Mortals

by Norman Rush

  New times! Ray thought. Boyle was normally laconic, and laconic at a completely standard middle-class level of word choice. He was playing a rougher class. The profanity, or the profusion of it, was new times too. There was more of it than was necessary to make Boyle’s point, which was that he was tough at the core, so watch out. And there was no way for Ray to miss the implications of Boyle’s allusions to academics as pains in the ass and problems in general for the true heroes of the world—the hard men, the practical men, less overeducated men like Boyle himself.

  “So then you don’t want me to pursue this in any way.”

  “Shape or form. No.”

  “Even if I pick up something.”

  “No. Nope. Don’t pick anything up. Don’t. Don’t touch him, don’t think about him, don’t have dreams about him. I’m sorry if you think he’s fascinating. He isn’t. Anyway there’s somebody else I need you for, if I can ever get to it.

  “Also, and this is a minor thing, but this is the way I want it, I don’t want anything on paper necessarily, from you. Unless you want to come in here and write it here and hand it straight in. I guess that would be okay except that it ties up the room. I guess we could try it. The fact is what I would prefer, and I think we are going to get to this, is for you to come in when you have something and just tape it here. Put it on a tape, it’s the fastest way. You can abbreviate. What I don’t want is you working on profiles on paper outside this room, because you know and I know what can happen. Now. I understand it’s not going to be as polished. It’s not the same thing writing it in here out of your head or taping it. But I don’t want you hit by a truck and there is all this interesting material, you know, in your backpack. I don’t want that. The people here do not know how to drive. I love them but they cannot fucking drive. Maybe in fifty years. And I know how careful you are and how you keep all your notes safe when you write. I know all that. I know you have your burn box, I know you always use it. But I want to get away from paper.”

  Ray felt his face getting hot. It was possible he had brought this on himself by fighting to get Morel. That would mean it was a punishment that might be reversed at some point, if he what, if he what, if he could think of something to get it reversed, like what? Boyle was dropping back into his more middle-class presentation of self, showing collegiality now. Everything is a trap, Ray thought.

  Boyle wouldn’t stop. “I see your stuff and your stuff is beautiful, I grant you. And Marion told me all about it and how they love it at McLean. I looked at your file and it’s beautiful. You know. So I don’t say categorically don’t write, but it has to be in here, and how you can fit that in I don’t venture to say. You need to shorten up anyway, if you want to write. But the fact is that if I have it on tape I can do something else while I listen. You know. I have my problems with time the same as you do. Whatever I need to do I can do. I can replay if I need to. I can listen to you on the can and get two things done at once. You know. And. We might make an exception and you could tape either here or in back, sometimes, upstairs. I could fix it up as an exception. Part of it is that I have more stuff I have to read than I can handle. I’m buried in it. So as I say we’re definitely going to tape only, fairly soon. It makes sense because you get more on tape faster and anyway we can go from tape to text through a machine if we need an extract.”

  I need to comprehend this, Ray thought. If he thinks he can make me quit with this shit I have news for him because patiens shall be my song: He may have been lying about Morel, why Morel is nothing to us, or he may not, why would he though?… I can’t think in here.

  From left to right on the table in front of Ray were an open pack of Rothman’s brand cigarettes and a pale blue desk blotter in a leatherette holder, on which rested the file folder Boyle had brought. Boyle’s thick hands rested overlapped on the folder, right hand on top, Boyle’s absurd involved gold Knights of Malta ring, if that’s what it was, gleaming on his middle finger. It was impossible not to be curious about what the ring meant, but it was also impossible to show you were curious because that meant you were someone unable to place such a ring, correctly identify its provenance, the device on it. So the task was not to fixate on it while it glinted away at you, big, big enough to have a secret compartment, like a Borgia ring. Boyle was waiting for him to assent, Boyle invariably had an open pack of cigarettes on display. It was there as a memento mori, in a way, and signified that time was fleeting and that Boyle couldn’t wait to get upstairs and have a smoke. There was no smoking in the conference room. There were no ashtrays. You always knew you were keeping Boyle from having a smoke. You were intended to remember that, because it would keep you crisp and succinct.

  Ray thought, I hate your fucking face, and said, “We can manage this. I um I appreciate … your time problems … your …” Then he didn’t know what else to say. This is obedience, he thought.

  “We’re fine,” Boyle said, just as Ray said, “No we’re fine.” Ray was embarrassed.

  Boyle appreciated obedience, and was showing he did, Ray understood, by considerately opening the folder he was pushing toward him and swinging it around so that Ray could begin reading immediately. Boyle relapped his hands, this time with his ring hand underneath, his seal of power withdrawn, a sign of collegiality restored because Ray was being good. All of Boyle’s inlays were gold, Ray had noted during one of the few times he had experienced Boyle laughing at something. He had no idea why that had come back to him.

  Ray opened the folder, acutely aware that it behooved him to show there and then that he could absorb like a demon. He had to be in control. He had to kill his grievances for the time being, but truly kill them, including the recurrent feeling that life was just one goddamned unannounced test after another, which hurt because given the state of the world, he had a right to relax, they all did, the entire agency, not only himself.

  The subject was a Motswana, Samuel Kerekang, forty, single, recently returned to the country after a protracted, successful, and, reading between the lines, heroic pursuit of a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of Edinburgh no less.

  His hatred of Boyle was interfering. An itch between his shoulder blades began to gnaw. Another thing about the new improved inner sanctum he was trapped in with Boyle was that it was hotter than before, despite the fact that it was supposedly served by the same airconditioning system that cooled the rest of the installation. He was seeing himself as the assistant who gets into the slotted box the magician pushes swords through from every conceivable angle, and who has to defeat the tangle of swords through sheer contortionism.

  Boyle was watching him read, watching him rather than turning to some little piece of makework as a courtesy, such as reading something himself. Maybe it was possible Boyle would change as time went on. He was not completely unadaptable. Somehow he had figured out that he should stop wearing the stupid bolo ties he had showed up in during the transition with Resnick. Maybe Resnick had said something. And he had stopped going around in the totally inappropriate guayaberas he had brought with him from Central America, flimsy things that let his mat of chest hair show like a dark shield, dark not blond or red blond like his hair, by the way. Without looking up to check, he knew that Boyle was studying him.

  The room was oppressive, its windowlessness especially. He was seized with the desire to tell Boyle something he wouldn’t want to hear, to wit, that everybody knew his secure room had a secret connection to the embassy upstairs. Somebody with the contractors had let it out. So Boyle had created a farce, like a set for a farce on a stage, French farce with doors opening and closing and people popping in and out. It struck Ray that this was a piece of true intelligence, a secret blown, true news.

  Ray was finding Kerekang admirable, so far. His odyssey through various polytechnics in the U.K., the struggle for bursaries, and his final triumph at the University of Edinburgh, it was all admirable. The man was a prize, from the standpoint of the country, a jewel. This is pointless, he thought.

&nb
sp; Softly, and as though in passing, Ray said, “At some point I may come back to Morel …” He waited for a murmur, a grunt, anything, from Boyle, but nothing came, only a penetrating silence. My life is important, Ray thought, appearances notwithstanding. He read harder. Boyle would give him nothing.

  The feeling of confinement afflicting him came as a surprise, because, so far as he knew, he was especially resistant to that problem, judging by his occasional misadventures in tight places like crawl spaces and closets. Boyle would be amazed to know that Ray wanted to approve of him. It was a general rule of life that things went better if you liked whomever fate happened to give you as your boss. So now Boyle was launched on a program to make that permanently impossible.

  He was dealing with a miscellany, not a coherent, unified profile. Even so, all he would normally need was one pass at a collection like this. But something there was that didn’t want him to perform. He was retaining proper names, but not much more. He was going to have to reread, selectively and only a little, but it was still rereading, which Boyle would detect. This was a rag rug. He had to hurry. There was a stopwatch feature on Boyle’s Rolex. This ragbag he had been handed was one more test, Ray thought.

  Various British entities had been tracking Kerekang, MI5 and an office Ray had never heard of in the Overseas Development Ministry, but there were also some data from American sources. There was a skimpy contribution from the American consulate in Edinburgh. The American interest had to be explained by Kerekang’s two trips to the University of Michigan at Lansing for special certificate study. The prose in the biodata piece was laughable, below the level usually found in the most routine profiling done by political-economic officers in American embassies. Apparently the British were losing their grip on the English language as fast as the colonials were. He was still failing to see what was wrong with Kerekang. The transcripts showed good to very good academic performance. Naturally there were gaps in the transcripts for the periods when Kerekang had been forced to pause and get work. And he had managed to find work, off the books, piecework tailoring for dry cleaning establishments. So there was another skill the man had. The fact that he had gotten work off the books was noted without comment. To Ray, it only demonstrated tenacity and ingenuity. Kerekang had taken a six-week course in barbering in one of the interstices in his odyssey, so presumably he had picked up extra change cutting the hair of other students. There were periods for which there seemed to be no documentation on Kerekang whatever, but they hardly added up to the Lost Years of Jesus. He didn’t see anything sinister. And they could be artifacts of the reporting process, such as it was, easily.

  “We want him,” Boyle said.

  Ray didn’t reply. He needed Boyle to be quiet. He hated Boyle and he didn’t want Boyle to explain what he meant by wanting Kerekang. That could mean several things. He was going to interpret it as meaning that they wanted leverage, ultimately, on this poor, hardworking devil, who had lived over a fishmonger’s shop in Edinburgh for his last two years there, which must have been fun. Somebody had gone around to check out his lodgings. The top floors of the building were described as a warren of tiny rooms let exclusively to foreign students. The author of the report had taken the trouble to note that the owner of the building was a Jew, a fact not necessarily revealed by the landlord’s last name, which was Brown.

  Why was Kerekang not a pearl of great price? He wanted to tell Boyle that Kerekang represented a truth about Botswana he was probably unaware of, which was that some huge percentage of Batswana sent abroad for advanced training returned to the country when their studies were over. People wanted to come back. The Batswana liked Botswana. They were patriots. And they seemed to like each other. This dry, peculiar country, who could love it? But they did, and they mostly came back to be there. There was something in the social nexus, something there, comity, something, We stand outside it, Ray thought. Boyle has no idea he is outside anything … He thinks information gets him inside, I hate his fucking face, he knows nothing, he is destroying me: These people do like each other … Well, there are certain exceptions … They don’t like the Bakalanga that much, and they think the Bushmen are a nuisance … There are always exceptions. Nothing is perfect, he thought.

  Boyle was chewing another pastille. Ray could hear it cracking.

  The material on Kerekang’s Botswana background was between thin and pathetic, although it did contain the information that Kerekang was a graduate of St. James’s, before Ray’s time. Otherwise there was only paucity. In England Kerekang had been under mail cover. There were a few sample intercepts in the folder. A note advised that the samples were perfectly representative. The mail cover summary showed nothing out of the ordinary, with principal correspondents being family members in two locations, Chitumbe, far in the north above Maun, and Mahalapye, not so far from Gaborone, to the east. Kerekang’s father, who was dead, had been from one of the senior lineages of the Tawana tribal group, a significant man, apparently. Kerekang’s mother was still alive. She was part of the Xhosa enclave in Mahalapye. Clearly there had been a divorce or separation. His mother had raised him. The marriage between a Xhosa and a Tawana from different ends of the country was odd, but such things happened. His mother operated a small general dealership in Mahalapye now, but she had previously worked as a seamstress. There was an interesting story somewhere in Kerekang’s parental background. He used his mother’s surname. Again, everything looked innocuous to Ray. It was possible, he supposed, that Kerekang was illegitimate. But that counted for nothing here.

  Boyle said, “You notice he graduated from your school.”

  “I see that.”

  “He wanted to work for the government. That got fucked. Now we hear he’s up to something over at the university. We don’t know what. We want to know. Get whatever you can. He’s been seen over there.”

  Ray kept reading.

  Boyle said, “What I gave you, that-there, isn’t everything. More’s coming.”

  “Then that might explain something,” Ray said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there isn’t much here against the man.”

  Boyle didn’t like it.

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s plenty in there. Lots. And as I say, there’s more. Go ahead and finish. Everything you need is in that-there. Go ahead.”

  Ray knew he had gone a little far, forgetting just for a second that these were new times for him. But he hadn’t really forgotten. It had been a test to see if what was happening to him was in fact happening, and it was. Insubordinate was the word Boyle was wanting to apply to Ray, to his slightest and mildest gestures at shaping what was going on here. Merely proposing that they focus on Morel was going to be insubordinate of him. This may be hell, he thought.

  Kerekang’s political history, looked at rationally, was barely even interesting. Where was his leftness? He had been briefly a member of a British Trotskyist youth organization that no longer existed. He had been expelled from it, which, depending on the reasons for the expulsion, could easily be a recommendation for him. There was no information about the expulsion, but the likelihood was that whoever prepared the report was operating with information provided from within the youth group, otherwise it would only have been noted that Kerekang had dropped out of the group. It would have been useful to have some indication of why Kerekang had been expelled, but Ray’s guess was that it had something to do with a paper critical of the Trotskyist Unity Movement in South Africa that he had produced for a political science seminar but which had gotten into other hands where it had caused umbrage. There was no copy of this paper in the folder, stupidly. On the evidence, it looked to Ray as though Kerekang had been eighty-sixed as punishment for a certain mental independence. But it had all happened seven or eight years ago in any case, and there was nothing else anywhere to suggest a subsequent physical affiliation with any kind of political organization of the left. In fact, the records of his borrowings from two university libraries showed a clear drift
away from politics and into the purely technical literature surrounding his discipline, mechanical engineering, with excursions into rural sociology, ecology, African ethnology. He was on the mailing list of the Schumacher Society. Someone had given him a gift subscription to Living Marxism, which was read by three-quarters of the British intelligentsia, but he had allowed the subscription to lapse. His only current subscriptions were to something called the Herald of Permaculture and to the Arid Lands Newsletter, with advice on how to squeeze blood out of stones in places like the Negev. He had a real interest, according to the register of library borrowings, in Victorian poetry. He loved Browning, apparently. He loved Tennyson. Boyle might not find that endearing, but Ray did. In fact the temperament that was declaring itself in these fragments was positive. It was attractive. There was nothing to show any connection with South African liberation apparatuses, no ANC or PAC connections at all, which was in its own way a little strange. He had put up a traveling member of the Black Consciousness Movement for a week or so, in Edinburgh, but this was someone who had been in exile in Botswana for years, a personal friend, apparently longtime. And there was absolutely no sign of any connection with what passed for the left in Botswana, the MELSians, the purists of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Society, or BoSo, the vaguer and bigger but still essentially hapless Botswana Social Front. So there was nothing, really, although it had to be said that there were so many holes in the records that it was slightly hazardous to be as definite as he felt. Where was his sex life, for example? Whatever anyone had on that was missing. Unless there was nothing, and Kerekang was a complete ascetic, a celibate, which was a little hard to believe. Ray was nearly through.

  There was one last item of recent date that Boyle undoubtedly thought bore heavily on Kerekang’s supposed leftness. Mounted on a separate sheet was a photocopy strip, the product of one of the new microcopiers, copiers the size of a matchbox that were very popular with the Brits, who issued them to freelance intelligence scavengers called scouts. MI5 loved the microcopiers and loved scouts, a lot of whom were graduate students. The microcopiers had been developed for scholarly use, for copying bits of text from volumes too unwieldy for normal copying or from books in delicate condition. They were popular with scholars working in restricted archives, too, and were responsible for a fair amount of protected information making its way into the light of day. The note that accompanied the strip described it as a lift from the first page of an article this scout had seen Kerekang reading in the International Review of Social History, Volume Five, Number One, 1960. This was not the kind of thing that would turn up in Kerekang’s checkout register, obviously, because it was something he had taken off an open shelf. Some pest tracking Kerekang had dashed over when Kerekang left his reading momentarily to go to the lavatory or out for a smoke. Not for a smoke. Kerekang was not a smoker. In any case, it had been a hurried take, diagonal, picking up only a part of the title and a swatch of text below it.