Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Who’s Margo?”

  “Oh, you don’t know. Margo is her baby. Ellen went back twice to change the name at the registry place, making scenes. She kept changing her mind. Nothing I could say. I shouldn’t have left. She gets me hysterical. She is completely provocative.

  “Here’s an example. I don’t know if I told you about this or not. The first time she nursed in public somebody made a face or passed a remark, which was lighting a fuse if only they had known. Now she just throws out her breast for nursing anywhere in Tallahassee she happens to be, the more public the better, the more dubious the location the better.

  “She is totally miscast in Tallahassee, by which I mean totally out of place. Except with her associates at the Montessori place, of course, she’s in a frenzy. She goes around raging. She wants to make citizens’ arrests! She should be with my mother. But my mother is out of the question. She keeps going on about illegitimacy. They could never get along. She has no room. Ellen drives me to the edge. I was on the verge of taking the postman aside and pleading with him to tear up her copy of The Progressive when it comes. Of course, I didn’t. But she reads their classifieds and orders the latest inflammatory bumperstickers, which they seem to specialize in. She has one she hasn’t put on her car yet because she can’t find it. Guess why. I hid it. WWJD—Who Wants Jelly Donuts? I have to think of what I can do.”

  “Do what, though?” Ray said, thinking There is no physic for the world’s ill, it will burn in a fever forever.

  “I have to walk around for a minute,” she said, getting up abruptly.

  He watched her. Doing something for her sister was going to mean bringing her here, he knew it, and it was impossible.

  Iris walked in a circle, leaving oily footprints on his clean floor.

  Abruptly she lay down again and returned her feet to him.

  She said, “I don’t know what to do. That child cannot just vanish into state care. Say something.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Maybe she could come here. Not forever but for a while. We have the space, Ray. I could give up my den.” She liked to call her room of her own her den.

  “Well, I mean, the idea is pretty staggering, Iris. I, um. What. We, I think, um, we need to monitor the situation first, don’t we?”

  “If we could just calm her down, Ray. I know Davis could help her.”

  He felt suffocated for a moment. It passed.

  He resumed rubbing her feet.

  “Be gentle,” she said. He didn’t feel like being gentle. He felt like ripping her feet off and cutting his cock off and starting life over as a eunuch someplace where there were no phones.

  “I’ll have to think about this,” he said. Think about opening a madhouse, he thought.

  “Okay, good. Bend my toes back. And hold them back forever. And if you can remember from the reflexology book the spot you push for constipation, work on it. If you remember, from when you were doing reflexology before we decided it was ridiculous.”

  “I do remember,” he said. He thought he did. He pressed his thumbs into the balls of her feet.

  “That isn’t it.”

  “Right,” he said. He began a random sequence of pressures, assuming that he would strike the spot at some point. The sole of the foot is not Asia, he thought. Maybe this would help.

  “I don’t think we loved our siblings enough,” she said.

  “Oh right. That’s inane, Iris.”

  “No I’m serious.”

  “You mean we should have stayed in America and loved them, just loved them a lot, and none of this would have happened?”

  “All I know is that my sister is lost.”

  “A lost cause.”

  She sighed in a conclusive way and he was encouraged to think she had come to the end of the topic, for now.

  She sat up sharply. “Oh boy,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You can stop now.”

  He released her feet and began grinding his hands dry in a bath towel. She went off toward the bathroom, thanking him over her shoulder, in advance.

  …

  They had eaten. She had liked the collation he’d gotten up, especially the crab salad. They were at the kitchen table. Three candles provided their light, their only light. They were sipping chilled fresh guava juice. They were closer. Tonight he would give her a wrenching orgasm, if at all possible.

  “We have to discuss your brother,” she said, not eagerly.

  “How is he?”

  “It’s hard to tell on the phone. We spoke a lot. He’s like you. It’s hard to tell how he is. We spoke a lot about the book and the arrangements and whether he could, well, impose on you to read it.”

  “Well and how’s his roommate?”

  “I’ll come to that in a minute.”

  “Come to it.”

  “I shall. I have to say, though …”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be … your usual way on this.”

  “My brother has never been anything to me but a source of pain and embarrassment, to start with a given.”

  “Okay, so you’re hostile. But I learned something talking to him you never bothered to mention. Our name isn’t really Finch, or yours isn’t, so mine isn’t.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, spacing his words for emphasis.

  “Well, in passing it came out, when we were talking, that your family changed its name from Fisch, F-i-s-c-h, to Finch, which is fine, if they wanted to do it, but it does raise the question of why you never mentioned it.”

  “It just never arose. It’s ancient history. Look. Look, it was during the First World War, for God’s sake, and there was a lot of feeling against Germans, so my grandfather decided to change the family name.”

  “Germans?”

  “Yes of course.”

  “Well I thought Fisch was a Jewish name.”

  “No it was because we were German, Iris. And then when the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped there was a Fisch involved in that, so my grandfather had to consider it a doubly good idea.”

  “Your brother obviously thinks it’s a Jewish name. He says you’re Jewish, or half or some part.”

  “Well, a perfect example of my brother’s nonsense. Look, and may I add that by the time Hitler came along, they were very glad to be Finch, I would guess, with what Hitler did for being German.”

  “You’re saying the family was never Jewish?”

  “Never, so far as I know. Fisch is a common German name. It can be Jewish, of course. But we weren’t. The family is from Stuttgart.”

  “Your brother is so convinced.”

  “My mother has whatever papers there are, if you want, you can follow it up. But Rex says things just for effect, you know, Iris.”

  “It would be interesting if you were Jewish, Rex.”

  “Look, if it’s interesting to you, then get in touch with my mother. If there are any papers, she has them, so get in touch with her. Take up genealogy. You might enjoy it.”

  He said, “I’m sorry. I am not testy about this, in fact. I’m just not interested in it. If you want to pursue it, fine with me.”

  “You are testy, so forget it.”

  “No I’m not. It’s just that life, now with the assistance of my dear brother, is presenting me with more tasks than I can currently shake a stick at. This is Rex getting attention, Iris. You know the line ‘Family I hate you’?”

  “Yes, Ezra Pound.”

  “You mean I’ve quoted it to you before?”

  “Yes, and we discussed it. I don’t admire Ezra Pound. And I don’t admire the sentiment. I know things about your brother that are pitiful.”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to share, as they say.”

  She looked pityingly at him, and said, “I intend to. There are certain things you have to do …”

  A sudden impulse to break secrecy startled him. He fiercely wanted to tell her something he had learned about Boyle that he shouldn’t tell her. Probabl
y it was to get sympathy. There were heavy movements going on behind the scenery. There was some very unusual conferencing taking place. Things were abnormal, or getting to be. The agency was going to do something instead of sitting there collecting data forever. He could tell. He didn’t like it. He was about to break secrecy, in a minor way only, really. He wanted to.

  He said, “I want to tell you something funny about Boyle, Iris.” She looked amazed. They were both so practiced at circumlocution when it came to his work with the agency that what he was saying felt major to her, obviously.

  He went ahead. I am not thinking, he thought.

  “This is Boyle for you.

  “There are certain times when the chief of station may have to call all his actors together into one conference, to get at something, to fix something, to stop something from happening that it’s urgent to stop.

  “These are called action inquests or operation inquests, if they’re taking place after the fact, or called just, well, plenaries, if they’re for preemptive emergencies.” There was no need for him to offer technical terms. But he felt like it.

  “By his actors, I mean the whole range of operatives, from contract agents like me to staff members, officers, to various special short-term contract parties, informants, occasionally. Now of course the key thing, a key thing, is to preserve internal ignorance about who is working for the agency. The actors are supposed to know who their boss is, no more than that.

  “Now in a very large station there are sophisticated ways of planning things and maintaining general anonymity, using high tech. You can convene and deliberate and get what you want and nobody finds out who the next guy is. But in smaller stations, it’s a lot more difficult. As you can imagine.

  “So Boyle had a situation come up in Central America. Namely Guatemala. He was new in the post. The technology was out of commission for some reason. And this need arose. So Boyle improvised. He found a venue and called a plenary and got his thirty or forty actors in one room, with every one of them wearing a paper bag over his or her head, with eyeholes and mouth holes cut into them, and Boyle presiding and shouting out to them to press the mouth holes tight across their faces so that words were not muffled up in these bags. And there were numbers on the foreheads of the bags, so he could keep track of who was contributing.”

  Ray was laughing. So was Iris.

  “That is hilarious! And Ray, thank you for telling me! And I mean that. And it shows me something I didn’t know about the business you’re in. It was interesting!”

  She had a grateful look, soft, he thought.

  “This goes no further, of course.”

  She nodded, offering a friendly, comic-mournful expression he realized he craved from her. That was better.

  She took his hands across the table. “Your brother’s book, Ray.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “First, he’s been working on this for years. It’s huge. I’m going to do my best to describe it. The title for the whole thing is either Strange News or Bright Cities Darken …”

  “Clarae urbes. He stole that from Horace.”

  “What?”

  “The phrase. Also Strange News is Elizabethan. Yes, it’s Thomas Nashe. The title has been used.”

  “Please don’t just pour out scorn and objections before I even get two words out on this subject. Please. You don’t know how important this is.”

  She went on. “It’s in four sections, Sentences, Paragraphs, Incidents, Plots, and each section contains a thousand items, that is, a thousand sentences, a thousand …”

  “I get it.”

  “And each item or exemplar, as he calls them, is on a separate page, so you can tell how many reams of paper you were hauling around.”

  “No wonder my knee hurts. That’s a joke. May I ask a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “A sentence on a single page, a paragraph …? Can you explain what that’s about?”

  “Well, as I understand it, it’s so you absorb, in a complete way, the particular item on the page, really take it in. He described the book in various ways, but mostly he described it as an anatomy. And he was explicit that I should tell you that it was not, was not just faits divers, you would know what that means. I can tell you what he told me it means …”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Every individual element is numbered, but the numbers don’t mean anything. What I understood him to say was that they were just numbers. He also described the book as a machine and also as a game, or was it that there’s a game buried in it? Can’t remember.”

  “It’s a machine to destroy my spare time, what little I have. Machine is right.”

  “It’s so hard to remember everything he said. Oh, one was that you shouldn’t start reading this with the idea that it’s some kind of Commonplace Book. It isn’t. Nothing is from other books. It’s all real, from letters, overheard items, his observations, stupid things said in the media. There are very few names. There are initials, mostly, where they’re needed. He said you would recognize some of the people and incidents. Don’t groan like that. Some of the items are from his childhood. He said he’s been working on it all his life, but not knowing it until he got into his twenties.

  “Sigh all you want. This is important. I’m even leaving things out.”

  Her eyes were moist. He needed to control his feelings about Rex. Questions like who in hell Rex expected to be readers for such a piece of massive self-indulgence could wait.

  “Give me a second to think, Ray. Oh, another way he put it. This book is about literary significance, that’s the subject, was the way he put it. He even thought of calling it Significance. Now this is me speaking, but what I gathered is that he thinks if you read through this you’ll find here, scattered around, what narrative literature does in an extensive way, but in very emblematic or condensed form …”

  “Ah, so you would never need to read another novel again, something like that? Because if you did you’d see … well … after Rex it would all be déjà vu. Is that what he meant, would you say?”

  “Ray …”

  “He is putting an end to literature, rendering it nugatory, shall we say. No small thing to do. It must be something like this. The most original novel or story that ever was or will be is in fact a mixture of tropes and images and connectives and trajectories that my brother has captured and pinned down in his book for your pleasure! A wonder, in short.”

  “Well, Ray, you’ll have to decide if that’s a fair summary. It’s certainly a hostile one.”

  “And have you read his book?”

  “God no. I’ve read very little, just here and there.”

  “And how do you like it?”

  “Some of it is hilarious, I think. Some of it is just more or less mysterious, but you get glimmerings of … something. Some is brilliant, though, which is the case whether your anticipatory sarcasm is justified or not. A lot I just didn’t have time to really get, to concentrate on. But I’m not the one to judge, you are, I can’t judge it as a whole.”

  “So this is just about stories, narrative literature. Not poetry.”

  “Correct. Oh no. Poetry, I have to tell you this, he is very dismissive about. He claims he doesn’t care about it. He thinks it’s lesser. I tried to remember his exact words because I was pretty sure you were going to ask me. Here’s how he put it. Poetry is about the poet … in a way that stories are not about the storyteller. Structurally narcissistic, he called poetry. He isn’t out to vivisect poetry, so you can relax.”

  “You have no idea how abysmal his notion of poetry is, how sophomoric.” He wanted that sentiment to reach me, Ray thought.

  Then he said, “He is … I was going to say an idiot. For example, does he think Paradise Lost is about Milton the man? But pardon me if I point out that this is classic Rex. He hands me a literary task and what? demeans my specialty. Incredible. My life is incredible.”

  “No, Ray, it’s my fault. You know how I am. This is awfu
l. I was groping around with him trying to get a clear grasp on what I was supposed to convey to you about what this was. And he wasn’t always clear. Which is another thing, oh God, another thing … So I was the one who brought up poetry. This was not something he was volunteering for you to be sure you knew. I am trying to do everybody justice. I was the one who said does this have anything to do with poetry. I got it out of him. It is important that you believe me about this, Ray.”

  “You know that I haven’t spoken to him for years, Iris. He knows that. We are not reconciled in any way.”

  “You have to be, though. I’ll explain it.”

  “I’m perfectly happy this way.”

  “You won’t be. You’ll see. So. I’m not competent to tell you more about how the different ingredients, I guess you would call them, elements, relate, in the book. I think in the Sentences, he takes care of metaphor, as I recall, maybe similes, maybe aphorisms. Also you have your choice of how you want to read this collection. You can go randomly, like reading the I Ching, if you want …”

  “Like a pillow book. Like the hugest most monumental pillow book ever.”

  “I think I’ve told you everything I can, Ray.”

  “And I am expected to do what, once I read this thing? Use my contacts in this hub of international publishing, Gaborone? I have nothing to offer in that department, I hope he knows. I have no connections in publishing. I never had any. There’s no one I could recommend this to who has. That is the fact. If he imagines I have literary friends in power, he is mistaken.”

  “I’ll tell you what he wants from you, if you let me.”

  “Tell.”

  “He wants you to read it and judge it. He wants a trained literary intelligence to read it and judge it. And I don’t mean sample it and judge it, I mean read it and judge it …”