Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “We both do. I’ll get us water.”

  “You will? And how will you do that?”

  “I’ll insist. It’s medically necessary. Actually, you have no temperature. But I’ll say you do. And I want my boots. And I want my bag, or at least I need them to let me get into my bag and get stuff, even if they stand there and then take it away when I’m through. I’ll propose it.”

  “Good luck.”

  A thing Ray had been turning over in his mind off and on thinking about Morel in the last few weeks was the question of who would look better at sixty-five or thereabouts, which of them, and he had been thinking that it would be himself. He would be the better deal. Of course there was the consideration that he was going to get there first, alas. But he had been entertaining the idea that Morel might be doomed in the context because his monobrevipodia might conceivably put him in the wheelchair-user category, something Iris might not have faced up to. Of course, he had no way of knowing if there was anything progressive about Morel’s leg situation. And he could tell that the man had done wonders in keeping the musculature on his short leg up to snuff, through some miracle of focused exercise. The calf on Morel’s short leg was better than either of Ray’s calves, not to put too fine a point on it. Ray felt that his own arms, because he had lost weight, looked old.

  The examination was proceeding. Unless he was wrong, his friend Dave was being rougher than he needed to, pushing Ray’s eyelids sharply back into his head while he made him roll his eyes clockwise and then counterclockwise not just once or twice but a few times. It was like no examination he’d ever had. And the outcome of that particular exercise seemed to be that Morel could see no signs of jaundice. He wanted to know why there was any reason to think he might have contracted jaundice.

  And then his side was squeezed, hard. That was to do with his liver or spleen, he supposed.

  And then Morel put his ear against his chest, which Ray doubted could tell him anything except that his heart was beating at present, otherwise the invention of the stethoscope was a superfluous event. He was being unfair to Morel. The examination was a physical feat being accomplished, with all the difficulty Morel was having in keeping himself from toppling over.

  Morel said, “Your ears are extraordinarily clean.”

  “She does that with a thing, a bulb …”

  “Syringe.”

  “Syringe, yes. I’m getting old.”

  “Really clean. I never see that.”

  “No she does it every couple of weeks. She’s very faithful about it. Debrox is the name of the what is it, acid? She puts acid in the porches of my ears.”

  “I’m pleased.”

  “Well, good, because she started doing it at your suggestion, you might recall. It’s part of your regimen, I believe.”

  Morel said nothing, but motioned for him to take his stinking shirt off. There was a punitive element to the proceeding, in Ray’s opinion.

  “We’ve got to clean you up. I have to get to my bag.

  “Look at this. You have contact dermatitis all through here on your chest, under your chest hair. And it’s showing on your neck. It must itch.”

  “It doesn’t,” Ray said, and that was true. But now that it had been brought to his attention he could feel the itching begin there. He hadn’t noticed any itching because he had been, this was his theory, distracted by the rich selection of wounds and bruises he was otherwise sporting.

  Morel said, “I can fix that with hydrogen peroxide if they give me my bag.

  “You have slight pectus excavatum. You must know that …”

  “I don’t think I know that. Sunken chest, that is?”

  “It’s really slight.”

  “What does it do to you?”

  “Nothing much. Yours is so slight.”

  “It’s more like a natural feature than a condition or defect, right? Like a cleft chin.”

  “More or less.”

  “I had a heart murmur when I was eight. It went away.”

  Morel was going interminably over his back and shoulders, looking for bites or any sort of interesting defect he might mention.

  “Just a second,” Ray said. He had realized there was a task that had to be done, which was to redistribute the pallets to their separate original positions. He went about it. It was important. Morel seemed puzzled by his anxious eagerness to complete the task.

  “What’re you doing?” Morel asked. Then he said, “I can do that.”

  Ray said, “They’ll be coming. You want everything to look the way it was before they left. Believe me. I can explain it more if you really need that.”

  “No. Hey.”

  Ray felt lightheaded and then felt his head beating with new pain, a supreme headache, a classic worse than anything from yesterday. He had to remember not to stoop, not to get his head down low.

  “I have to lie down for a minute,” he said.

  Morel himself had sunk to a sitting position against the wall. He seemed to be doing breathing exercises.

  “I’m not finished examining you,” Morel said.

  “Yes you are,” Ray said.

  “I am?”

  “You are. You covered the waterfront. And if you found something, what, terrible, what can you do? You have nothing. They won’t let you. That’s it.”

  “Listen, I am going to get my bag, I promise you. But even without it there are certain things I can do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like various things.”

  Ray said, “Right now I have a headache that on a scale of one to ten is nine. Iris gives me that aspirin with codeine you can get in the Republic. You have no codeine. That’s what this one is eligible for.”

  Morel hauled himself up and limped over, kneeling beside Ray on the pallet.

  “Okay,” Morel said, breathing complexly, theatrically, Ray thought, then saying commandingly, “Close your eyes … um … Blow all your breath out … Now.”

  I am not an idiot, Ray thought. But he did as he was told.

  Ray felt thumb pressure being applied to the midline of his forehead, and then knuckle pressure being applied further up along the same axis but stopping short of his scab area. Morel was being careful. And then the knuckle pressure continued harder, rocking. It hurt. It was cruelly hard. And it was infuriating that he could feel his headache receding.

  “Sit up slowly,” Morel said.

  Ray did, furious. His head pain was shrinking toward the manageable. And then toward the negligible.

  And then it was a vestige.

  That was a parlor trick, he thought. It was undoubtedly the trick of using one kind of pain to trump another kind of pain, a parlor trick.

  “How is your head?”

  “Getting better.”

  “Good, then.” Morel withdrew.

  Now Morel was over at the waste bucket.

  “Can’t we get a lid for this thing?” Morel asked over his shoulder.

  “Of course not. It’s part of the program.”

  Morel was studying the contents of the waste bucket. Ray assumed he was considering evacuating into it. But still the staring into it was an invasion of privacy, in a way. Not that it was important.

  “When was your last bowel movement?” Morel asked. Ray wanted this line of attention over with. The question was a reaction to there being only urine in the bucket. So Morel was reaching a conclusion. But of course the bucket could have been emptied any number of times. Why did he have to answer this particular question, he wanted to know.

  “I don’t know,” Ray said.

  “Give a guess.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long, though? A week?”

  Ray had to think. He said, “Since I’ve been here. Almost a week.”

  “Not good,” Morel said, continuing to contemplate, irritatingly, the contents of the bucket as though if he stared long enough some wisdom would leap up and strike him.

  “Look, I have to go, Ray. I’m sorry,” Morel said.


  “What in the fuck are you apologizing for?” But he knew why Davis was apologizing. He was apologizing for being closer to normal, in better shape, in that way. Actually, he was being delicate, Ray decided. Maybe he was apologizing for having had plenty to eat and drink recently.

  “Of course. Go ahead. I’m sorry. Of course, go ahead.”

  “Um, I see there’s no paper. No paper.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know what to tell you. That’s also part of the program. Part of the treatment.”

  “Bastards. I’ll get some paper from them.”

  “No you won’t. No. But I’ll tell you what you do. This is what I would do. You sacrifice a piece of your shirttail. Tear off as little as you can get away with for the purpose. And when you use it be real careful, scientific. That’s what I would do. If I had to shit. Which I don’t. I mean, about the shirt, you don’t know what else you might be going to need it for. I’m just trying to think ahead. Anyway.”

  Ray turned his back to Morel. He went to stand as close to the shed doors as possible. He heard cloth being torn.

  Grumbling softly, and, Ray believed, still apologizing, Morel emptied his bowels, suppressing as well as he could any sounds of relief or satisfaction, natural reactions.

  You have to appreciate him, Ray thought. He had qualities.

  A standardly foul odor established itself.

  “Don’t apologize,” Ray said, which led to some suppressed but still evident amusement on Morel’s part.

  Morel was through and he was brisker.

  “I’ll get that thing emptied, don’t worry, or I’ll get a lid for it out of them. I will. I will, man. Also, I’ll get my bag. I’ll get my boots. They can keep the laces if that’s what they’re worried about and I want my watch, but that’s nothing, they can keep it. I want my toothbrush. They can watch me use it if they think I’d like to turn it into a weapon, a shiv or something. Fuck them. I’ve got to clean you up. And I want water available in here full-time, not only when they feel like it now and then. No no.”

  Morel was in a sort of dancing state, a punching state. It was unusual.

  Ray said, “Dream on. You’ll get nothing. Be prepared.”

  But against his will he was finding Morel slightly inspiring. All assholes respond to extreme self-confidence, he thought. Morel was like a coach. He was the type a white college under pressure to diversify would fall on their knees for, somebody smart about getting along with the white alumni but jive or tough enough to motivate the black and white team, the troops, into crushing the enemy of the moment, the team from another venue. There was a weak but distinct in-and-out pattern in his friend Davis, a modulation from a regular sort of down-home black up into the doctor, good schools persona. Iris probably loved that without knowing she did. One minute the man was tough, and the next it was would she like some Constant Comment tea and had the last issue of the New York Review of Books arrived and where had she put it? Because she had a habit of putting things in odd places. Davis would discover that. Ray did know that Morel had a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Whether he read it or not was another question. He was thinking of himself and his own backlog of Times Literary Supplements which this nightmare hell trip had at least allowed him to eat into. Not one of his unread TLSes had ever gone astray. She had just been being considerate, but saving them so strictly had constituted a reproach, not that she knew it. How could she? He had said they had to get the TLS because in Africa that was the way he could keep in touch with the other world of thought and writing, which he had meant, he had meant it, but it had been a lie. Because over the years it had gotten more and more painful to look into the world of the scholarly literary others busily producing, dancing. But she had continued saving these painful things, faithful to the end.

  He heard something. “They’re coming,” he said.

  “Breakfast, you mean?”

  “Right, probably, but listen. I have to know what you told the people who captured you, took you. I have to know what you told them about me. We have to be on the same page. You understand. Jesus, we should have talked about this before. So, quick, please. They’re coming.”

  Morel said, “No don’t worry. No, this is what I told them. I’ll tell you.

  “I told them you were with Education and you were in the bush looking for school sites. That was what you were doing.”

  “And so what did you tell them about why in the name of God you were up here looking for me?”

  “Okay, this is what I told them. And forgive me. I told them you were my patient and your wife was worried about you.”

  “You said I was your patient.”

  “Yeah. I came up with that and I thought it was clever. I was coming to look for my patient. Look, they knew I was a doctor. There was no question about that. And I didn’t have anything ready to say and I came up with that. I don’t know, I thought it was clever, kind of, at the time. I went into how upset your wife was, distraught …”

  “You said I was your patient. I had escaped from you. I needed to be under control. So the implication was, is, was that I was a what, mental patient?”

  “No a therapy patient. You were receiving therapy.”

  “Christ almighty. It’s a little humiliating, isn’t it? From my standpoint?”

  “I did my best.”

  “Let me think about this. It’s a shock. But maybe it isn’t all bad. Let me think. I’m an escaped patient …”

  “Look, all I said was erratic. You were behaving erratically and it was a concern to your wife and to me and so on. They seemed to buy it okay. Come on. You can work with it. Come on.”

  Be a realist, Ray said to himself. There was the singing outbreak of the day before that this idea comported not so badly with. There was his attachment to a peculiar and, as his captors saw it, incoherent manuscript.

  “This is going to work out,” Morel said, squaring his shoulders, projecting the impression that the matter was settled, radiating definiteness, resilience.

  Of course that was what Iris needed and had a right to have, an optimist. I am a traveling grave, he thought. Billowing dark sorrow over his brother rose up, as though for emphasis. He pushed it away. No, what she needed was a congenital optimist, so to speak. Morel was a heroic optimist. Anyone who thought he could break the grip of the white hand on Africa by arguing the continent into rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ was an optimist at the extreme end of the spectrum, a caricature figure worthy of Molière. It was at the level of comedy. I am a traveling grave, he thought again. It occurred to him that Morel would make a very good choice for one of the Lives he was going to write. He would think about that more, later.

  “Are they coming with breakfast?” Morel asked.

  “Room service is coming. Don’t worry.”

  He was realizing something. Iris could be loving something she hardly even knew she needed. She could be loving a clean heart, the lightness of being that a clean heart gives, gives the eyes, the voice. She had a right to love someone with nothing to declare versus someone … someone else. Because a certain amount of his mortal life had been given over to burying certain matters, misgivings, and to not disclosing things having to do with the agency, what blessed Marion Resnick in the grip of red joy had told him about Malawi, to name just one thing, killings, by Banda, by Banda and not the agency, but the agency allowing events to go on without acting.

  He was starving but he had no appetite. He would have to ask his physician how that could be. And he was surprised at how little fear for his body he had felt so far.

  We bury death, he thought.

  Morel was talking to himself. Ray knew what he was doing. He was repeating the list of items he was going to get their captors to give him. He was making himself believe it was going to happen. Ray couldn’t help admiring the exercise and even more the ability to think it was worth doing. Morel was moving around oddly, dancingly, clenching his hands softly behind his back. What a guy, Ray thought.

  “T
hey’re coming. This is going to work out,” Morel said.

  Morel thought he was going to fix Africa. Ray wanted to tell him some things about Africa. Africa was broken, and broken everywhere and broken worst where the West had come in, intervened. He was thinking of Angola. How could it ever recover? Angola had happened during his time in the agency, not like Indonesia, say, which was earlier and far away. Angola was going to limp forever. Resnick had been against helping Savimbi and he hadn’t been careful about letting it be known. And that hadn’t helped him in the South Africa Region Office with his superiors. But he had been right about Angola, of course, Resnick had. By the time Angola got back to normal the undamaged white West would have vaulted further onward and upward, out of sight, the white gods, technologically speaking, would be unattainably ahead. Land mines kept going off in Angola, removing people’s legs and arms. He was part of the system that had led to that. The mines would outlive him. He had to let all this come into him, everything he had struggled to keep out. He had never been interested in wrecking anything in Africa.

  Something was going on at the door.

  Morel was striding arduously forward, friendly and resolute, which was wrong. There was a routine to follow.

  “Davis, we have to stay over there against the wall,” he said.

  There would be trouble. They were supposed to have their backs to the door, their hands over their heads. There would be trouble and it would be his fault. He knew the routine and they would assume he had communicated about it.

  “Dumelang,” Morel said, booming it out, full of morning cheer, as the doors were pulled open.

  Ray didn’t understand.

  Two men in black balaclavas had delivered breakfast, a genuine breakfast, of sorts, not just a dish of samp or mealie-meal. No, they had provided a leathery brown omelette, an ostrich egg omelette, served on a square of kraft paper, cold. And with it had come two kinds of crackers, eight of them, four of each kind. The omelette had been huge, and there had been eight figs, pretty dried up but still edible, which Morel had insisted Ray eat all of. And there had been a plastic liter bottle of cold tea and another one of plain water. And Morel had done a song and dance and the guards had agreed to leave the water in the cell.