Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Small-arms fire, yes.”

  “You know what a gunshot sounds like to me? Like what a bar of metal snapping in two would sound like, if such a thing could happen.”

  “Well, that’s suggestive. Of course different guns make different sounds.”

  “Can you tell things like the caliber of the weapons being fired, that kind of thing?”

  “In a limited way. I’m not a weapons expert.” A subtle shift was taking place. Morel was showing an unsolicited deference to Ray, based no doubt on his perception of him as an expert in peculiar matters like the present one, bloodshed. He wanted to tell him how misplaced his notion was. But he couldn’t. What was the point in scaring him? Ray had gone out of his way to have nothing but the most minimal contact with weapons instruction. He had gotten the initial introduction and then he had evaded the subject, except for two mandated refresher courses there had been no way to avoid. The agency was organized guile, not organized gunplay, in his parsing of it, his own individual parsing of it. His practice in the agency had been founded on outsmarting, outthinking, on intellection. He had been so fastidious, so wonderfully fastidious. A bolt of ennui struck him. He was weary of himself.

  “We have to get out there,” Morel said.

  Oh, just step out into bloody confusion and then get shot, Ray thought. He said, “We need to think about that. We have a couple of ways we can go. We can get poised to jump on whoever comes to the door and overpower him. We might want to attract attention by yelling when the fighting gets closer, if it does.”

  Morel was enthusiastic about that. “I like the idea of shouting. We could take turns. We could shout Kea tsala, I mean ditsala …”

  Ray said, “No, that means we’re each other’s friends, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “Oh, you’re right. No it would be Kea lona ditsala.”

  “That’s it. That might be good to shout. A good thing about it is that it wouldn’t offend anybody, whichever side heard it.” He had to come up with some semblance of a plan of action, even if it was for the sole purpose of calming Morel down while events unfolded into some more readable shape.

  “But let’s consider the opposite possibility. Stop walking around so much. We need to conserve our energy. And here’s the opposite possibility.

  “We have no idea who’s going to win this thing. So the opposite strategy would be to keep our mouths absolutely shut. In other words, we sit tight and silent and then make a move when it’s all over, when we think it is. For example, maybe we can go back to figuring out how we can rip our way through the roof up there, the thatch, once we think it’s safe to appear in public. We could take turns being each other’s footstools so we could get up high enough to claw away up there. You could be the footstool first.”

  What he was doing was wrong. He was yielding to the impulse to tease Morel, a little. But in fact he was just doing his best to suggest calming options, and the teasing was incidental. He did think that with some currently unimaginable exertions they might get through the chicken wire and the other impedimenta and then finally through the thatch, their fingers bloody shreds at the end of the procedure.

  Ray said, “So there are different ways to go. It would help if we could get some room service. I’m starving.”

  “Let me give you some advice,” Morel said, suddenly authoritative.

  “Go on.”

  “Try not to think about food. Don’t articulate what you’re thinking, is what I mean. This sounds stupid but it isn’t. Here is the thing. Don’t name the thing you want or need to yourself.”

  “Funny, that’s exactly what I was doing, not speaking of it. Then I lost it.”

  “Where do you think the fighting is?”

  “You mean the firing. I don’t know if there’s any fighting going on yet.”

  “You mean you don’t know who’s firing or do you mean you can’t tell if the guys down here are firing back?”

  “Take it easy. I don’t know anything for sure. What I think is that there’s shooting coming from the west rim of the pan, the high rim. That’s the only high ground in the vicinity. It overlooks everything. I’m sure it’s the Kerekang people up there. I don’t hear anything that sounds like local return fire, so far.

  “I don’t know what anybody’s doing. But the pan rim is a good defensive position for Kerekang in case koevoet wants to go after them. Koevoet has some truck-mounted machine guns, heavy caliber, would be my guess. But they can’t put vehicles into the pan, so they can’t get close to him. I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to send Bushmen down to blow darts at these bastards. I’m just making that up. I’m doing my best here, with nothing to go on.”

  There was a crescendo in the firing.

  “I hate war,” Morel said.

  “Who doesn’t?” Ray said. Here we go, he thought.

  The firing sank away.

  Morel said, “War is unnecessary. All the monstrous stuff, weaponry, huge standing armies, all that … There’s a way out of it and the way would be for all the countries of the world to decide to drop the load of competitive armaments by agreeing that there would be one body, the United Nations, and what it would do would be to operate a powerful force that would enforce agreed-on boundaries. That is, everyone’s boundaries would be agreed, imperfect or not, frozen, accepted as final. So nations would go down to what they needed to police themselves inside secure boundaries … so if no country is threatened with any kind of incursion, then that means no need for overseas bases, no arms races, because the justification for those is defense of the realm. I’m not saying you could ever get to the point where this would suddenly blaze up as a good idea to all hands on deck. It’s a thought experiment.”

  “Good idea,” Ray said. He was truly astonished. It was hard to credit that he was hearing what he was hearing. What he was hearing was a proposition appropriate for a sophomore symposium somewhere, a colloquium. Morel was a type. He wanted to be fair to the man who was taking his wife away, far away, taking her in his arms and flying away with her and landing in some excellent place. Fear was precipitating him into little lectures, fervent ones. The pitch of his voice was higher. Ray would have to capture all this in words, in the cameo he would do of Morel, assuming they got out. It would be delicate, getting it right, but here was a man in fear of death urgent to register his bright ideas, in case he was going to die suddenly, register them with another potential corpse. The answer to the question What is life? is Life is abnormal psychology, he thought.

  Ray was not going to spare himself, either. He was going to encapsulate himself but maybe not in the same book with the other Lives. Mine would be My Life in a Nutshell, which would be appropriate, he thought.

  Morel seemed satisfied with having said what he had. No doubt he was rummaging something else up he wanted to be remembered as having thought of. I feel small, Ray thought. It was fairly horrible. This man was overflowing with items like plans for universal peace. There was a kind of idiotic nobility to it. I feel like flotsam, in comparison, Ray thought. And now he wished, for the sake of the sketch he was going to do, that he had paid better attention to a couple of other deliverances Morel had let fall in passing earlier. One had to do with a correct understanding of what the entire human race was basically up to, that understanding being that mankind was engaged not only in internecine conflicts unending but in a general collaborative war against the trees, as he remembered it, mankind as a kind of planetary mange. And the idea of these formulations was to make a light go off in the mind of man that would stop him or her in his or her tracks and lead to huge changes. The other deliverance was lost to him, for the moment. He had to get a pen, somehow, and a tablet, a notebook, anything.

  “You think they’re shooting down from the pan?”

  “Yes.”

  A serious detonation shook the shed, jolting Morel into another presentation. Dust and grit sifted down over them from the ceiling.

  Morel said, “I got a look at the pan. It’s like a giga
ntic pockmark. I read about it before I came up here.”

  The detonation was significant and represented a change. Morel wasn’t asking for his opinion. In fact he had no opinion. It was possible that it was a mortar hit. It was possible that through some accident some ammunition or explosives had gone up. It was serious.

  Morel continued. “Do you know that there’s some mystery about what causes pans? The geology is mysterious. One theory is that there were natural depressions in the terrain and that there used to be much heavier winds in the area that scooped them out and much heavier rains that filled them up, so that when they dried, these beds of clay and soda were left. But the problem with that theory is that there are no pans in other deserts, only around here.”

  Ray was fascinated. This was beyond wanting to deposit his aperçus before misadventure struck. This was sadder, a need to demonstrate that he knew certain things the average man might not.

  Morel said, “The pan here isn’t the biggest one in the Kalahari. This is a small one, less than half a kilometer I would say, measured longwise. It’s an oval-shaped thing.”

  Morel was speaking more rapidly as he went on. Ray wanted to slow him up a little, not stop him.

  Ray said, “The pan used to fill with water every rainy season and stay full most of the year. They say it was beautiful. It was shoulder-to-shoulder marabou storks and fish eagles, Cape vultures, rare birds. That’s why they chose to build this monstrosity out here. Of course then the drought came.”

  In Morel’s eagerness to proceed, he interrupted Ray. “Man, you should see it now. I saw it. Christ, it’s an eyesore.

  “You wouldn’t go near it. It’s a boneyard. You see cow skeletons stuck halfway in the mud. You see skulls sitting there. The floor of it is checkered and you can tell that what happens is that when you step on these individual slabs they tilt up and dump you into this white mire, muck.

  “There are a couple of abandoned trucks in there, just the roofs showing. It’s blinding to look at, it’s so white, pure burning white, white as snow.

  “I couldn’t see much, though. That is, I couldn’t look at the thing for very long without my sunglasses. That’s another thing I want back. My bag I have to get first, first thing. People are going to be hurt.”

  Morel was neatening himself up, beating dust out of his hair and off his shoulders. Ray was doing the same.

  “That last explosion, what was that?” Morel asked.

  “That’s what I’m thinking about,” Ray answered. He didn’t want to alarm Morel. And even if somebody was firing a mortar or mortars, they might not have many shells, maybe even only two, even only one.

  “Is there anything we could make a white flag out of?” Morel asked.

  “Your shorts, perhaps,” Ray said, regretting saying it. Morel looked at him closely.

  “That was an attempt at levity. And also a recognition of the fact that my shorts are khaki-colored and in fact the only white sort of thing around is your shorts. I’m not suggesting it’s practical. My socks are white, or they were, it occurs to me. I don’t see how I could give them up. They’re all I’ve got to protect my feet. But none of this amounts to a flaglike item, if you know what I mean. I imagine if we started waving socks and shorts around, people would take it for an insult, and bingo … It was just a thought.”

  “I understand. But if we want to surrender, that is surrender even more than we have already surrendered … we just put our hands way up. I think that would do it.”

  “Be quiet for a minute,” Ray said fiercely to Morel. They had to be alert. Ray realized for the first time in his life that he sounded like his mother when he used the imperative mode, not his father. There was a whistling sound he didn’t like.

  “What is it?”

  “Just listen.”

  Somebody had a mortar. Mortar shells whistled in flight and something was coming toward them and whistling. The whistling was getting stronger, so this was incoming. Now the possibility of getting pushed into death by one or the other of these ignorant armies was up a notch. Because mortars were not weapons that could be aimed in any real sense of the term. Or they could be aimed only in the sense that a shell would be fired and the people firing it would try to see where it had landed and then they would move their mortar around a little and try again. What that meant was that it was true they could be sitting ducks, by accident, and die. They could actually die. Either or both of them could turn into a terrible bloom, bloodmist, gobbets of flesh, shards of bone.

  A violent detonation, close by, jarred them.

  “Prosit,” Ray said, for no reason. Morel had to be told what was happening.

  Ray said, “They have mortars, at least one.”

  “That’s dangerous,” Morel said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “We could die in here.”

  “We could.”

  “I never got a chance to talk to you about Milton.”

  “What’s that? What are you talking about?”

  “You’re a partisan of Milton and I hate Milton and I’ve thought a lot about why you would like Milton so much. My father forced me to study Milton, memorize parts he liked. Well, forced is too strong a word, but …”

  “Look, right now we need to figure out the safest place to stand in here, while this is going on. We want to be out of the middle area. I think we should stand in opposite corners. I’m not even sure it makes any difference. It would be better to be in the corner if the roof came down, those beams. And I think it makes sense to crouch down, contract the amount of flesh you’re making available for injury. And let’s each pull one of these pallets over us, which might help in case flaming fragments of shit come our way. It’s all nonsense, but let’s do it.” Morel was agreeable.

  When they were each huddled appropriately in their places, Ray said, “One last thing. Remember to keep as low as possible.”

  “What? You have to speak up. It’s getting loud out there.”

  “Okay, just remember to keep as low as you can, because we could take automatic weapons ordnance through the door, or if they used heavier weapons, through the walls. It’s only cinderblock and it shatters. I’m talking about the possibility of somebody feeling frisky and sweeping this structure with gunfire out of high spirits. So, obviously, we stay as much clear of the doors as we can. And since the level of fire would normally come in waist high and up, if we were unlucky enough to be standing at the time, that would be bad.”

  “So the idea is we should crawl, mostly?”

  “Well, for the time being. Until it’s quiet.”

  Morel was lying flat.

  A little time passed.

  Thin white smoke began to curl in through the vents near the tops of the north and west walls. They had smelled smoke before but now they were seeing it. The smoke was forming a stratum under the thatch and dissipating only very slowly upward through it. Morel was aghast.

  Morel sat up. “I think we’re on fire.” He was frightened.

  Ray said, “No. It’s not us. It’s not coming in that fast. It’s from somewhere else. Also, white smoke you don’t have to worry so much about. It’s dark or black you need to watch out for. White smoke is from fast-burning stuff like paper and wood … It’s not us. There’s no extra heat in here.”

  “And thatch. Thatch would make white smoke, right?”

  “Sure, but our thatch isn’t burning.” Ray was amused at his own performance of false expertise. He had to keep the man calm. What choice did he have? “And if you just watch you’ll see the layer of smoke up there get thinner. Believe me. It’s not us.”

  They studied the smoke religiously, exchanging impressions about whether the inflow was strengthening or abating. It did clearly begin abating.

  “You see what I mean?”

  “You were right.”

  A lull began. It was a waste of time, waiting to meet one’s fate. There were things he absolutely had to take care of when, if, he meant if, he got back okay to Gaborone, things he absolute
ly had to do in preparation for getting free, getting out, excising himself. There were certain students he had to say goodbye to, for example. There were at least five students and two or three colleagues, and Curwen in particular, at St. James’s that he absolutely had to say something to. And he had to collect various items, like his backup passports and some other papers, from various caches. He couldn’t stand to think about his students. And he had to find Keletso and say goodbye. And he had to see Victor, his coconspirator at the airport, who was a decent fellow. Victor deserved a bonus. So did some of the other assets he was going to be abandoning. He would have to do something along those lines and it was going to have to be organized fast. It was a slight shock to realize how few people there were that he had to find and say something to or do a little something for valedictorily. It was true that there were enough of them to constitute a time problem. But there really weren’t that many, given how long he and Iris had been in that part of the forest. But he had an answer for that. It was because certain people he loved had absorbed most of what he had to give. A certain subject matter had absorbed inordinate amounts of his love capacity, his leisure-time attention.

  He could save Morel from the trouble of having to survive another near-death experience like the last mortar strike to propel him into his Milton lecture, which was something he had evidently devoted some time to perfecting, probably in show-off conversations with Iris, he could just invite him to get into it, since he’d mentioned it. The thought that Morel had been parading around in front of Iris delivering his show-off capsule stuff on Milton was infuriating. It was too infuriating. He had to find out about that. First he would get Morel to do his little act on Milton.

  Confoundingly, it seemed that Morel had managed to doze. Ray couldn’t believe it. Things outside were not improving. There was an intermittent filtering down of petty detritus from the ceiling thatch, the result of reverberations from intensifying shooting and shelling. Hunger is the best sauce for food and a clear conscience the best sleeping pill, Ray thought. How could Morel have a clear conscience? Is taking my wife away from me a virtuous act? Ray wanted to know. The shooting was at the level of static on the radio, for God’s sake. It had risen to that! Ray’s theory of the shooting he was hearing was that a jockeying exercise was in progress, one side trying to scare the other off with heavier and heavier barrages, followed by intervals of waiting to see if somebody was going to be pulling back, quitting. But then he knew so little about combat, war, serious war.