soft and nonbelligerent. His enunciation was going to be strange because his lips had swollen up and his mouth was so dry.

  “Dumela morena,” he said, partly for practice. He had tried to keep it pleasant.

  His words produced a charged stillness.

  And then he was leapt on crushingly. Large strong hands found his throat and gripped it.

  He grappled with his attacker, struggling to get a purchase anywhere on his head, his nose, ears. By the feel of his hair he was an African and he had been eating onions, something that gave Ray a twinge of hunger, oddly.

  A voice he knew growled, “O mang?” But with the pressure on his throat he couldn’t reply, but he knew who it was. He did. He would be all right.

  It was Morel. Somehow it was Morel.

  Feelings of relief and hatred confused together swept hotly through him. He fought to get the breath to speak.

  “It’s me,” he managed to say, trying to sound like himself.

  Morel let him go.

  “This is you, Finch. This is you. I found you,” Morel said. It was Morel’s strong voice but higher than usual, lifted into a higher register by fatigue and fear. Fear was there. Ray heard male elation and triumph in Morel’s voice. He had done something.

  “Is Iris all right?” Ray asked urgently.

  “I can’t believe this. Yes, Iris. No she’s fine, except over you. No she got frantic about you. Nothing coming in, no news. You know. Ah God. That’s why I came. No she was threatening to come up to look for you herself and I stopped her. She was going to come. So I stopped her, I came. It was the only way I could do it. She was raising hell at the embassy and getting nothing, getting the runaround worse than you can imagine. You don’t know. She gets insane. You don’t know.

  “Ah man, this is you, but man, you smell. I smell blood. Have you got a torch, a match, any light so I can take a look? I don’t have my bag. They took it.”

  Ray was amazed. Morel was not acknowledging the secret. That was interesting.

  Ray laughed. “They’ve been hitting me. I’ve been hit. That’s all. I think I’m okay. There’s no light, nothing for light, sorry. My head hurts. I’ve got a scalp wound but it’s scabbing up okay, I think. I clot fast.”

  “Sit still,” Morel said. He was talking unusually rapidly, for him, skating over the one thing, the one thing. He lightly touched his palm to the back of Ray’s head. He blew his breath out in a meaningful way.

  “What?” Ray asked.

  “I don’t like it, man. Did you lose consciousness at any point? Think if you did. Shit, I need light to see this. We’ve got to get you cleaned up. You better get flat, stay flat until I can look at you. What the fuck is this place?

  “I’ll get a torch from these bastards. I’m a doctor.”

  “So how will you get them to give you a torch?”

  “I’ll yell, I’ll kick the fucking doors …”

  “Believe me, don’t. They won’t even come. Conserve your strength. It gets light in the morning, not bright clear but enough, you know. You can see. It’s like twilight but you can see …

  “Listen to me, the best thing is if you can rest. They get started early around here. I don’t know what they have on the schedule for you, but they start early.

  “There’s another pallet you can sleep on. In fact there are three more, so you can take your choice. It’s cold, so you have to fold a pallet in two and sleep in the fold. It’s easier if you jam yourself into a corner.

  “And let’s see. Okay, you said Iris is okay, so when were you in touch with her last? Because now she’ll be worrying about you too, won’t she?” He let his words come out a little more darkly than he’d intended.

  “No she’s all right. I talked to her from Maun two three days ago.” Ray could see that Morel wanted to rip through any matter relating to Iris at high speed. He understood why. He had a secret. He was nervous. Too bad for him.

  Ray wanted the light to come for his own reasons. He wanted to see Morel with the eyes, the eyes of what, a cuckold. He wanted to see what she was seeing that he had missed. This was not a good subject matter for the moment at hand. Hell was another man’s cock going into your beloved’s cunt. That was the long and the short of it, so to speak. He had to have light so he could see guilt, the signs and traces. He was not going to accuse Morel of anything in the total dark and let him get away with anything. He was going to get him in the light of day and get the answer clear as hell and see it.

  Morel was arranging his pallet. And he was giving a brief travelogue that was uninteresting to Ray, his difficulty in renting a vehicle, his cleverness in certain situations, all boring and all beside the point.

  There was a silence when Morel was settled, but a short one.

  Morel’s voice was coming closer. He said, “You know who these people are, don’t you? You do. You know what’s going on up here. You know what this is.”

  “I have an idea,” Ray said.

  “You know what they want,” Ray said.

  “I have an idea.”

  Now he could hardly hear what Morel was saying. He had to ask him to speak up.

  “Do you think it’s safe for us to talk? I mean, I know we have to keep our voices down. But what do you think?”

  “You mean have they got this place wired? Don’t worry. They’re not even taping the interrogations. You don’t know how primitive this operation is. They’ve got their hands full. They have to get out of here fast. They know that.

  “They want to get one man, Kerekang. That’s all they want. They think I can help them with that, but they’re afraid to go too far with me because I’m white and they figure people are going to be looking for me. Like you, for example.

  “They’re not going to go too hard on anybody white.”

  “Oh that makes me feel good,” Morel said.

  “Don’t worry. You’re white. You’re included. You’re American. To them you’re white.”

  “Listen …”

  “Doctor, don’t bother.
”

  Morel had moved his pallet closer yet. “We should keep our voices down, though, just out of prudence … right?”

  “I don’t think it matters. But let’s do that.

  “And I’m sorry you got into this. You were saying how you found me. I’m sorry if I wasn’t listening. Say it again. So go ahead.” He needed to be fair to Morel, who was just newly into this nightmare that he himself had had a chance to get used to. He had taken a risk to come looking for his lover’s husband. Probably he’d expected to fail creditably but instead this had happened and he was in hell, for his trouble. Probably he had just wanted credit for a good try. That could be unfair. There is a kind of heroism that stupidity or ignorance allows to happen, Ray thought.

  Morel wanted to keep on conversing, or if not conversing, just talking, describing his situation to himself, trying to do that over and over until he had something he could accommodate. Because not everything he was saying was being said for Ray’s benefit. He was being repetitive. And he had again moved his pallet closer.

  Ray was getting desperate about sleep. He didn’t want to seem ungrateful or inhospitable, if that was the word.

  Morel was expressing himself in fragments.

  “I drove up to Maun. That was easy. Your assistant is still around there, waiting for you, I guess. He got through to Iris the one time. By the way the whole top of the country is out of commission … Emergency area. They keep saying it’s temporary and being vague about bandits coming down from Caprivi, some bullshit story … You know this. So I found him, and it was a problem because he wanted to come along. He just gave me bare basics, where he’d seen you last and so on. I don’t know if I should have brought him. I didn’t want the responsibility. Also I had what he could tell me. Also I didn’t think this would take long … I don’t know why. So I came. I’d had to fight once already with your wife about coming along, big fight, so I was … I’d fought on the issue and I said no to him. You hear what I’m saying …”