Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Now she was asking him what real African friends he thought she had in Botswana.

  “Well, you have a lot of acquaintances …”

  “But no close friends, Ray.”

  “Sure you do. You must. Maybe not right at this moment. One problem is that compatible people come and they go, if they’re foreign service, say. It’s standard. And you have African friends from Zambia you write to …”

  She groaned.

  “Let’s stop talking,” she said.

  He shook his mechanical pencil to see if the lead reservoir was reasonably full. And he was not going to smoke. He hung up, then took the receiver off the hook.

  Ray confronted his pad. There was a polished sheet of stainless steel exactly the size of the pad that he kept between the final sheet in the pad and the cardboard backing. He slid it out and inserted it under the top sheet as a preventive against leaving impressions on the next sheet down as he wrote. He tended to press hard when he wrote. Now he was ready. He decided to chance setting the receiver back in its cradle.

  The phone rang. It was going to be Iris, and putting the phone back in use had been the right thing to do because this was going to be an apology and if she’d kept on getting a busy signal it would have led to frustration and the need for some kind of explanation later on. Also, knowing that she was trying to call him would have wrecked his concentration. He had had no choice.

  He answered the phone.

  “I’m sorry too,” he said. He knew it was Iris.

  It was. She sighed. “That’s what I wanted to say, Ray. I hate myself.”

  “Don’t hate yourself. We’re both sorry. It’s all right. I appreciate you.”

  “I know.”

  It was important that she hang up first. He waited.

  She said, “Before I forget, there’s one thing I found out that I wanted to tell you. Yesterday Fikile was looking up at one of our palm trees and smiling, so I asked him what he was looking at. He said it was rats. Apparently that place on the palm where the dead fronds hang down and form a kind of mass is where a certain kind of rat, tree rat, makes its home. He had seen one of them peeping out. He said we have quite a few. They’re small, though.”

  “That’s nice. Well. Is this something that needs to be attended to or do we just keep cohabiting with them?”

  “No, that’s not why I’m telling you. I don’t think they bother anything. But I thought it was interesting because it might explain certain sounds we hear on the roof at times that we can’t figure out. We thought they were caused by birds, but it seemed strange because it was nocturnal, remember?”

  “I do.”

  “I was afraid I’d forget to mention it. I’ll let you go now. I love you. One other thing is that I think my sister may be pregnant and not telling me directly, or that she plans to get pregnant. But I can tell you about that later.”

  He became alert. He wanted to know about this. Her sister was unmarried. The relationship between the sisters was strained and important to Iris.

  “Wait, I want to hear this. You’re not saying she’s gotten married, are you?”

  “No, not at all. This is all reading between the lines, really, but I think she’s going to stay single and just do it. But see what this sounds like to you. This is from her last letter. I’d better summarize it instead of reading it. She eats lunch in a playground near her office every day and eavesdrops and reports things the children say that are cute enough but are not the wisdom of the ages in the mouths of babes she seems to think they are. This is only one example. She overheard some children arguing over whether there could be good monsters as well as bad ones. She drew some great significance from it. Now I can’t find what I wanted to read you. But in every letter there’s something about how profound children are if you only listen.”

  “When you answer, tell her that yes there are good monsters.”

  A silence fell.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well, but you do think she may be planning to reproduce? I find that reckless and also typical of her.”

  “Don’t be so hard. Some child said It’s noon o’clock, and she thought that was wonderful. And here’s another thing she seems to think is beyond darling. She was visiting a friend of hers who has a two-year-old daughter, very delicate and sensitive and very resistant to going to bed. So four adults were sitting around and they decided to all yawn at the same time to show how tired they were and by implication how tired she should be. So they did it and the baby burst into tears because she knew it was so unnatural or manipulative or something. Ellen raves about the child. Oh, and, lest we forget, her friend is a single mother.”

  “I have to go. I have to sit revision,” he said. He thought, Maybe I can cancel revision. He needed a list.

  The International Postal Union was his enemy. It brought Rex and Ellen into her life, and his.

  Curwen himself would take over Ray’s revision group, as a favor. He loved Curwen for always trying to be like Christ, an idea of Christ, a cartoon but a completely benign cartoon. He even half envied Curwen whatever the restricting cultural history was that had led him into feeling that copying Christ was a fulfilling thing to do with his mortal life. The whole teaching staff exploited Curwen, the Marxists worst of all. Ray didn’t like to do it, and he tried not to. Iris thought of Curwen as an ideal good guy on the basis of Ray’s anecdotes. But Ray didn’t, because there was a difference between good acts resulting from adherence to a model of some kind and some other way to be good, some more natural way, that for example women had. Women seemed not to need these models to kneel to and copy. It was true that Curwen got less appreciation than he deserved because you could predict his acts of goodness so infallibly. Curwen wanted to be loved, and Ray wanted to love him, but Ray knew that there was condescension in his attitude to Curwen that he couldn’t do anything about and that wrecked it as a form of love. Life is unfair, Ray thought, unfair to Curwen.

  He centered the writing block on his desk and adjusted the point length of his pencil lead. He wondered whether he should begin by generating categories first, as against putting down everything that came to him in no order, chaotically, which might be better because the project was making him feel chaotic.

  He couldn’t decide. This was difficult. It shouldn’t be. He had done hundreds of profiles in his time, which was all this was. But of course very few profiles had been of women, almost none.

  It came to Ray that he didn’t like to think about women—the subject of women, he meant. He was surprised at himself. But of course the subject of women was not the same thing as individual women, which he thought about just as much as the next man, that is, all the time, off and on, depending on the mood or circumstances he was in, or what a particular woman might be up to. He wasn’t counting involuntary trains of carnal imagery.

  And of course, because something confusing was going on with Iris, she was on his mind constantly. So he did think about women, just not as a subject.

  There were other things besides women he preferred not to think about. For example … death, say, and unidentified flying objects. But these were things you could decline to think about without feeling guilty. It was human not to want to think about death, about being mortal. And it made him irritable to think about unidentified flying objects because, as a phenomenon, it was in the hands of charlatans and clowns. He had seen something odd in the sky, once, so of course he was interested. The subject was completely surrounded by liars, unfortunately. And flying saucers were more and more irritating as a phenomenon in that they kept recurring, and the claims of what they were doing kept getting more elaborate. And of course if it was true that they existed, then the whole human enterprise obviously needed to be redirected toward finding out who was flying these damned things, especially since their occupants had supposedly taken up molesting hordes of people in their bedrooms at night and stealing fetuses and other absurdities. He wondered if there was some quality common to death, women, and UFOs that made
him want to not think about them. He considered the question. They were all similar in a way, ontologically. They were all entities that nothing could be done about.

  Was that it? Probably not, although in a cheap way it seemed to fit. He wanted not to be superficial. His life, or at least his life with Iris, depended on it. The problem was that he had thought until fairly recently that he had solved the woman question, so to speak, by getting happily married. And the conventional idea that he had been raised with was, roughly, that if everybody did what he did and got happily married there was no woman question, which now turned out to be an incorrect idea. He had been operating with simple, oversimple, ideas, obviously.

  When Iris had said to him, hurting him, had said to him, Ask yourself sometime if you talk to yourself the same way you talk to me, and then tell me … that had been rough. It had been like being flayed without sufficient warning, or something. They had barely been able to discuss it later. The implication of the question was that he was talking down to her or shaping what he said to her in order to keep her pacified or in a cheerful frame of mind or something like that. Something good if painful had come out of it, he thought. He had concluded that it might be true that his manner of talking to her was less direct, or more processed or something, than he liked to admit. And he had stopped. Or he was trying, at least. The implication was that he was trying to control her.

  Something else had come out of that moment. He wanted to sigh when he thought about it. He had noticed that the level of language he used on himself … was questionable, and limited, suggesting the influence of some force inside of himself acting to keep him … acting to keep him within certain borders. But that was a new subject …

  The question of women as a subject came down to their unhappiness. And what was happening was that the general unhappiness of women was turning into a force and developing institutions and mandibles whereas before it had been a kind of background condition like the temperature, as he had thought, something that rose and fell within certain stable limits. He thought of his mother’s unhappiness. Iris was not what he would call a feminist and yet, if he was anywhere near understanding what was going on with her, she was part of this great unhappiness. Just his luck. But then his luck had never been good, except for finding and marrying Iris, paradoxically, which had saved his life.

  What was the general unhappiness of women about? He would have to concentrate … except that he wouldn’t have to at all! The answer was in the category of answers you possess without knowing you do. He had the answer, he realized. Sometimes you carried the answer to an ultimate question around with you like something in a parcel, wrapped up.

  Unwrapped, it was simple. It was like this. What they wanted, he gathered, feeling pleased with himself, was for their own personal rational deliberation to replace what?… to replace tradition and custom and instinct, what men called instinct, in arriving at the nine or ten major decisions life presents all of us with. That meant when to mate, of course, but not only when to mate, it meant whether to mate or not, and with which sex, even … what to be professionally and whether to have children. It was banal, but an insight can be banal and radical at the same time, apparently. It had a Freudian tinge to it too, as in Where id was, ego shall be. It was other familiar things. It was our friend the Enlightenment, still rolling merrily along, for instance.

  He didn’t know how he felt. It was immense, of course, because the only kind of societies the human race had ever been able to build were ones in which half the population was being very accommodating to the other half. Now it was going to be … Where id was, contracts and negotiations and taking forever to work things out are going to be. How was it going to work? Life was going to take longer. Everyone would have to adjust.

  He felt better, strangely enough. He thought: God moves in a mysterious way, when he moves at all. It annoyed him that he was using one of his brother’s bons mots, but it seemed to apply, a bit. The world ahead was going to be seriously different. He had a sense of it. He felt that if he kept his mind still he might sense even more of how it was going to be. It was going to be a world full of divorces, for one thing, and you could forget about people joining nunneries. That was about all he could think of. He had his limitations as a seer, obviously. But he was getting a presentiment of the magnitude of the change that was coming.

  He felt, what? He felt uneasy. He felt melancholy, in fact.

  He needed to get this over with.

  Now to the list. He was dealing with fragments. He should assemble fragments.

  One, she was more profane lately. She was saying Shit more than he remembered, and this was in the context of informing him that intramale sexual profanity could be intimidating to women in the vicinity. Probably there was no conflict there. But she was more profane lately. One, Shit, he wrote on the pad, at the top.

  She was noticing things and making a point of mentioning them, and they were things that seemed to imply she was undergoing some deep revision of what she had assumed up to that point. It was on the order of going to the barber and getting your hair cut in a new way and looking into the mirror and discovering that, although you hadn’t noticed up till then, you have a very small head. She had said I bet you don’t know you have a tic of just almost imperceptibly hefting each forkful of food as you start to raise it to your mouth, as though you’re weighing it, when you’re feeling defensive about something. It had been a neutral observation, not meant to make him stop weighing his food. She included herself in these discoveries.

  Three evaded him. He sat waiting for Three.

  There was an exercise he sometimes did that was reassuring. He had put his head into a ten-year-old girl’s bedroom back in the States, just glancing in, years ago. This had been during training. The point had been to memorize at least a dozen discrete items of decor. He still had every one. One, cat motif posters and knickknacks including a cat piggy bank. Two, painted decorated rocks. Three, Charlie Brown stickers on dresser drawers. Four, horse sculpture. Five, miniature watering can. Six, multicolor raffia-ring curtain covering doorless closet. Seven, music stand. Eight, pennants. Nine through Twelve, Heidi, Stuart Little, Black Beauty, a Laing Fairy Book. Thirteen, flocked riding helmet.

  Three was about losing things. She was more absentminded recently, and she was losing things to the point that he had referred to their bedroom as the Lost and Found. There had to be a better Three.

  Three could be Rex, instead, and everything connected with Rex. Or Three could just be the implication he was getting more and more often from Iris that he should find everything Rex wrote hilarious. He was loaded down mentally with quotations from his brother. He seemed to be cursed with total recall for everything Rex produced. What had there been along those lines lately? He remembered something from a sketch Rex was writing, about someone who’s trying to be more decisive and aggressive and who writes a note to himself that reads Consider starting to make an effort to try being at least a little less half-assed about things. He wanted to forget Rex, not anatomize everything connected with him.

  Four could be Iris’s feeling that he, or they, he and Iris, were no longer as funny with each other as they had been. She’d said We used to say stupid things more than we do now. She had examples. One was when she said, after he’d been repetitious, You must be History because you just repeated yourself, and his instant comeback of You must be Power because you abhor a vacuum … cleaner, which had been an allusion to her lack of love for housecleaning, which by the way was a problem Africa had solved for her.

  Then Five came to him. He didn’t want this Five. Five was Iris saying to him apropos of nothing, saying, and looking steadily at him when she said it, to separate it from everything else that had preceded it, saying I know this sounds stupid but one thing I want in this life is to have nothing to do with … with cruelty. She had looked at him as though he was supposed to make some kind of vow back to her. This was Five, and it was Iris being suspicious of his work or her notion of his work. I
t was an assault. He resented it. That was Five.

  9. The Mobashi

  Ray was enraged. This was reckless, and Victor had never been reckless before. This was sheer recklessness.

  He was enraged as much at his own flux of panic as at the stupid act that had provoked it. There was an obvious flaw in the system he had developed for Victor. He had told Victor never to call him on the phone. So the flaw was that if something turned up that Ray needed to see urgently at some point between his scheduled visits, Victor was stuck with waiting. This had never happened before. Victor was obviously taking himself more and more seriously in his work for Ray. And then it had probably been a mistake to increase his remuneration so sharply the last time. No doubt Victor was seeing Morel as a treasure trove he had to plunder expeditiously before all of Morel’s goods had moved through.