Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He said, “I wonder if we could pipe down. And I wonder if rather than going nuts on me in public you could talk about your sister. Please.” Ellen is the lesser evil, he thought.

  She was silent for a long interval. He was doing everything wrong. She gave a sigh bordering on a groan. Her sighs kill me, he thought.

  “Okay, I give up,” she said. “Maybe what I said is all I have to say, all I need to say, about my doctor. Maybe you heard something you needed to hear. But we need to talk about Ellen anyway, so okay.”

  She relinked with him. She is saving my life, he thought.

  The mouth of Kgari Close was in view. She asked, “Do you mind if we keep walking up and down before we go into the close, during this?”

  “No, that’s fine.” During this definitely meant there was something to undergo.

  “Ray, I’m worried about Ellen. No surprise to you. But she’s pregnant, definitely pregnant. And we have to think about my going back for her delivery. I know you don’t like it. Groan all you want. I may have to. I can see myself there for two weeks, or at most for a month, that would be the worst case. You have to get used to this, love. Don’t have an attack.”

  “Why is she pregnant?”

  “It’s very overdetermined. You know most of it. She’s thirty-five. She’s tried harder to find somebody to marry and go the usual route than anyone I know. But she had no luck.

  “She has no luck in general, just in general. Listen to this. And this is an example of trying everything, which she has. Listen to this, she joined a trail club. This is all by way of prologue to why she got pregnant, because you really have to understand. She joined a trail club thinking that might be a good way to meet someone maybe a little older than the men she usually went with, a little older but still in good shape, maybe someone divorced. Ray, she deserves credit. She has no great love of the great out-of-doors, but she joined up and was enjoying it okay despite the fact that there seemed to be no one, no men anyway, who were plausible for her. I guess they were mainly quite a bit older. So she decided to stay with it in hopes there might be some turnover. But she got along with the older people, who were nice, including one woman about sixty-five she liked. Ellen has had more unnerving experiences than she deserves. This was a woman who owned her own business, a normal person. Also I suppose Ellen was thinking that even if these people were older they might have younger friends and all of that. She might be invited to dinner. Poor Ellen. So she stuck it out. Then on one outing they climbed a mountain and arrived at the beautiful view they had come for. And when they got there, at the top, her friend led Ellen off to one side and pointed into the distance and said, ‘All that over there is hell.’ She was pointing at some distant valley where there was an industrial chimney, and she apparently believed that that was where hell was located, biblical hell. And then that was it. The woman resumed being herself.”

  “Maybe it was hell. Maybe the woman was right. But no, if you couldn’t hear the screams of the damned, it wasn’t.”

  “Maybe it was out of earshot.”

  “Well it’s definitely here someplace. I think it moves around, though.”

  “Anyway, that was all. My sister questioned the woman gingerly, or shouldn’t that be gingerlily, just enough to confirm that this was actually what the woman believed. Yep, she was just being informative. It was just something she thought Ellen might want to make a note of.”

  Ray said, “There are certain interesting syndromes in which people are completely normal in their belief structures except for one narrow little niche, where they believe something odd. If you believe that a member of your family has been replaced by an exact double, you have Capgrass syndrome. People who have it are normal in every other way. I forget what they call it when you think you have somebody else’s internal organs.”

  “This isn’t really funny,” Iris said. “Well, it is, but it’s part of a very sad picture. She’s tried everything. She advertised in the New York Review of Books.”

  “I know. You wrote the ad.”

  “I edited it. She wrote it. Ai! Something bit me. If you keep your arms moving it seems to help.

  “I forget why she didn’t marry the advertising guy she was living with. The one after the shirt model. I know what happened there. A certain percentage of guys she goes with decide they’re gay, which has to be tough. But she lived with the advertising guy for quite a while, it seems like.”

  “He was a drunk, she stuck with him for too long. He was tremendously goodlooking, like she is, she attracts people physically on her level. And very goodlooking men are a dubious proposition most of the time. That’s what she attracts.”

  “She didn’t have your luck.”

  “Why bother? You know you’re a handsome dog.”

  “So you say. Except that the other day you said I look like Woodrow Wilson.”

  “Please let me finish about my sister and then we have to go in. I mean, I love this feeling of parting the night as you go, but another something just got me on the neck.”

  “We like to do this,” he said.

  “We like to do this.”

  Then they were silent again. Cars passed by, not many, two sedans and a bakkie.

  He said, finally, “Anyway you don’t need all this propaganda, which is what it is, for abandoning me when your sister gives birth. Okay if you want to shatter our Guinness Book of Records record for people not being separated, married couples, okay, then go. I’m only kidding. It’s okay if you go, of course. You don’t need me to say that anyway, you know it. Except that these things have a way of dragging on. Don’t they?” He thought, Every arrow being fired on the planet is curving up and over and into my heart, Boyle, her sister’s needs, my brother’s what, his bile … but what was it she said the other day about some woman?… ah yes, she said I feel sorry for anyone so self-pitying. He thought, her pity covers the earth, like Sherwin-Williams paint. It might not be necessary for her to go, something might happen, God forbid, how vile am I, how stupid. He didn’t want her to go, and if she went it would mean she was blind to what was going on with him, which of course was the condition he was trying to keep going, never to be pitiful to her. She was saying something he was missing.

  “… definitively pregnant and the way it happened is not what you think, not what you assume. Not coldblooded, in other words. Not asking an old male friend and not going to a sperm bank.

  “What she did is go from a high-achieving hopeless alcoholic to an underachieving very bright but hapless …”

  “May I just guess, very goodlooking also, just by chance?”

  “Yes, very nicelooking …”

  “Not goodlooking, nicelooking in this case …”

  “Well goodlooking if you will. A hapless man and a very bright man, but goodlooking. That seems to be a constant. Anyway, Frank is very bright, a very good writer, no a very good mind. He’s fortyish. He works in a bookstore. He’s a very good writer, but he has an imprimatur problem, as Ellen put it. He’s published a few things in small-circulation magazines, but the main thing he’s been working on is an encyclopedic thing about American intellectual life that everyone who’s seen it says is brilliant and radical but needs to be revised, as in seriously cut. And he agrees with them. But when he starts to revise he also sees things he needs to add, new developments in the culture that just make his thesis even stronger. Also he’s what used to be called an independent scholar. At one time they were respected things to be. But he has no academic affiliation whatever. He has a B.A. in modern European history from prehistoric times, but that’s all.”

  Ray thought, This could be me … this poor fuck could be me … the reverse, I mean.

  “Frank is also shy. She met him in the bookstore he works in when she was hunting for something in the children’s section. He was very knowledgeable, and they got to talking, and that’s how it started. It became a platonic friendship, strictly, in which she got interested in taking him under her wing and getting him marketed, or rath
er first she wanted to get him to break off from his magnum opus at least for a while and write some pieces that could get published and generate some interest in him as an intellectual persona. He was going to waste, she thought. And there was still time. Obviously she was transposing herself going to waste, into his situation, something like that.”

  “So you’re telling me this wasn’t love. And of course the question you want to ask is why this investment if love wasn’t involved. Why not put this time into those things she was doing you told me about. Going to meetings of the War Resisters League? Esperanto? Amnesty International?”

  “Well, that’s a good question, but nobody is just one thing. She never went to Esperanto, she just asked my opinion about it and I told her. Try to be fair.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, she read through his immense manuscript. It was erudite and complicated and utterly brilliant. But it was hopelessly complex. It had numbered paragraphs and instead of notes it had sections in a minute typeface that represented expansions of the main argument. And she objected to that and he said it was a terrific way to condense things and he had gotten it from a book by Nikolai Bukharin, not that he was a communist, he Frank. It was just that this was the way things had to be done. So this is a hapless person, hapless in every way. Here’s another example. He went down to Washington to use the Library of Congress and borrowed a friend’s apartment to stay in while the friend was out of the country. Now Frank is someone who’s very distressed about the homeless. On the way to the Library of Congress he passes a blind homeless person begging and Frank reaches into the pocket and drags up all the change he has in it and dumps it in the guy’s cup, then goes a block and realizes that he put the apartment key—he only had the one key—into the beggar’s cup along with the change. What should he do? He sidles back to the blind man and hovers there and sees that his key is right there in the cup. So he tells this man what he’s done, nicely, but gets no reaction because this poor fellow is deaf as well as blind. So he decides to reach in and subtly pluck out his key. Unfortunately for him the beggar wasn’t mute because he screamed out that he was being robbed and he screamed and screamed. A crowd of other homeless people—he described it as a lynch mob—gathered. There were no police in sight and he was being converged on by frightening people and he had his hand in this man’s cup. So, there are no police, and he’s being converged on by something he described as the Elizabethan underworld, giants, dwarfs, ragged people waving crutches and so on, so he runs away. He ran off. Now, and here’s the most pitiful part, he realized he has no means of getting in touch with his absent host, knows no one in the building, he can’t find the super. So he spends the next two nights sleeping in his car. Or three nights. I don’t know.”

  Ray grunted. By being minimal he hoped he was encouraging Iris to get through this story. He wondered if what she was doing was trying to fill the air with narrative to occupy the space that questions about Doctor Morel would rush into once she stopped, since she knew they were coming.

  But he remembered a car trip he’d taken with a cousin going through a cruel divorce, whom he’d asked, just by way of conversation, what he’d been reading lately, which had produced an almost line-by-line retelling of The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, a late literary discovery his cousin had made, a lost classic, and so on. The object had been not to talk about the main ingredient in his collapsing life. It had gone on for two hours.

  They had come into Kgari Close.

  “So she found this man touching. And you do understand that up to the point I’m describing, they weren’t lovers. I think he had tried, clumsily, to start something intimate. I’m not clear when that happened.

  “She loved his mind, not his body. She had a program for him. She had a campaign. She was serious about getting him into print. For example she had him get business cards printed so that he wouldn’t always be scribbling his name, address, and phone number in matchbooks, and this plays a part in what happened, by the way, as you’ll see. She was maternal toward him. That’s her word. What she had done was this. He was a brilliant conversationalist and she decided she would freeze, that is tape, without his knowledge, one of his arpeggios and then confront him with it and tell him to write it down, turn it into an essay, I guess.

  “Well, astonishingly this worked. He had a product. It was an essay comparing certain people, one a Japanese who killed and cooked and ate his girlfriend but got a light sentence and moved to France, where he became a popular celebrity, another someone named Howard Stern who is, I gather, a disgusting radio personality, and the third a famous reactionary named Joseph de Maistre. She said it was absolutely brilliant.

  “She got to work and a party was planned where Frank was going to be placed in the path of the editor of the book section of a big paper, this would be a place it would be worth being noticed in. She considered Frank a natural reviewer.

  “The plan was just for Frank to engage in his usual conversationalism with the book section guy, but of course Frank is shy, she knows this. So she talked to Frank beforehand and extracted from what he was saying the best, funniest topics, four or five of them. And she drilled him on how to bring them up. She coached him. Now remember how shy this man is.

  “She told me what the topics were but the only one I remember now was that in England somebody had just developed a process for putting advertising on eggs, and he had a riff on this. They were cultural topics, striking things.

  “It’s too horrible. Keep in mind how shy Frank is. So the party transpires and Frank does as he’s told and brings up his topics one-two-three, and makes an impression, clearly, to the point where the editor asks him if he might want to consider doing something for them, to which Frank says yes and hands him his card. He thought. In fact, and without Ellen’s knowledge, he had prepared a pony for himself, not only listing the topics he was supposed to take up but giving the little stage directions Ellen had thought up. He had written this pony on a card. He’d been afraid of forgetting something, losing one of the topics. And when he thought he was giving his business card to the editor, of course he was giving him this embarrassing aide-mémoire. He discovers this after the party is over and Ellen is congratulating him.

  “Well, you can imagine. He was beyond deflated. He was suicidal. He was certain he was never going to hear from the book section editor again. And he didn’t. So what was her role? Well, what with one thing and another, she slept with him, sort of right on the spot.

  “It was to cheer him up and convince him he hadn’t done anything so cataclysmic as he thought. She was claiming this guy was just going to be puzzled, not think anything about it. I guess also she was feeling responsible for sponsoring this thing that had turned into such a humiliating event. Also, as they talked, they were consuming nightcaps, from nervousness. Neither of them had been able to imbibe during the party out of anxiety. We know the way that is. So she ended up screwing him and without a condom, and don’t say what you’re going to say.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything. I’m just astonished at her.”

  “Well, don’t be. In the first place she knew his life inside out and he had been celibate for five years. She was properly hysterical about it the next day, though, she made him get an AIDS test as soon as he left work so she could kill him if it was positive. And then, strangely enough, he was offended to the quick. This was a breach of trust. He had told her his whole life in detail. He had never been so disappointed. He got the test, but that was it for them. The test was fine, but they were over. So then when she missed her period she felt that events were making her mind up for her and she should become a single mother. The father has no idea. I don’t know if she’ll tell him or not. Neither does she. She was leaving Chicago in any case because she had enrolled to take Montessori training in Florida, in their main training center. You know about that. She’s out of advertising forever and she’s going to be a Montessori person. She thinks she’s going to be a teacher, but she’ll end up adm
inistering because she’s so talented. But let her start as a teacher … So that’s where we are now.

  “Now. My mother is useless for this kind of thing, like being around for the delivery. And she disapproves of single motherhood. And she hasn’t offered. And Ellen needs to know someone is going to come. And that’s me.”

  They walked in silence up to their gate. Fikile was nowhere around, so they let themselves in. They had just entered the house when the phone began to ring. He had never acclimated to the standard ring pattern in Africa, the two peremptory short burrs and a long interval.

  Iris started toward the phone but stopped herself when she sensed Ray wanted to take it. He did.

  It was one of his notification calls, with the information he needed coded into the wrong number or wrong resident name the caller would claim to be trying to reach. Iris had a good sense of when one of these calls was coming through. It was odd. She would hesitate. She would look at him as if she knew in advance what kind of call it was, not always, but often enough to be odd.

  A voice he knew said, “Dumela, rra. Is this number 5412, 5412?”

  “Dumela. Sorry, rra. No. Tsamaya sentle.”

  It was good news. His man had successfully removed and unloaded the tackhead microcam Ray had taken the risk of having installed in Samuel Kerekang’s bedroom in his dismal lodgings in Bontleng. He would have the footage tomorrow, ready for reviewing. It wasn’t a good idea, but he could get hold of the footage now …

  “Finally you look happy,” Iris said. “But are we through with my sister for tonight?” She didn’t like his wrong-number calls. She was showing it more than usual tonight. He did his best to keep them to a minimum. But there was only so much he could do about it.

  “I don’t know, are we?”

  “We are if everything is clear about my trip back. Because I definitely am …”