Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Morel was being primal. Maybe it was good that somebody could get into that mode. And maybe it was something to do that felt better than wallowing in the impossibilities in a situation. For example there had been all that debate about what they should do as the battle got closer, whether they should keep mum and stay where they were, play dead, or whether they should move heaven and earth to find a way to break out and then run and hide in a donga until the battle was over, or whether they should barge out and get into the fight. It looked like Morel had resolved everything unilaterally. They were not going to stay in their dungeon if at all possible. He was going to create an exit barehanded singlehanded. There really wasn’t time to discuss any of this again. Their deliberations had taken place when it hadn’t been clear that the battle was ever going to reach them. Now it was not a question. There was such a thing as slipping out into a scene of confusion and finding a place to hide while everyone was distracted with killing. Maybe they could still do that, if they got loose.

  Morel was determined. There was blood showing on the back of one hand. He was ignoring it.

  “I don’t recommend this,” was all Ray could think of to say.

  He knew what Morel was attempting. He was trying to get his fingers in as far as the void at the core of the cement block so that he could get a solid grip on the fragment and really wrench away at it, pull it hard. He was endangering his hands. Fortunately he wasn’t a surgeon, but still, he had to touch people in his practice. His diagnostic procedure involved a lot of touching. That was what holistic medicine was, apparently.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” Ray said. He couldn’t see how Morel had gotten his fingers so far into the crack, but he had.

  He had to try to help. Morel was being a machine. The fucking chunk of wall seemed to be actually moving, tilting. Morel’s shirt back was dark with sweat.

  “We need a crowbar,” Ray said, provoking a hiss of exasperation from Morel.

  Ray hastened to assist. The crack was tighter where he was, to Morel’s right. But by brute force he was now getting his fingertips in up to the first joint. He had to do better. He had to get them in far enough to bend them down into a hollow space so he could grip and pull, like Morel.

  Morel was extremely strong. Ray could feel the effect of his force in the definite rocking movement being produced in the fragment. Morel was pretending the abrasions on the backs of his hands weren’t happening. I have to help, Ray thought. He drove his fingers in and found the void in his segment of the chunk and grasped hard.

  Ray said, “I think we should push. We should stop rocking this thing. It hurts when it rocks back in. I think we need to just push out.” There were ridges of scraped-off skin midway between his second and third knuckles, on every finger. Morel seemed not to be listening to him. Ray’s hands were in agony and the kneeling position he was in was hell on his bad knee.

  Morel was still insisting on whispering. He was saying that they were not coordinating. They paused. Morel put his ear to the wall. Ray couldn’t imagine what the point of doing that was. Morel seemed satisfied, though, and resumed his efforts, pushing, only, now. The floor was drooping under them, but not alarmingly.

  Ray scanned the fractures in the upper wall, thinking that they had, what was the word, ramified, since the last time he’d glanced at them, raising the possibility of a Samsonic, if that was a word, conclusion, as in the entire side of the edifice collapsing in on them, burying them. It was far-fetched but it added something to the moment. And there was still the possibility of one or even both of them getting caught like idiots with their hands stuck in the wall. He didn’t know how it could be, but he seemed to be having fun, despite everything, the pain. He wanted to see if he and Morel could do this thing.

  Morel was resting again. That was natural. His exertions had been greater. But they had to continue soon. Ray had the germ of a feeling, a spark of belief that they could do this, do it together if they kept the momentum up. And if he could exclude from his mind questions like whether, once they got the chunk detached from its what, its moorings, they should push it all the way out or just edge it out as far as they could without creating a glaring cavelike hole for all to see. The question was should they pause and wait once they were sure they had an exit, but without using it immediately. The thing to do was to proceed. There was no exit yet.

  Morel was kneeling and resting, his forehead against the wall. He appeared to be talking softly to himself. What he was doing resembled praying, which couldn’t be. Ray felt he had to know.

  “You’re not praying there, are you?”

  Morel looked balefully at him. He said, “How could you ask me that?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what it looked like.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.”

  “Well, I’m relieved.” That was true. The idea of Morel praying had been unsettling.

  But Morel resumed murmuring to himself. This was obviously some personal ritual he was going through preparatory to their climactic next effort. Finally Morel seemed to be through.

  Ray couldn’t help himself. “What were you saying, if you don’t mind my asking?” He was truly curious. If he were to write a vignette of Morel the answer to that question would be just the kind of thing that might turn out to be emblematic. And he had no idea what Morel might have been saying, unless it had been some idiosyncratic mantra to the first atheist or to Bertrand Russell, except that mantras weren’t addressed to particular heroes, now that he thought about it.

  “It was nothing,” Morel said.

  “It was.”

  “I don’t feel like telling you, to tell you the truth.”

  “Okay don’t.”

  Morel was not going to be able to not tell him. He wouldn’t want Ray alienated at this point. Ray was exploiting that. Drop it, Ray told himself.

  Morel said, “All right. I was thinking of someone. I was imagining someone. I was drawing strength from … from the image. It’s something you can do, one can.”

  “Ah,” Ray said. He knew that this was where he should stop interrogating. It was ridiculous. They both had their hands in the crack still. He should stop interrogating. Because, without being told, he knew who it was Morel had been holding in front of his mind. It was Iris. And Ray didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want to know that. But he also felt he had to know, right or wrong, because it was possible he was wrong, as always. We can always be wrong, he thought. He felt a proprietary rage. Morel hadn’t known Iris long enough to what, appropriate her this way. It was vicious.

  “Do you mind telling me who it is?”

  “Yes I do mind.”

  “Would it be someone I know?”

  “God damn it! Could you possibly shut up until we get this done?”

  He doesn’t want to deny it, or to have to say it, Ray thought. He resented the situation and blamed Morel for creating it. He was hating him. His little murmuring act had been provocative. It had to have been deliberate. Maybe it was a genuine reaction to the extremis they were in. Or maybe it had been reflexive, like the matador pointing out the woman in the stands he was going to present the bull’s ear to, or like a knight tucking his earl’s wife’s underpants into his armor, under his breastplate, before going off to some feat of arms.

  Morel had a grim look. He had extracted his bloody fingers from the crack and was repositioning himself, getting on his back with both feet against the wedge. Ray withdrew his fingers too. Morel was tireless. Now he was working his chewed-up fingers around the lip of the flooring, getting purchase for his new approach to kicking the wedge over and out. He was still muttering to himself.

  Ray thought, Call up your own image of Iris. It could be when she had been looking for him, with anxiety. It could be a moment from their great hours on Orcas Island. They had been following a trail in the woods and she had been ahead, eager to get to the view or whatever they were searching for. He had stepped into the underbrush to urinate, without alerting her. And then she had looked ar
ound and seen the trail empty and she had come back, calling his name. He had that moment, the note in her voice, if he wanted it.

  It was time to finish. Ray duplicated Morel’s position, with some difficulty. He was able to get only one hand around the edge of the flooring. It would have to do.

  “Push,” Morel said.

  Ray felt serious movement occurring. They were winning. They both groaned. Light was coming in, and air. They could have stopped and left the wedge tilting, which would be less likely to attract the attention of passersby, but they couldn’t. They had to completely dislodge it. And then they had done it. Their feet were in the open air. They drew them back.

  Ray got on his knees and bent forward, his face in the gap, breathing in heavily. He could see that there was an impact crater just outside, by the wall.

  He had to contain himself. He wanted to get out. He had to keep himself from acting stupidly. But the prospect of getting out was creating a fire in him to physically do that, get out, be out, dance around, be in the open. But there were decisions to be made, such as who should go first. It would have to be him. He didn’t know why, but he would think of why. He was on fire to be outside.

  It had been hard work. Bare feet hadn’t made anything easier. Our feet are delicate, he thought.

  Something was wrong with Morel. He was lying flat, his arms crossed over his eyes. Ray was afraid for him.

  “I’m all right,” Morel announced.

  “Are you sure you are? You don’t look great.”

  “I’m getting my breath. We got that thing out. Maybe we shouldn’t have shoved it all the way out, but it’s too late. It’s out.”

  “You rest,” Ray said. Morel had a right to rest. He had done more. And he was the one who had made them do it at all. Morel’s short leg was trembling, only the short leg.

  “I think I should go out first,” Ray said.

  “Why you?”

  “Because, well, I’m limber …” What he meant was that he was a lot narrower, thinner. Either one of them could get through the hole, but it would be less work for Ray. Morel could see that. And there was the question of Morel’s leg problem. His leg was trembling. Ray didn’t want to be explicit.

  Morel said, “First we just look out, get our heads out. You can do it first. Then you duck back and I’ll look. Then we decide how it looks. We decide whether one of us should go or whether we should both go, one after the other, at the same time. You see what I’m trying to avoid, which is, one of us gets out there and God knows what happens, something happens, I’m still in here and have to scramble after you. I’m making this up as I go along, you may have noticed. And Jesus, look at our hands. I’ve got to get some hydrogen peroxide someplace.”

  Ray was calming down. They needed to act while the firing was in recess, which it seemed to be, unless, of course, it would be better to go out when there was more confusion, more firing, more distraction.

  Morel sat up. “You go,” he said.

  “Go? You mean …”

  “I mean put your head out.”

  Lying on his belly, Ray shrugged his way into the gap. It was tight, not more than eight or nine inches high and about four feet in length.

  It was painfully bright out. He would adjust. It was sometime in the hot afternoon. What he could see wasn’t telling him much. He was being careful. He was only visible to his enemies from the bridge of his nose on up, assuming they were interested.

  What he had achieved was a prospect of the western end of the back wall of the main hotel building. It was unevenly pink and it was crenellated along the top. There were aprons of broken glass on the ground outside every window on the ground floor. The open ground that he could see between the shed and the hotel was cratered in three places, not counting the crater immediately to his right. His eyes were clearly not what they had once been, evidently, although possibly his nutrition lately was partly to blame, that and being kept hooded and in the dark so much. He certainly hoped so. Morel’s eyesight was undoubtedly better than his. Morel was tugging at Ray’s heel.

  Ray had to digest everything he could see. Furniture and planking and sheets of metal had been pushed together variously to make barricades in the first-floor windows. There were lines of bullet holes, arabesques, in the upper wall.

  The view to the west wasn’t alarming. Black bursts of chemical-smelling smoke were washing through the scene. The fire generating the smoke was on the other side of the hotel, possibly in the courtyard, used as a parking area, that occupied the space between the west and east wings of the U-shaped building. Their shed faced the outside of the bottom of the U, the rear side of the hotel. Nothing he was seeing was immediately alarming. The smoke from the fire, which was at a safe distance from them, seemed to be lessening. There was shooting going on behind him. The loudest fire was proceeding from the west wing of the hotel, overlooking the zoo and, farther out, the pan, if his interpretation of the soundscape was correct. Somebody’s labor had come to nothing. He was looking along the path at clotheslines bearing laundry very much the worse for war, would be one way to put it. The bed linen hung there was blackened and here and there listlessly burning. He was seeing no activity in any of the windows, no activity generally. This front was dormant.

  Morel was pulling sharply at his legs. Ray edged his way back inside. Morel was going to be in favor of waiting until nightfall before they actually both got out and began to peregrinate. Ray didn’t want to wait.

  “Tell me what you see,” Morel said. He was anxious.

  “Well it’s all quiet on the western front, from what I can see. Except for the shooting. And the smoke. There may be a fire over in the parking area. You said that koevoet had their military vehicles herded in there, in the courtyard, for security. You saw that out there, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right, just their military stuff, trucks, and one personnel carrier, one of those funny-looking South African ones that you can feel safe in running over a mine. A Casspir. But I didn’t see our vehicles. I don’t know where they put those. Somewhere around, I guess.”

  “I’m guessing that that’s where the fire is, where they’ve parked. I can tell you that if it was me attacking this place, I couldn’t wait to put a mortar round into that spot. But would Quartus be stupid enough to not disperse his vehicles? The fire is on the way out. It’s not a conflagration or anything out of control. But I’m going to edge farther out to see what else I can see.”

  Morel was agitated. “Wait a minute. Let’s think. Say it turns out that we’re in a sort of backwater in the fighting, for now. Let’s think what it would be smart to do. I mean, this might be our moment, if their attention is elsewhere …”

  “Let me take another look.”

  “Wait, we need to figure out in case it looks like we should jump into action. Right now we’re at risk, with this hole in the wall, not to mention your sticking your face into it. I don’t know. Maybe we should concentrate on breaking out enough more of the hole so I could get through too, in a pinch. So we’d be ready. It wouldn’t take much.”

  Ray tried to be measured. Morel was unraveling. Ray said, “Look, it’s possible I could get out and slip around to the front of the shed and see how they’ve got us locked in. All we know is that when we push on it we see two segments of chain across the opening. We don’t know if there’s a padlock. Why should there be? It’s more likely they’ve just got a chain looped around and cinched up someway in a knot.”

  Morel was breathing rapidly. “No I think we need to both get out of here together, both of us at the same time. I don’t think we should work it so that just one of us goes and leaves the other waiting to see what in the name of fuck is happening. You see my point. I think we should take our chances together, like a team.”

  “Maybe so. But let me take a good look in the other direction first.”

  It was clear Morel didn’t want to be abandoned, which was interesting, as a development. Ray was feeling brave. Against his will, Morel was showing he
was afraid. But of course Morel had something to lose that Ray no longer did.

  Ray inched out again, this time as far as his knees. Morel was holding his ankles and producing muffled protests and instructions.

  There was something frightening to the east. It was a body. It was a dead body. The body of a man was lying near the footpath fifty feet down. The dead body was the scene, with the rest of what he could see secondary to it, a frame for the dead man. He was assuming this man was dead. He concentrated on detecting any sign of life. There was nothing. Gunfire rattled from the far ridge of the pan and there seemed to be some action taking place on the floor of the pan to the west. He could make out part of one of the zoo cages. It appeared to be empty.

  The body was face down. The back was bloody and seemed wrong, torn up and irregular, not smooth. The man was clad only in bush shorts. And he was wearing combat boots. Ray had to tell Morel.

  He withdrew into the shed.

  “What’s wrong, man?” Morel asked.

  “There’s a body fifty feet down the path, lying there. A black guy. I don’t know if he’s one of Quartus’s men or not. He could be a cook or one of these locals they’re making do chores for them. I think I need to go look at him. I think he’s dead but I don’t know. There’s blood all over, but he might not be dead.”

  “You’re not going out there.”

  “I think I need to. The fact that nobody has bothered to collect him shows that nobody is paying attention to this side of the hotel right now. Or it means he’s nobody. I just think I have to go see, ascertain if …”

  “Don’t be insane. What could you do? Say he’s still alive, what could you do?”

  “I don’t know. I have to see.”

  “Listen. This is the deal. This is what we agreed. We don’t do anything out there we don’t both agree has to be done.”

  “We never agreed that.”

  “Well, de facto we did.”

  “We didn’t. I’m going out there.”

  “Were you raised religious?”