Mortals

by Norman Rush

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything? But okay, my family tried, with me, but not very hard. So what?”

  “You’re saying you’re going out there in broad daylight. You could die. You’ll be exposed. You don’t think you’re going to die, do you? That’s one thing religion does for us, it plants the conviction that we’re going to live forever. It explains a lot of irrational action.”

  “So does needing a pair of boots,” Ray said.

  Morel was silent.

  Ray got down and prepared to exit fully. The ragged slot was tight against his shoulders. His shirt was ripping but he was making it through. He was full of urgency to get to the corpse, if it was a corpse. He was hoping it was a corpse because he was going to take the man’s boots. Morel had boots. The dead man’s boots represented power. He would be more than back to normal if he could get the boots and get them on his feet. It would change everything. It could save him, save Morel too.

  Excelsior! he thought, aware that it wasn’t quite the right word. He wanted something that signalized getting out of confinement in a more specific way, but all he could think of was Voilà, which was funny.

  Excelsior! he thought again, emerging. He was about to be free. One arm was free. It would be helpful if Morel would grab his legs and push, help him, but he could manage without help.

  He was locomoting, if that was the word, on his right side. Both arms were free and God was good because dark smoke was building up again in the space between the sheds and the hotel proper. He was feeling giddy. He was afraid, but, irrationally, he wanted to dance around, flail his arms around. He was afraid, but that was what he wanted to do.

  He was out. He made himself lie still, lie against the wall like a slug. His heart was beating violently. He needed to think of something to calm himself down. The lines Escaping from the enemy’s hand … Into the enemy’s vast domain came to him. Perfect, he thought. But he wanted to know why it was always the twentieth century that provided him with what, literary comfort. What was wrong with Milton? He had to force himself to be calm, to keep his movements small and incremental. He looked back at the hole he had squeezed through, feeling a ridiculous pride and a sort of fascination with it, the smallness of the aperture. He was almost in control of himself.

  There was a conflict between what he wanted to do first and what he ought to do first. He wanted to go for the boots like a shot and he was having a slight mania about them that was impelling him to do that, instead of what he ought to do first. He had his eyes on the boots. The mania he was having was in the genre of the wallet connected to a black thread and left on the sidewalk on April Fools’ Day to be jerked away by a joker when some dupe reached for it. In this case it would be the dead body getting up and strolling off saying Gosiame, demonstrating that this had only been someone who happened to be taking a nap in a pool of blood. He knew he was being insane.

  What he ought to do first was crawl around to the front of the shed to ascertain how they were being locked in. It was conceivable that he could undo it and be the one to throw the doors open for Morel, let him out, usher him out into the melee.

  He would crawl around to the front of the shed, take a quick look at the situation, and decide what to do. That was enough of a plan. Crawling was painful, but he was discovering something interesting in the process. His knee was hurting, but only intermittently. Fear and pressure had given him the power to dissociate from his panoply of injuries, all of them, including the new abrasions on the backs of his hands, his head wound, to dissociate for decent intervals. Now everything was hurting. But he was adapting. A shattering barrage of firing began and ended.

  He paused at the corner of their shed. He had a clearer view of the dead man and it was definite that he was dead. Ray turned the corner. He thanked God that he hadn’t had to look into the man’s face, so far. That would come.

  He got to where he needed to be and he realized he had to stand up to see what the deal was on their door lock. He could see it was a padlock, but he had to get up and handle it to see that, say, it was locked, that the hasp was pushed in all the way. He got up. The padlock was massive. It took a key to open it. It was fully locked.

  He was through with crawling. He was up for good. It didn’t matter that he was being attacked by an irrational impulse to dance around. He was equal to it. Iris loved to dance. He had never been much of a dancer, because dancing had always made him feel false, in some way. Dancing went with inner cheerfulness, which came and went, with him. That was his view, anyway. Of course, why he wanted to dance around just then was a question for somebody. Morel probably liked to dance, despite his leg. He would ask him. Iris deserved more fun. She could even go to dinner dances now, if she wanted to. She liked to dress up. Excelsior, Iris! he thought.

  He approached the dead man and bent over him. Ray rolled him over onto his back but he couldn’t bear what that revealed so he rolled him back onto his front again, shaking. This kind of thing has to stop, he thought. Something had blown away half the man’s face, the side of his neck, his shoulder. It was hideous. It was unnatural for the inner workings of the human machine to be on display in a shattered condition. Ray wondered if the mortar round that had compromised the wall of their shed had done in this poor bugger. He was wearing a belt with cartridge pouches strung on it. There might be a weapon somewhere in the vicinity, knocked away by the blast that had killed the man, it occurred to him. He didn’t see anything nearby, but maybe he would do more of a search later, after he had the man’s boots off.

  He had to turn the corpse over again to get at the lacing of the boots. He crouched down. Definitely he did not want to be shot before he could get these seven-league boots on, which is what they would be for him. His feet were hurting almost as much as his knee, his scalp, just from the minimal walking around in stocking feet on the rocky ground, to tell the truth.

  He got the combat boots off the corpse. He wanted to say something aloud in thanks, even though the boot donor, if that was the right term, was probably a death squad guy, a killer. But then indirectly he was a killer, himself, Ray Finch, indirect killer.

  He got the boots on. They were too big but that was nothing. He wanted to kick things and in fact he still wanted to dance. Here I come, he thought.

  It was wonderful, the way he felt.

  He looked down at the corpse and said “Thank you.”

  He had laced and tied the boots very tightly, too tightly. He would adjust them when he got back inside.

  He gave a little time to ranging around in search of a gun the dead man might have been carrying when he was killed. But there was nothing.

  He returned to the hole he had to reenter and studied the wall around it. It was radically fractured. Now that he was shod, they could break more pieces out and enlarge the getaway gap. He knew they could. He felt full of strength.

  He put himself into the hole again. Morel cried out, relieved, and then apologized for making noise. He pulled Ray back inside.

  Ray got to his feet. He stamped his feet. “I got them,” he said. He felt like kicking the wall, so he did. He kicked the wall in various places, concentrating finally on the margins of the hole they had made together. He kicked demonically. He couldn’t stop. He would be able to stop when he succeeded in making it bigger, knocking a chunk off. That would prove something.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself. Stop that,” Morel said.

  Ray continued the assault.

  Morel asked if he had seen anything useful lying around outside, a tool of any kind, a crowbar, anything.

  “I didn’t see anything. But then I didn’t go very far afield, looking. I thought I should get back. We have to plan. Since we don’t exactly have a plan.”

  “There could be something useful in one of the other sheds in this cluster. There are about six, that I saw, around here. Did you check to see if they were locked, by any chance?”

  “No, I didn’t. But we’re locked in good here. No, when I was out there I stuck to the outsi
de of this place like a leech. I thought I should keep it crisp out there. And did you notice something? Nobody killed me. Here I am. We’re padlocked in. But I feel good. I’ll tell you, you feel like dancing once you get out in the open.”

  “Lay off the kicking for a minute. Give it a rest.”

  “I will in a second,” Ray said. But he didn’t know when he could. The kicking was turning into a kind of dancing, in his mind. Dancing had hold of him, the idea did, the picture of it did. He thought, The whole thing is a dance, life is, from our first steps until all we can do is twitch in our wheelchairs.

  Morel came up to him. He said, “You’re getting a high out of this. I don’t like it. Take a rest.”

  “Don’t touch me.” He didn’t want to be touched and he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  The dance is already going when we have to step in, he thought. That’s what society was, the dance. The agency was a dance he had stumbled into, a dance within a dance. He thought, We have to dance … we have to find a partner, we look and we look and then we find one and then in the dance we get tapped on the shoulder and it’s Morel and the rules say it’s his turn, because the dance has rules.

  “My brother could dance,” Ray said. It was true. Gay people were good dancers.

  His right leg was hurting considerably. He wanted to kick the building down. He put all his concentration into the point of his right boot. He kicked desperately, willing the wall to come down, which it failed to do, but as he gave up, sat down, and watched his failure, a piece of concrete the size of a cauliflower fell away from the arch of the existing hole.

  Morel gave a shout and bent down and pounded Ray on the back.

  “Don’t touch me,” Ray said. Immediately he wanted to apologize.

  “Right, I forgot. But this is good, man. Just a little more work and I’ll be able to get through that thing.”

  “I think you could get through it now, really, but I’ll work on it more if you give me a minute. Getting my breath.”

  “I’ll work on it myself.”

  “Okay, go ahead. And here’s what we have to decide. Okay when we get out either we stick together or we separate and find someplace to hide individually, you understand, individually, we discussed this, individually out there, which would be optimal for one of us surviving. Because this thing is going to come to an end at some point and the forces of law are going to drift in and we might be there, waving, Here I am, over here. So if we’re both in the same place and the wrong guys find us. Well. You understand the odds.”

  “You mean we scramble out and split up and find a ditch or something out in the veld or something to get behind and wait, wait until this is over one way or another?”

  “That would be one way to go.” And it was the best way, from the standpoint of reason, Reason, as his brother would have put it, with his capitalizations, Reason, his poor fuck of a brother, his poor brother. The problem was that there was a slight misunderstanding on Morel’s part about Ray’s vocational qualifications for this kind of situation. He had hated his brother and failed his brother and now his brother was dead. But the truth was that he had no special operations training addressing anything like this hellfuckshit hell going on. But that was his own problem.

  Morel began kicking at the wall as hard as he could, with his good foot. Ray got up, but before joining him in his effort, scrutinized the crack structure developing in the wall, the crackage, as it was undoubtedly referred to among professionals in what, walls.

  He thought, We have to kick scientifically because we are wearing ourselves out.

  “Stop,” Ray said.

  “Why?”

  “We need to study the crackage so we bang at the right spot. Which would be right there.”

  “The crackage,” Morel said, dryly.

  “Right, the crack pattern.”

  “It’s very important for you to have the right word for everything. Hey look, frankly I think you made that up.”

  “I may have. I may have. I like the right descriptor being applied to the correct object. Vocabulary is important. Iris is the same way, about words. You’ll see. The working vocabulary of Americans is half what it was in 1950. That’s horrifying. I have students in this country with better vocabularies than Americans their age, English vocabulary.”

  “I hear what you’re saying,” Morel said, which infuriated Ray.

  “Of course you do, you’re not deaf. And don’t ever use that expression again. Iris will think you’re an asshole. What I was saying is this, and I am being helpful, and it’s that you are going to come under a lot of pressure to play Scrabble, if you haven’t already. She loves it. I wasn’t good about it. She stopped trying to get me to play, over time. You may wind up playing Scrabble a lot, if you know what’s good for you. It’s just a word to the wise. About Scrabble my excuse was that I was doing English morning to night at St. James’s and that I wanted surcease from English. It was a mistake and we all make mistakes and sometimes a lot of small mistakes turn into a gigantic mistake.” He felt okay. He hoped he had created for Morel a vista of postprandial board games being part of his utopia with Iris. He would bet that crackage was there in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  Morel was going ahead without him, jerking and hauling with his hands at the wall in the wrong place, according to Ray’s judgment, when an astonishingly large segment of the wall, a jagged huge rind, came away.

  They were free to go.

  Morel said, “Okay, we have to leave now, and I think we should stick together whatever, out there.” It was an appeal, but it was unnecessary because Ray had already decided it would have to be that way. They would have to be brothers, temporarily. The man had a short leg.

  Ray said, “It’s a deal. That’s the only way. Right.”

  “Okay, good.”

  Ray didn’t want to say what he was going to say next. It was going to sound like an ultimatum. It wasn’t. It was just a necessity. He said, “Okay, but look, first we need to get into the hotel to get my brother’s manuscript, if we can. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Morel was going to object. Ray didn’t care.

  “That makes no sense,” Morel said unhappily.

  “I know it. But I have to. Look, you don’t have to go in with me. In fact, wait here if you want to, which is not exactly the protocol we agreed on. But that’s where I’m going first, if it’s physically possible, if it looks like I can get in. So wait here, I’ll go, I’ll come back, and then we jump out together. I have to try. Because I don’t know where we’re going to end up, how far from here we’re going to end up, hiding or whatever we do. The whole place could burn down while we’re watching it, burn from a distance, you see. Man, I have to.”

  “Okay then that’s first thing. We’ll do it together. I need to find my bag, anyway. I think I saw it in the torture chamber over there. I’d like to get my car keys, too. We’ll try it together.”

  The wall made a noise, a brief grinding noise, and they both jumped back in unison, like a dance team, Ray thought. They were abashed about doing that.

  They had to get going. The wall was rotten. There was new crackage showing. They were both thinking the same thing, that the wall was unstable and something could happen. The wall could come down, the roof with it, they could be sitting up to their necks in thatch attracting attention.

  Morel was afraid. It had helped that they had agreed to stick together out in the maelstrom, but he was still breathing fast. It was not going to be possible to have a blueprint for every step.

  Morel was gathering himself. He wanted to act well, outside. They both did. They both knew that the other might be the main surviving witness to how he had comported himself at the very end.

  They had to go quickly. Ray had the urge to say, Shall we dance?

  Morel wanted to lead. That was all right.

  Morel was hesitating over whether to go out feet first or head first. He decided on head first. The clearance was just adequate. He proceeded very carefully, s
eeking to have as little contact with the wall as he could manage, put as little strain on it as possible, as he squeezed through. It was because the wall seemed delicate.

  Ray prepared to follow. Morel was out. Before Ray could enter, Morel’s hand appeared in the gap. He seemed to think Ray could use help, this time. Morel was all right. He was doing his best. Ray hissed at him, to move him back. Ray got through very neatly. They were free.

  Morel wanted something. He wanted to shake hands. They did. Morel was vibrating, vibrating, not trembling. He was wound up. He was gesturing about something. He wanted to say something in Ray’s ear, apparently.

  “I think we should whisper,” he whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we have to communicate, we should. But mostly we should use gestures, watch each other. Give signals.”

  Ray didn’t want to laugh, but it was funny. Morel needed a manual, a new manual for each fifteen minutes. And it was funny to worry about being overheard in the pandemonium unfolding around them. He was adapting to the steady sound of firing. The most concentrated popping sounds were coming from the front side of the hotel, around the corner from them, to their right, and it was likeliest that the shooters would be in the second-story rooms, or on the roof. That was something to keep in mind. If there were shooters moving around on the roof the chances that they would be spotted were better, that had to be communicated to Morel.

  The smoke was thick. He was grateful for it but they had to get away from it. His eyes were stinging. He rubbed them. When he opened his eyes, Morel was gone.

  It was nothing. Morel had dashed off to look at the dead man. He was crouching over him.

  Ray went after Morel full of irritation. They had an understanding.

  But he knew what Morel was doing. He was being Hippocratic. He was a doctor. All I need to hear right now is that the guy is alive and wants his boots back, Ray thought. But he wasn’t alive. Half his neck was gone. Ray should have mentioned that to Morel earlier. Morel was asserting himself, making the point that he was a doctor and so this was the first thing that had to be done.