Mortals

by Norman Rush

  The house felt dead without Iris, dead and clean and cold. There was a saucer with two cherry pits in it. The house felt like the Mary Celeste, except that Iris would be found. He remembered that he needed to call Curwen immediately.

  He got through to the school and worked everything out smoothly but talking too fast. Mild food poisoning had been a good excuse. Curwen himself had had a touch of it recently.

  He could use the time to his advantage. Unease about Iris was putting Boyle and all his works in perspective, a little.

  It was conceivable that Iris was having another go at lunch with Lor. He had urged her to give it a third try. She needed friends. He took off his shirt and his shorts, his costume. He sat down on the living room sofa in his underwear, kneesocks, and shoes. Iris liked to tease him about his attachment to his classic undershirts because, as she pointed out correctly, they were bare under the armpits so that you sweated directly into your shirt but they covered up areas where you hardly sweated at all, and raised your body temperature to boot. He couldn’t help it. He was used to them, and both his father and his stepfather had worn them. And he could get very decent classic undershirts easily, too, because they were still popular in South Africa with the time-lagged Boers. He couldn’t sit there for more than a minute because Dimakatso was going to turn up at some point.

  He proceeded to wash up. He put on a fresh shirt and bush shorts. It was seeming less likely to him that Iris had gone again to lunch with Lor. Their second lunch had been more of the same, the usual. Iris had repeated samples of the conversation to him, in Lor’s voice: It’s really so frightening nowadays in Joburg, especially Hillbrow, where we always stay … Because of the unemployed people everywhere living in alleys and on stoops and in every foyer, everywhere, running after you and forcing these unnecessary services on you, running along to open any door you approach, even automatic doors, standing there with their arm extended, ushering you into places of business they have nothing whatever to do with … Or if you parallel-park you’re directed by people using big arm movements as though without them doing that you might crash into something despite the fact you have oceans of room … And the high-rises with laundry fluttering from every balcony … And all the squatters taking over and all the buildings to let or for sale … And the begging, so constant …

  He went into the breezeway and contemplated his yard. For two days Rex’s most recent letter, a jumbo with many closely written pages, had been left out, naked, on top of the credenza in the breezeway, out of its envelope, like bait or like the trap itself. He was ignoring it. It was right behind him.

  Something moved along the shrubbery at the left-hand edge of his field of view. It was Fikile, early again. He was early today because on other days recently he had been late. Apparently he could offset his late arrivals by coming absurdly early on other days. Of course there was no need for watchguarding during the middle of the day. And there was doubly no need for it when he overlapped with the yardman, who came three days a week though not today. Ray suspected that Iris had said yes to this arrangement, it would be like her. If those oscillations kept on, Ray would say something.

  Ray wasn’t interested in any more exposure to his brother. He had made it explicit that he had no desire to follow every kink and dogleg in Rex’s travesty of a career. The thick letter represented another unwanted task. He had too many tasks as it was. Iris presented him with more tasks than she knew. He was conscientious, and out of love and conscience he took as tasks many things, wishful things, things she might waft at him completely innocently. When she said Why is the French noun for war feminine and why is the French for vagina masculine, it wasn’t as though he physically had to go and jerk somebody’s hem at the Alliance Française or hunt around in his reference books, no. But he loved her and anything he could satisfy her on right off the bat became a kind of ghost task for him whether she meant it to be or not.

  Ray hefted the letter, not looking at it.

  These letters were getting longer because Iris was encouraging it, and encouraging it, it had to be, by being forthcoming about herself and her problems, a.k.a. their problems, their his-and-hers problems. He had no idea what she was writing to Rex, beyond what he could infer from what Rex wrote back. What she was writing to Rex was not something he was going to obsess on. He should remember that there were harmless models for what she was probably doing here. Rex was providing a gay ear. There was nothing dangerous about that. So many major women were linked to gay men as confidants that in a way Iris was only joining a procession. Iris was major. She didn’t know it, but Ray did. Of course, in this case the bastard listening to her was his own queer brother, his enemy. Rex was spying on him through Iris. Revenge was going on.

  Every ongoing relationship contains a quid pro quo somewhere, he thought: The task is identifying it. How intimate was Rex being in these letters? Very, Ray had gathered from hints dropped here and there by Iris. So.

  He could scan, he could read excerpts, or he could read the whole thing.

  He picked up the letter and began to read it, leaning against the wall.

  My Dear Iris:

  We are still in Mexico, but in Oaxaca, in a weird hotel right on the zocalo. Our room has an actual balcony you can go out on to endure the musical performances blaring from the bandshell it overlooks, or purling up from the strolling mariachi groups who afflict the street-level cafés until late at night, or rising repetitively from the blind or otherwisely decrepit solo guitarists with their overlapping tiny repertoires.

  Mexico is frightening. It’s as frightening as Grace Jones and frightening in somewhat the same way she is. It’s sort of beautiful but you get the feeling it wants to bite you. It’s a nightmare that Joel is enjoying very much.

  I’m up early and have come downstairs alone to have breakfast and write these lines to you in privacy. It’s a glorious morning and as usual one part of God’s creation is eating another part of it for breakfast. I hope to join in but I am growing faint. The service in Mexican restaurants is obsequious but slow. But to be absolutely fair the waiters in these arcade cafés have other things to do than bring you your food. For example they have to keep the doves off your table. Some can scare them away with a deft snap of a filthy towel they carry. Others have developed a peculiar screaming cry that seems to do the job, sometimes clearing several tables at once. Bending over your place setting to blow dove-molt off it is another task they have.

  It is truly early. A detachment of the Mexican army marches into the zocalo every morning after waking you up at six-thirty with their reveille. Except that possibly you are already awake because another nighttime activity that begins at just about the time when the cafés finally close is the de-limbing, with chain saws, of the tule trees that are planted throughout and around the zocalo. Pollution is killing them. I don’t know why the de-limbing is restricted to the small hours, unless it’s because the government thinks tourists would be upset at the spectacle. But in my opinion tourists who come to Mexico are very hardy indeed.

  When I say Mexico is frightening what I mean is that almost every aspect of Mexico that you confront contains something frightening, like the bus driver who is all smiles and courtesy until you get to your destination and he won’t take your suitcase out of the storage section in the bottom of the bus unless you give him a huge tip. I do hope you know who Grace Jones is. It occurs to me you may not. I’ll send a picture. You go to the museum to see the antiquities and these turn out to be mainly horrific representations in stone of skulls and rattlesnakes. In the last earthquake, in Mexico City, an innocuous building collapsed—I think it was the post office—and what do you know, there was an operative torture chamber in it.

  So now here we are in Oaxaca, where we can enjoy my kind of travel. There are basically two kinds of travels, my kind, vegetative travel, where you go someplace and vegetate and stay in your room and sigh looking out at the palm fronds if need be, and the other kind, activist travel, where people trudge out to every r
uin, plant themselves for a half second before every painting in the museum, in short push their way into every nook and cranny of the Other in order to suck out the genius in all the loci they can get to. So I should be happy. But am I? No.

  Do you know the Emily Dickinson poem that begins “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!”? That’s almost me. I need you to help me with Joel, or rather I need you to help me with certain impulses I am developing toward him, impulses I disown but need help in curbing. I suspect that what is happening is my own fault, in a way. Lately Joel is finding himself irresistible. Somehow all my loving efforts to build up his selfconfidence have born monstrous fruit. He has begun to really love himself. He feels he is too good for anything. Here is an outburst he had. He started to put on a shirt with his monogram on it, a gift from his mother, but then stopped and tore it off and threw it on the floor, saying I HATE MY INITIALS. Suddenly he is too fine for them, or something. Later we were getting on the bus for a day trip to Monte Alban and he was in a fine mood, looking forward to it, we had a nice little lunch packed, and he turned to me and said, “This is going to be neat. Now don’t let anything I do ruin our day.”

  Now he is preening himself and is on the verge of flirting with other people. In fact he was flirting the other night, in a sidelong way and over his shoulder, with a clot of tenured fauves from the UC Berkeley Art & Musicology Departments.

  As you know, and as Ray will have emphasized, I am not prepossessing, physically. I could be described as pudgy. Also I am being driven bald at an accelerated rate lately, through anxiety, I believe, or possibly by something in the water in Mexico. I am not saying I am repulsive. Let others say that. But on my best day I rise to the average. Joel seemed always not to notice. So we got on famously until I succeeded in convincing him that not only is he attractive but he is worth knowing and worth treating nicely. The problem that is emerging between us is teasing. I have a tendency to want to tease, which I am basically in control of. But I began teasing more as his rehab progressed, I think. I don’t know why. Possibly I am seeing him as a duckling getting ready to fly, and if he is going to fly away it might be better for me if he does it now, before I get further attached to him. So that would be one Surmise. Or the impulse could be to tease him as a way of showing I still have some kinds of power he doesn’t. His attempts to tease back are pathetic. Or the fact that I am footing the bill for everything could be involved. One thing I do to make a little money now and then is to sell one of the business names I’ve copyrighted. I have a list of these names, in different categories, and I sold one, Bodysmith, to a gym chain, and here we are, spending my fee together. We never discuss money. We used to. He used to actually express gratitude now and then. Or possibly I tease because teasing was the worst thing ever done to me (ask your husband what I am talking about) and I have some perverse drive to make Joel experience at least a dilute version of what I went through. I don’t even know what I mean by this. I am trying to think of everything. I am drifting toward wanting to humiliate Joel and I reject myself for it.

  I see that my breakfast is here. On a plate with a dollop of refried beans and a piece of toast like a section of planking is a sunnyside up fried egg with a major bloodspot in it. The coffee is like ink. This may be a diet day for me. I have had many diet days in Mexico.

  Joel makes me wonder who I am.

  By the way, we must be Proud of our identities these days, we must be fierce, insulting, even, as we proclaim ourselves, flaunt our teeny individualities. A woman who teaches English at one of the junior colleges in Marin told me that a student requested she not be required to do a paper on a certain writer because he smoked. She explained that she felt strongly on the subject and would be much more comfortable expositing a nonsmoker. Believe me that this happened. This is not the sort of thing a normal mind could make up.

  One thing that tempts me in re teasing is that Joel is truly a virginal mind. Teasing can be a form of instruction. And Joel is a dummy, in fact, but so beautiful that if it weren’t for his accompanying stupidity he would be totally beyond my reach or grasp. I no longer say “A penny for your thoughts” to Joel. I hate being overcharged.

  I want you to know that I don’t blame Joel for his defects, by the way. He is the product of several tragedies larger than he is, so to say. He has no relationship whatever to the written word, for example, which is now common. All his referentia are audiovisual.

  This is what I think is happening with American children in a very general way, and what I think happened to Joel. I think people are finding their own children boring. And this is due to two factors. Factor one is that by the time a child normally would be a developed persona, a real individual, he or she has become a kind of playback machine for various media tropes and loops: he or she has become what he or she beheld, that is, your child is old television, a rerun. Your child is things you have seen yourself and have outgrown. Then factor two comes into play, to wit, that when the parent looks at his boring child he knows that on television or video, even as he looks into the face of his child, there is bound to be something on that’s more interesting than the child before him.

  This is my Joel. His parents were bored by him. Add to this that they made their livings in media themselves and were, I would say, themselves boring. Even his beauty failed to interest them, I feel safe in saying. Both parents were goodlooking, so he was expected to be beautiful.

  This is my television-as-the-root-of-all-evil general theory of American civilizational decline. You will observe that it explains a lot, including why children are out of control to the point of bringing guns to school and scribbling their initials all over the material landscape. By the way, I never wanted television in our house. Ask Ray. It was purely visceral with me. I didn’t know why, but I hated the thought of it. Ray wanted it. So we got it.

  I can pretty well re-create what happened finally between Joel and his parents. They didn’t mind that he was gay, apparently, but they hated it that he was so childish. He tried to be a model, but something childish showed through in photographs and it didn’t work out for him. I feel responsible for him. I’m not sure there are hordes of people who would want Joel once they got past his fleshly envelope, if you know what I mean. He has a little trouble with his fricatives, for example, not a real speech defect but kind of embarrassing and, I think, one of the reasons he got into the habit of not talking much. He has had the experience of being tossed away after something in him seemed not to live up to his exterior. Also, Joel is afraid of life, but in an adorable way. For example, every morning he makes me read the obituaries to see if anyone younger than he is has died. He doesn’t want the names, just the ages, if there are any. And these days there often are. At this point I should mention a shining virtue of his. He is faithful. Fidelity is natural to him. Even if he flirts now and then, this is true of Joel. So, to continue. Joel gets an oversupply of attention for his exterior and I get a paucity of attention for mine. I have a rich interior and a poor (face it) sort of exterior. He has a rich exterior and internally he is a mixed bag, say. Nobody knows what I am because of what my exterior oh so wrongly suggests. So in a way we make a perfect object together.

  I badly want you not to misperceive me over Joel. I sensed in your questions that you might be, thus I want to emphasize what I love about him. He is the kind of man who can be loved. He is loyal. He is still maturing. He is less precipitate in conversation than he was. And he is beautiful. With him I have an experience of sublime beauty beyond anything I ever thought I would have. His innocence, when it isn’t driving me insane, is probably good for me. And I think I see more, now, of what he sees in me. It’s my mind and my wit that attract him, those things and my talent for striking back. I get revenge. He has seen me in action, my fangs and talons out. He sees me as an armed thing. He is, by nature, a disarmed personality, which has been a disaster because his beauty has attracted the unjust in greater numbers than the just.

  Ray stopped reading, feeling coldness blossom ins
ide himself. He thought, This is for me, warnings for me, these letters are acts of war … He is striking at me through her. Ray continued reading.

  Also, there is a fact of gay life that comes into this that you may not appreciate. I can have my beautiful man and enjoy him intensely as long as I can and not worry about the things I would be worrying about if we were planning to reproduce. There are gay men who want to adopt and so on, a minority, and go for it, I say, if you want that. But there is a certain freedom to enjoy beauty per se that straights must lack, with their great mission of reproducing our species, and so having to consider other qualities, such as brains, for example.

  Ray had to stop. He thought, I’m surrounded, this is demonic … The idea is to suggest that Iris is my Joel, my ornament, my toy … We have no children, et cetera, that’s the subtext, that’s it! The bastard!

  Now he had to finish the letter. He had to see what else there was that was like this. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t eaten. That had been a mistake.

  But getting back to what Joel sees in me, there’s a little more to it. Joel is developing what I would call stirrings of personal ambition, a new thing. He sees me as a writer and a sort of facilitator. He has an idea for a screenplay. In fact he has two ideas. In the first screenplay, there is a pet uprising. Pets attack and kill their owners. And those fortunate enough not to own pets are killed by wild animals who sense their moment of opportunity and rush in out of the woods to do the deed. Farm animals kill their owners also. Snakes leap up out of toilets, of course. That’s the entire thing. He has made a few notes, mainly of clever ways that the smaller and more innocuous pets might dispatch their much larger human owners. I’m trying to be encouraging to him. By the way, there is no reprieve for humanity in this movie. The pets win. That’s the first screenplay. The second screenplay is what he refers to as a screwball comedy. He doesn’t really know what a screwball comedy is, but he thinks he is conceiving one. In the second screenplay a standard plot (he is vacillating between a western and a film noir) proceeds. The comic element in this western or film noir is as follows: everyday objects employed in the film, like guns or hammers or knives and forks, keep changing in size. In one scene a fork will be a tiny implement like a pickle fork and in the next it will be the size of a pitchfork. A character will, as Joel envisions it, charge around in shoes the size of coffins. Or he will attempt to charge around. Sometimes it will be impossible! The action will be totally impeded by this unreliability in the size of objects, but nobody will ever allude to it. Hence the comedy. And there will be no suggestion as to why this is happening. And that is the screwball comedy. He thinks we could collaborate beautifully on this. I do, in fact, think there is something funny in this idea. It’s certainly high concept.