Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Signs of disorganization continued to multiply. It was deadly bright and hot, and people had packed themselves into the seats under the canopy to eat. One man was standing and eating at the podium. A presentation of flowers, gladioli, had just arrived late and were being set up. A low hiss emanated from the public-address system speakers. Staff people who should have been in evidence were not. Obviously many of them had been hurled into the search for Dwight Wemberg.

  Following Iris, Morel, and Kerekang toward the shade were the gleaner children, in a body, moving carefully and attending to the full plates they were carrying. Ray watched them settle in the horseshoe pitch, at Kerekang’s feet. Morel and Kerekang, now lounging against the wall of the main residence, were in mid-conversation. He was going to go over there. Iris was kneeling among the children. The children shifted, moving even nearer to Kerekang. It was vaguely like a scene from the Gospels.

  Ray was set up to tape. His wife was beautiful but he wished she were standing. She could be careless about people interested in looking down her front. She had one top with sagging, too generous armholes that he wished she would eliminate from her wardrobe. She was careless.

  Going by the gestures in play, Kerekang was engaged in a verbal attack on Morel. This was not Morel’s day. Ray couldn’t imagine what the issue might be. He had to hear this. He tried to call up anything he knew of Tennyson’s beyond what everyone knew from Locksley Hall. Nothing was coming.

  Halfway there, he was invisibly deflected. Boyle crossed in front of him and gave a double cough that meant Ray should follow him, mark where he was headed, and then find a discreet way to get there and meet with him. Boyle had studiously not looked at him as he was crossing his path, which was usual. Anyone who had intelligence business with Boyle was to avoid public contact with him on pain of being considered something between an absolute idiot and a walking threat to the continued existence of the Central Intelligence Agency as an institution. Ray wondered if anyone had figured out that a good way to winkle out who was doing Boyle’s work would be to make a list of the people who were always feverishly scuttling out of Boyle’s neighborhood at gatherings like this one.

  Ray was furious. He should be with the constellation. Boyle was using a cane today so maybe there was hope somewhere. I curse you, he thought. If Boyle was descending toward immobility there was hope, unless because he was so invaluable he would be kept on even if all he could do was sit in a chair and concoct actions. The agency loved Boyle.

  Normally he would feel pity for anyone moving along with such evident difficulty as Boyle. He wished Boyle would fall. That way this mission he had been summoned to the same way a dog is summoned by his master’s whistle would abort, presumably, and he could go where he should be. Boyle was heading for the Portosans.

  He had to hurry. He signaled vaguely to Iris, not sure she was getting what he was trying to convey. He handed his plate of tomatoes to the wife of the embassy’s communication officer, who was there making herself useful but who seemed nonplussed at his act.

  Boyle led him past the Portosans and around to the back of the residence garage. There was a door in the rear wall and Boyle would have a key. He had keys to everything. He gave Boyle time to let himself in and light up his Santos Dumont. He would be ready for Ray when he could address him from the center of a cloud of smoke. This was going to have to do with Wemberg.

  Ray entered the garage. Boyle, in his flowing white linen suit perfect for the temperature but wrong for the memorial service, was there, glimmering and smoking.

  It was about Wemberg. It was urgent, supposedly. Boyle handed him a notecard with five license plate numbers scrawled on it. He had nobody else to send on this errand, which was to go three blocks away to a parking area and ascertain which cars with the license plates indicated were not there. Ray could tell that Boyle saw the Wemberg situation as not much above the level of a nuisance, but that since he had been brought into it he was certainly going to clear up the mystery before it got worse.

  There was no time to talk because people would be leaving. It had been established that Wemberg was not back at his flat or at any of the other likely locations. Somebody, some group sympathetic to Wemberg’s complaints against the government and the embassy, had given him sanctuary, was Boyle’s guess. The idea was to move fast. If this was an ad hoc thing, the faster they moved the sooner they would find Wemberg and get him on a plane. The ambassador wanted Wemberg on a plane tomorrow, or at least no later than the next day.

  I have no interest in this, Ray thought: Let me alone before I miss everything. He had to get back to Iris and Morel. Mine enemy gleams, he thought. He was sounding rather high-romantic to himself and wondered what that was about.

  Just as Ray was about to go, Boyle stopped him. He wanted to be certain Ray could read the scrawled license plate numbers, so he took out his penlight and held the beam on the card while Ray read the numbers aloud for him. Ray had been able to make out the letters and numbers perfectly, using available light. It was all a waste of precious time and it was typical of Boyle. Boyle was insane.

  Securing the license plate information had taken less time than Ray had anticipated, but locating Boyle once he was back with the information had become nightmarish because stupidly they hadn’t fixed on a rendezvous point in advance. So he had had to find Boyle, who was busy machinating someplace, without showing to anyone the slightest interest in where the man might be. He had found him after a tedious period of wandering through the dissolving event. Finally a crisscross pass had been arranged by the usual winks and nods. When it was done he was tired of life.

  Poor Iris. Her lot had been to wait and watch patiently while he came and went, circulated, self-evidently doing nothing. She had known roughly what was going on. She had waited, abandoned, sitting in the horseshoe pitch on an upturned wastebasket, feigning interest in a fashion magazine, which had probably been for his benefit. There was no subject she hated more than fashion. Morel had gone. Kerekang and his urchins had gone.

  He collected her.

  “I am dying,” she said. “You abandon me.” They were walking home, although dragging themselves home would be closer to it.

  She went on. “You abandon me. You aren’t supposed to.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I should be used to it. I guess it hasn’t happened for a while because it hit me this time with a sort of shock, like the old days when it happened all the time. Which led to an understanding, you may recall. You would not let this happen to me unless it was an absolute emergency.”

  “Which this was. Well, it classified as an emergency.”

  “I won’t ask you what it was. You know I was out there in suspended animation for a whole hour. I considered holding the magazine upside down as a distress signal, would you have noticed? I won’t ask you what the emergency was because I know you can’t tell me.”

  He considered violating the house rules. She would appreciate it if he did. And this situation was something she had undoubtedly put together for herself already.

  He said, “I’ll tell you what it was. But please tell me you won’t ever do anything like that magazine trick. People notice things. Say you won’t.”

  “I never have, I wouldn’t, but I wanted to. I wanted to hold the thing upside down, and wave it in the air every time you passed.”

  “Good Lord.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Anyway, you noticed how Dwight was nowhere to be seen. Well, they have him set up for a flight home tomorrow at noon. He was supposed to go back to get his bags, which Maeve had packed for him, and then come back and stay the night at the DCM’s.

  “He’s a missing person. And he didn’t just wander off somewhere.

  “The theory is that he prevailed on somebody to hide him out so he can continue his campaign. He kept saying he wouldn’t leave Africa without Alice’s body, and he meant it, apparently.

  “So now we don’t know where he is. He has a wide circle of friends, Ba
tswana friends, and so did Alice. They need to find him right away, so I had to go and check some license plates. They know he left in a car. I had to check on which cars had been parked in a certain place and no longer were, if you see what I mean. I had no choice. There was nobody else to do it. Everybody else was tasked up.”

  She was listening closely. She looked at him with an expression distinctly combining gratitude and surprise.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I mean it.”

  He thought, If she thinks this is the thin end of the wedge, she’s wrong …

  “And all the wandering around mysteriously, what was that?”

  “It was part of the deal.”

  “I know, but it seemed so strange and protracted …”

  “It wasn’t very strange.”

  After a silence, she said, “I know who you report to, by the way.”

  This didn’t surprise Ray very much. He shrugged.

  “And I’m sorry for you. I knew before today, so don’t worry that it’s anything you did this afternoon. Anyway it’s the new consular officer and I pity you, I do.”

  “Are you saying that because it’s always the consular officer? Because it isn’t always the consular officer.”

  “No, everybody knows. He’s awful. All the people I know, know. I just look interested. I play dumb, don’t worry. Also if your previous boss was that very nice Marion Resnick, I’m sorry for you. What a contrast. You can confirm my guess by pulling your earlobe if you want to.”

  “I can’t say anything about this.”

  “But you do understand that everybody knows.”

  “Maybe they only think they know.”

  “Oh I don’t think so. But that’s all right.”

  She stopped, spun against him, and locked her arms around him in a hard embrace, there on the street. Immediately he felt calmer.

  He noticed that he was hungry. He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.

  On impulse, he said, “Should we go someplace for coffee?”

  She said, “I like the idea, but it’s Sunday. One of the hotels would be about it. I don’t want to get caught in the braai at the Sun, but we could go to the coffee shop. Everything else is closed, the regular places.”

  The hotel they were nearest to was the Sun, but she didn’t love going there. She disliked it because the tone of the place was corrupted by the casino, the types it attracted. The Sun was off his normal beat, for obvious reasons. He was a schoolteacher. But when he had a plausible reason to go there, he went. He liked it for the same reasons that Iris didn’t. It was a sink of vice, so you saw temptation winning or losing, loss of composure, certain extremes.

  They decided it would be a good idea. He was touched that she was agreeable to going. They changed their route.

  She was splendid, fundamentally. They were going to the Sun for his sake. There were plenty of reasons she would usually prefer to avoid the Sun, the gauntlet of prostitutes you had to run in order to get in the door being one of them, but that was usually only a nighttime problem. There were the beggars who assumed that everybody leaving the Sun had broken the bank. There were the Boers who had come up for black sex where nobody they knew would see them. But it was the hawkers, the lace sellers, who upset her the most. There was a vendor encampment extending along the road paralleling the Sun’s frontage. The lace sellers dominated the encampment and completely controlled the choice area directly across from the entrance gate. Their lace goods were displayed along fences or on makeshift racks, or carried out into the traffic by the hawkers, hardlooking matrons, and unfurled for pedestrians and slower-moving cars. For occasional shelter from the sun the hawkers would repair to lean-tos crafted from sticks, cardboard, and burlap sacking. The encampment was a hell of dust, shouting, and carbon monoxide pumped out by the idling engines of vehicles pulled up on the shoulder of the road for the purpose of browsing. The ratio of sales to stopped cars was pitifully low.

  Iris had a history with these people. She had tried to help them. The bedspreads and tablecloths and mantillas and runners being sold were items that united incredible craftsmanship with appallingly cheap materials. That was the problem. The shawl Iris was wearing constituted a case in point. She was forever fiddling with it, gluing up broken threads, tightening it up in one way or another. Iris had spoken to several of the lace-makers about the mismatch, and they had seemed to understand. As he remembered it, she had gone so far as to locate a source for better linen thread for them, and they had seemed interested. What was the point of constructing these intricate and potentially beautiful objects out of what amounted to packing twine? But there had been no outcome.

  It occurred to him that Iris had spoken to the wrong people. There was a hidden government among the hawkers. There always is, he thought. He could delve. There was a top woman, who occupied the prime spot in the encampment and whose lace stand was shaded by golf umbrellas, new ones. She was probably the one to speak to, not that it would do any good. He could find out, if Iris wanted to pursue it. She liked to correct things. She thought the world was more pliable than it is. Every time she saw the cordon of prostitutes around the entrance to the Sun, her mind ran in the direction of what could be done for them. She had a general impulse toward social helpfulness that somehow never resulted in organized action, like working with the gleaners the way Alice Wemberg had, actually getting out of the house and going to the site of the iniquity. He knew what she would say about that. She would say, if they were ever able to discuss it honestly, that he discouraged it, in part because it would raise their profile, which was always to be avoided, and in part because … he needed her so inordinately. For example, he always wanted to know where she was and that wherever she was it was a reasonable place to be, a safe place. Because the fact was that without her the world would be unintelligible to him. That much was true.

  “Did I miss anything?” he asked her.

  “Oh, only a fascinating dispute between the man who spoke so beautifully, Mister Kerekang, and a man who’s still not your favorite person, I gather.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well I didn’t get all of it, remember. Possibly because I had to stop and concentrate on particular things I knew you’d find interesting, like the reasons Davis gave for wanting to be in Africa …”

  He felt taut. It appeared that what she had was Morel’s mission statement, or what he was interested in having people think was his mission statement. He was taut because the underlying burning question of what exactly was going on with her over at Morel’s was with him constantly, like indigestion. That question would be coming up and into the light sometime soon, if not tonight. It would happen before she left for the States, that was certain. It could be tonight, depending on what she had to say about Morel in the next segment. Going to the Sun rather than going home was a way of postponing the conversation, for him if not for her. Was she cooperating with his struggle to postpone the Morel question, the full-dress moment? She seemed blithe enough. He was the one with the problem. He was the one with the full plate. They had to be at home when he picked the moment to thrash the thing out, or was it thresh the thing out? For an instant both words seemed equally correct in the phrase, a sign that he was getting old, proof positive.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “Let’s see how I do with my memory palace.”

  “Your memory palace.”

  “You know what that is?”

  “I think I do,” he said. Of course he knew. “You mean where you visualize a building you know every detail of by heart and then use different features of it to pigeonhole pieces of information so you can recover them by association.”

  “Davis suggested the idea to me. It’s a simple concept. I must’ve heard of it in the past but just never paid attention to it or never thought it was relevant to me. He mentioned it when I was complaining about my short-term memory.”

  “You think your short-term memory is worse lately, but it isn’t. You’ve always had an erratic memory.”

/>   “Well, I beg to differ. But it doesn’t matter. It was bothering me, so I included it in my long menu of objections to myself and my body. And Davis made this suggestion, which I’ve been employing for a few weeks and which, well, which I think helps. I could be wrong. Do you notice any improvement?”

  “Maybe so. I don’t know. You’re variable.” There was nothing wrong with using memory palaces if you needed to. This device had been covered during training. But he never used it. His memory worked without tricks. When he absorbed a scene or a sequence it was an effortless process. It was a form of becoming the scene, surrendering to it. He was unusual, when it came to memory, it was a gift. In the agency he was regarded as a prodigy, or once had been. He was pleased if using memory palaces was genuinely going to work for her. They would see.

  He wondered what template she used for her memory palace. It would be one of the houses she’d lived in when she was growing up, undoubtedly. That was what he’d used when he’d tried the technique out. He was curious to know.

  “I’m curious,” he said. “I’m curious to know what edifice you’re using for your memory palace. I don’t mean to be intruding.” He realized that he wanted it to be the house they were living in.

  “Oh nononono. There’s nothing secret about this. Please. Actually I have two I use. One as you might expect is our house, going in the front door, to the right and then to the left, room by room, and I can start with the driveway, the yard, to expand it. That’s one memory palace. But I have another one for less complicated sequences.”

  He broke in. “Ensembles,” he said. She might as well know the technical term.