Mortals

by Norman Rush

  There were ten copies of this item in the shipment, and the same number of another and more recent work by this same Weston La Barre, Shadow of Childhood: Neoteny and the Biology of Religion, this from a reputable publisher, the University of Oklahoma Press.

  Victor handed him, gravely, a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary.

  Something was coalescing here. The shipment was for a Doctor Davis Morel, a medical doctor coming in as a working immigrant, according to the code entry Victor pointed out on his copy of the doctor’s immigration paperwork. So they were not dealing with an accredited scholar or teacher of any kind. This was something else. Doctor Morel would be located on Tshekedi Crescent, in their neighborhood, or almost. He looked again at the code entry on the immigration carbon. Morel had been granted indefinite duration, a rare thing these days.

  Somehow Victor had listed everything. There was a separate listing of all the books and pamphlets—many pamphlets—present in multiple copies. La Barre was at the head of the list, followed by The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby, at nine copies, and then by The Illusion of Immortality by Corliss Lamont, at seven copies. Victor was no fool. One look at the titles of the pamphlets alone, which were from a miscellany of free-thought sources, would have been all it took to convince him that the shipment constituted an arsenal of irreligion and that Morel was the Antichrist if not the Great Beast himself. Some of the pamphlet titles struck Ray as fairly inflammatory … Is God a Jew? The Church & the Nazis, Hinduism and Paranoia. This was more than some crank’s personal collection. Multiple copies meant that the point was propaganda. Victor had seen that straight off.

  Victor was presenting him with sheet after sheet of inventory, one sheet at a time. That was to emphasize how very many sheets there were, of course, and it was unnecessary because Ray was aware that a huge amount of effort had gone into this. He was considering how much extra he should pay Victor for all this. He looked at Victor’s typically Tswana handwriting. It was painstaking. The individually printed letters in their roundness and the way they were spaced recalled the school copybook style you were expected to outgrow. He loved Victor, he loved the man for his work. Probably Victor had never gone beyond Standard Four, like most Batswana, which might be an explanation for the pervasiveness of this unsophisticated penmanship among literate Batswana.

  Ray could only skim the lists. Morel was a sexophile or sexologist of some kind. There were numerous books on the history of sexual customs. Victor had put stars next to these titles. There were books on the history of imprisonment, of punishments. There were histories of freemasonry. And this was very nice, a little collection of popular books unmasking the CIA, so they claimed. He was noting titles at random. Everything had a resonance he didn’t like, such as Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry by Armando R. Favazza, M.D. Ray’s image of Morel was darkening. Ray wasn’t altogether sure why Morel excited him as a prospect, but he was indisputably a person of interest. They would certainly see that at the agency. Ray refused to use the acronym, POI, when he was in discussions at the agency. Acronyms embarrassed him.

  He would take the lists and go over them in detail later. His visits to Customs had to be kept brief. He had decided on sixty rands for Victor’s payment. It was very generous. He had the bills ready.

  Victor had checked the manifests on Morel’s professional effects and discovered that there were two expensive photocopy machines in the shipment. They were state of the art machines, in Ray’s judgment. He thanked Victor for everything, but there was more, something more Victor wanted him to see. Ray tried to be patient.

  His feelings about the emerging character Morel appeared to be were complicated. He looked at this image from two angles. From one angle Morel seemed unexceptionable, a sort of educated proselytizing crank, flamboyant, who might even add a little texture to the intellectual life of the expatriate community, which could use it. Ray would hardly describe himself as religious in any acting-out sense, which wasn’t what he meant. He meant he wasn’t an observing religious type in any way. So he had no personal animus against what this Morel obviously had in mind to do. Ray felt, if he had to put it in a capsule way, that the Christian religion had worked out fairly well as the medium for a tolerable and variegated and improving set of societies. He had no profound thoughts on the subject. Maybe religion was going to evolve away ultimately and maybe not. Maybe decent societies could have been based on something else. He couldn’t say. But as it was, Christianity had done about the best. Christianity gave us Milton, not to mention Bach and all the rest. And there was Botswana, which was a decent and placid country that was doing all right as it was. There was something goodhearted about Botswana. And it was a religious country, evangelized from top to bottom. It didn’t need a Morel. By the numbers, Botswana was doing better than any other country in Africa. Christianity or the mindset bound up with it at least was helpful to the country, so far as he could judge. He’d never thought of himself as a limb of Christendom but of course in a way he was, and so be it. There was some potential for religious friction down the road. The Hindus wanted a temple. The Bahai were around. There were enough Muslims in town to support a mosque, and a mosque had been put up, and there was already some unhappiness with the volume the recorded muezzin calls were being played at. There had been a shortlived attempt, crushed by the government, by Domkrag, to insist that a live muezzin give the hourly calls, because of course that could bother nobody, human lung power being limited. But the Muslims had been able to prove that live muezzins were being phased out everywhere in Islam. So there were these recorded calls to prayer and the difficulty was that the Muslims were claiming that they were keeping the volume down when the experience of householders in the vicinity was that they weren’t, in fact. He was lucky they didn’t live in the vicinity. Iris would freak. The point was that Botswana was working, in a continent where almost nothing else was. It was developing a stratum of people who could communicate with you in your own vocabulary. Rex had been so precocious that he’d decided at eight or nine he didn’t want to have pets because you couldn’t converse with them, ergo they were a waste of time. Ray had wanted pets but he hadn’t been willing to have them and be the only one responsible for pet chores. They had let Rex refuse to bear any responsibility. And the goddamned dogs they’d had early on loved Rex. So ultimately there had been no pets. What was his point? The heat was getting him.

  “You are just dreaming, rra,” Victor said.

  “Sorry.”

  Victor was handling a framed eight by ten photograph. It was a professionally done portrait, head and shoulders. He was holding it up for Ray.

  Davis Morel was black. Ray could see that Victor harbored some additional disapproval over that. Morel was black, though lighter skinned than an African, in the medium range. It had to be Morel because the subject was seated at a desk and there were medical reference books on a shelf behind him. If the photograph was recent, Morel was in his early forties. He was conventionally handsome and was giving a rather dry smile and overall a rather standardly forthright expression. Ray thought the expression was detectably self-consciously forthright, but maybe not. He was looking for slyness, without luck. Morel had an athletic bearing. He had a strong neck and wide shoulders. His hairline was very good, his hair close-cropped, not graying. He was an advertisement for his services, if nothing else. There was no jewelry on show. His suit was expensive. Sometimes Ray felt he could get deeper into a photograph if he looked aside from the main image slightly. He would say that, as faces go, Morel’s seemed to be on the large side. He was square-faced and his grooming was perfect. His chin and his nose-tip each showed a distinct cleft. The flesh under his eyes was tight.

  He returned the photograph to Victor, who resecured it in the bubblepack swathings it had come in.

  Ray was a little unhappy and he knew why. He had been looking for something in the photograph that probably had to do with an old fantasy of h
is. At some point after getting into intelligence he had realized that something was lacking. His great enemy, some great personal enemy, was missing. He had no great antagonist. He knew this was literary and adolescent, and when it came to his mind, he had always laughed it away. But the truth was that the people he dealt with and processed and wrote up were in general not very smart or interesting and many of them were essentially just venal, which was unsatisfactory if you let it be. You could find it boring. The Russians and their creatures had been a blank system to him—and he noticed he was referring to them nowadays in the past tense, which was a sign of truth as to how things stood in the world. He had never had to work very hard to corrupt his targets, when that had been necessary, and it had been slightly bitter to learn that. The element of hard struggle was pretty intermittent in his work. Of course, he had chosen to work at a certain level in the game. He wasn’t a thug. In fact he took pride in the certainty that he had never directly injured anyone in all his years in intelligence, not once, directly. And of course he had chosen to work in the borderlands of the struggle. He saw himself as a provider of truths that others would make use of, for good or ill, the morality of what they did with them being their problem and not his. It was where he was comfortable being, which was why this great enemy notion was so regressive and why he rejected it. It was essentially literary. But literature has power over us, he thought.

  Ray wanted to look at the photograph again, but he was sweating, and it was late, so he decided against it. Victor had one last thing for Ray to see. He was rooting around in a different carton.

  Morel looked disappointingly average, or did he mean above average? It was going to be interesting to find out why he had come to Botswana when everything about him suggested that he could get whatever he wanted out of life easily enough in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the venue he was departing from. He was smart, smart enough to get a medical degree of some kind, at least, he was black, he was presentable, a man for all races so to speak, and the way the apparatus of opportunity was configured right now in the United States meant that someone like this would have to take courses to learn how to miss the boat. Morel represented a commodity in short supply, unlike white male middle-aged academics in the humanities with degrees from nonstellar institutions, a category of commodity he knew something about. Morel appeared to be in his prime, moreover. American professionals coming to Africa to perform benefactions during sabbaticals or when they were past their prime made one kind of sense. But Morel had to be in his peak earning period. And he appeared to be coming to stay. And he was, according to the immigration paperwork, coming unsponsored, which meant that this was a personally driven and personally funded choice. And there was the question of choosing Botswana, which had its attractions but which was not picturesque, except up north. Something was off center. There was something here to pursue. The agency would see it his way.

  Victor was gesturing at a jumble of shoes he’d pulled out for Ray’s inspection.

  Ray went over to look. They were all either high shoes or low boots. In every pair the inner heel, the inner right heel, had been built up significantly. There were many more shoes in the carton and they were all like these, Victor assured him.

  Perfection is rare, Ray thought.

  8. The List

  He had a free period. It was three in the afternoon. The school was quiet. The phone rang. That was another thing that could go on the list. The call was going to be from Iris, who was calling him more often at work lately, which could mean she was feeling a need to keep better apprised of his movements, which was a new anxiety with her. And it had to be coupled with something else that was new … her requests that he let her know definitely if he was coming home for lunch or not.

  He picked up the phone and said, “Here I am and I still love you.” The caller gasped. It was definitely Iris.

  “How did you know it would be me, you fool. Don’t do that. I could have been anybody.”

  “I knew it was you.”

  “You couldn’t have. My God. Please don’t do that again. It’s not like you. Don’t be strange.”

  “I live on the edge,” he said.

  “No you don’t. Please don’t do it again.”

  “I may, I may not.”

  “Quit it, please.”

  “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  “I don’t want you to be strange.” He thought that was interesting.

  She said, lightly, “I just wanted to touch voices.”

  “I love you to say that. But tell me about lunch, your lunch date,” he said.

  She sighed, and then was silent.

  He said, “I take it my recommendation wasn’t great.”

  “Well, it was an example of why you could get lonely in Gaborone. We ate at the President, in the Grenadier Room no less. I dressed up. It was fine. Her name is Lorna, but she insisted I call her Lor, which felt awkward. I guess because she’s married to an American I assumed she was too, but she isn’t. Well, she is, she’s a citizen, but she’s Australian. Getting me to call her Lor and not Lorna seemed to be the main thing on her mind. They’ve been all over. She loves the embassy people. We had nothing to talk about, really.

  “But, well she’s nice and she’s livelier than a lot of other embassy wives I could name. It was funny, she drank quite a bit of Cape Riesling during lunch, but the main effect it had on her was to stir up lots of umbrage about how much drinking there is in embassy circles. She managed to refer to the embassy staff as Alcoholics Unanimous a couple of times. She seems to think there’s too much daytime drinking, particularly.”

  He thought, The fact is that I am talking to the most beautiful white woman in southern Africa, outside of the movies, and someone getting more beautiful, not less … these token signs of age make her beauty more acute, other women must hate her: How can she have friends? She needs friends, outside of me: Nothing can be done. The fact that he could give her pleasure, that life allowed him to, was immense to him. It was like gold.

  “What?” he asked, he had missed something.

  “I said, Lor and I are both insomniacs. Thank God, because that was basically our only subject. So we were talking and I tried to be entertaining by relating something you said the other night, don’t worry, nothing embarrassing, but I thought it was a funny story. It was when I complained because you had just turned over, like that, flopped over and said goodnight when I was still my usual wide-awake self … It happens, it’s no big problem, this is me. But this was early, even for you. You know how it is when I’m abandoned to myself … my own devices, at night.

  “So then you remember I had an attack of pique and kind of yelled at you, ‘I have no rights around here!’ meaning, of course, that I have an unwritten marital right to sufficient notice before you go to sleep. And you said, when I said I have no rights, you said, ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ Well, it was funny. Still makes me laugh. But she didn’t get it at all and I was drawn into one of those explanations, explications, that ends up making you sound like a complete idiot. Her interpretation was just that I was a tyrant and you were a policeman.”

  “That was pretty amusing of me. She didn’t get the humor. Maybe because she’s Australian, they don’t have Miranda.”

  “It was a misfire,” she said.

  “Bad recommendation, I guess.”

  “It’s not your fault. She’s fine, really. But she’s not going to be exactly a friend. I don’t know what I mean, exactly … am I pathetic? I guess what I mean is she’s not an answer.”

  “She’s part of the problem, you’re saying.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. She’s okay.”

  “If she’s not an answer, what is the question?”

  “Ah,” she said dryly and not happily.

  “So what is the question, Iris?” He knew his tone was wrong. It was what she called his bearing down tone.

  “Oh please don’t get all relentless. Please.”

  “I didn’t mean to be. I’m sorry. I
thought you were initiating something and clearly you weren’t.”

  “On the phone? When you have to get back to work? I don’t think I was.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Okay.”

  “Also she was wearing the most painful accessory in the history of jewelry. It was a choker made out of white plastic petals, pointed petals all awry and pointing in different directions. It was sticking into her throat, into the flesh. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”

  This is the way she retreats, he thought.

  “It made a teeny clacking sound when she swallowed.”

  “I do apologize. If I’d known she was Australian I’d have mentioned it. It’s another culture.”

  “Yes, it is. And I don’t transcend cultures at all well. I’m not good at it.”

  Uh-oh, he thought.

  “But Iris, you are good at it. You’ve done it here and in Zambia beautifully, and before that.”

  “No I haven’t. You’re confusing two things, Ray, one being that I don’t complain and the other being your interpretation of that as how well I’m doing. Those are two different things.”

  “But you make African friends,” he said, unnerved at how large these declarations were. Usually she was more incremental. A bitter feast was steaming hot and a mouth must be found to eat it, he thought. It was a quotation whose author he couldn’t come up with. That was what he was facing, though. There was something unfair about quotations lasting longer than the names of their creators. He saw her recent declarations as thrusts or lunges, not tentative anymore. And this was going on over the phone and it was unfair, unless she was in a more extreme state than he’d guessed. Maybe she was. It was his brother’s influence. She wanted liberation of some kind. It was Rex. Liberation was fine, he agreed with it, but all he knew was that at the heart of any kind of liberation worth anything there still had to be someone grabbing someone else and saying I’m yours, I love you beyond expression, something like that, embraces, berserk embraces, in his humble opinion. But maybe not, according to her, according to all this, according to his brother. It was unfair. He couldn’t laugh at her anymore when she said something funny she hadn’t intended to say. There was a recent example. She had complained that he was being parsimonious with some piece of gossip or information he had, and she had said something like It’s like pulling hen’s teeth getting anything out of you. So he had laughed, and although she’d realized immediately what she’d said, she still hadn’t liked his laughing, even after he explained that he’d been mainly laughing appreciatively at how appositely the mixed metaphor worked. Well, he thought: Wife is unfair … as somebody said.