Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Thousands of pages, he thought. He realized unhappily that he was incorporating into his consciousness Morel’s theory of religion as a conspiracy against free time and applying it a little differently, free time being mortal time, limited, limited, applying it to other, what, entities, like family I hate you, families as blind machines using up their progeny with demands on their time, whatever was left of their lives, the progenies’ lives, the time before the toad arrives, death the toad. But I have no children, he thought. He knew through Pony that on the wall in Morel’s meeting room was a papier-mâché Mexican carnival mask with a toad or lizard occluding the smiling face.

  “Ray, he wants to know if this is a brilliant thing, major, or if it’s a failure and a mistake. He doesn’t know, Ray.”

  “What about the possibility he’s done something in between, something pretty good, say?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to think it’s mediocre.”

  Ray said, “I’ll do this. I’ll do my best.”

  “Ray, look straight at me when you say that.”

  He did. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Because I want you to say this as yourself.”

  “Don’t follow.”

  “There is a difference between being yourself and playing yourself, which is something we all do. You do it when you’re tired and want to get through something that’s difficult in some way. Men do it more, I think. I don’t think I do it much at all anymore, since I started going to Davis. But the paradox here is that since I started going to Davis you’re doing it more. But please don’t do it now.”

  “I am now not doing it, to the best of my knowledge.”

  She didn’t like that answer, clearly. All this for my brother, he thought. It was baffling that Rex was making an appeal to the bond between them that Rex himself had sought all his life to deny and destroy.

  Ray’s experience of brotherhood was hardly what anyone thought. Brotherhood, or brothership, a better word for it, had been something he had gotten from being in the agency, even if, except for his friendship with blessed Marion, it had been more abstract than not, an appreciation of membership in a male alliance, it was like, he imagined, being with the Allied armies during World War II, despite pattern bombing and the betrayal of the White Russians. He had a live brother, no thank you very much, who had made brotherhood odious, gone out of his way to do that. He wondered if the attraction the agency had always had for him would have been there if his experience of brotherhood with Rex had been normal. He felt pathetic for a moment, which enraged him.

  “Ray, I know I’m putting you in a hard place. You can tell I want you to think this thing is wonderful …”

  “A masterpiece, if at all possible.”

  “Of course. That would be my dream.”

  “But of course I can’t promise to like it.”

  “No, and if it turns out you don’t, I’m going to ask you to agree to something in advance. Will you?”

  “Will I what?”

  “Will you agree that if you don’t like it you are going to negotiate with me what you are going to say?”

  “You mean the wording?”

  “More than that, really.”

  “You mean you want veto power, or what? I am having difficulty with this.”

  “What I want is your agreement to negotiate with me as to what gets said to Rex, but that I get to decide, when it comes down to it.”

  “This is like nothing I ever heard of, my weird woman.”

  “Now you’re hearing of it.”

  “I mean, am I cognizing here that I’m supposed to let my judgment about this thing come out as a lie, at your hands, is that it? If this is not a masterpiece?”

  “Yes, but before I answer that … well I just did answer it, but what I meant to say is that there are certain things you need to know.”

  She was about to weep again, he could tell, it was coming. He wanted to be kissing her face and fucking her, but this had to be gone through, which was a shame because he was floating on a wave of heat toward her, real heat, the kind that dissolves everything into hot perfect form, perfection renewed. Everything dissolved into the fevered onset, in that state of heat, milk glands being palpated were transformed into different items, different, celestial items separate from any function. It was a realm and he could be in it, like that, if she would finish with this, with his brother, sometime this century.

  “Don’t be upset, Iris. Okay, it’s a deal. Reminds me of when somebody asks you for a reference and you say You write it I’ll sign it, but …”

  “Then thank God,” she said.

  What was this? She was almost vibrating. Part of it might be jetlag, but what was he missing?

  “Two, then, Ray, you also have to promise to do this with speed. You have to address it right away. Can you do that?”

  “Wait a minute. How can I promise that? You’re talking about thousands of pages of …”

  “Yes, but some pages have only the one sentence, so … At least can you say that you’ll try? I’ll make it easy for you. I won’t bother you. I …”

  “I want you to bother me. That’s the point.”

  “Please agree to this.”

  It was too much. He was being bullied. But she was almost vibrating. He nodded.

  She was wringing her hands, not something he could remember seeing her do, ever.

  “The importance of this … You know, how he sent this to me.

  “He knew I was leaving by a certain date and he wanted me to carry it personally to you and he hadn’t even finished photocopying. One thing I have to do first is take care of that, maybe at St. James. Of course I assume he has the original drafts these pages came from, in some form or other. But it needs to be photocopied straight through. I won’t ask you to do that …”

  “Oh thanks.”

  “So what he did was send this to me by courier. And I don’t mean by a courier service. It was a friend of his.”

  “He paid a friend of his to bear this to you?”

  “No that’s another remarkable thing about this. He didn’t pay him. This guy paid his own plane fare, Armand. This is just someone who loves your brother. He has a kind of group, or following, Rex.”

  “Some sort of homosexual what, um, would you call it, homosexual what would you say, civil rights group?”

  “Oh they’re gay, but that’s not what defines them. They’re friends of his. They love him. Can you imagine …”

  “Not really.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s remarkable. I can’t imagine people doing that for me.”

  “Please calm yourself, babe. It’s okay. My babe. Please.”

  “I’m almost fine,” she said. “Just one more thing I need you to do. Ah wait. I have to go to the bathroom again, oh thank you … Please retain what it is you did to my feet. I am so relieved. I just need you to read two things of Rex’s. In his handwriting. Just these two things I need you to read and I think you’ll … you’ll see what I see. You’ll see it. I’ll get them.” She left the room rapidly.

  He waited. Family I hate you, he thought. He was dreading something, with Rex. He thought he knew what it was, but why she hadn’t been more direct about it, if he was right, was more than he could figure out just then. His brother had some weird charm, or charisma, even. It was an ancient mystery. Now Iris was in his thrall, if that was the right word. Somehow Rex had always possessed what could only be called glamour, he supposed, as peculiar as that was.

  The problem with Iris conducting him into this prolonged new waltz with his brother was that it was energizing and resurrecting memories and incidents he had successfully and happily forgotten. Pick a scab, any scab, he wanted to say to her sometime when she was stirring up the sediments of his past. The idea that it was helpful to go back and relive the most annoying passages of your life was one of the dumbest notions ever to acquire a following. He had read something by or referring to a therapist who specialized in treating Holocaust survivors who had co
me to the conclusion, after years of the opposite approach, that the survivors who had done the best job of repressing their hideous experiences were the best off, the happiest, the most successful, and that the practice of reliving was ruinous for a lot of the relivers, ruinous. But who knows? he thought. Of course Morel would be all for reanimating injustices, dead things, like Frankenstein, no doubt.

  He had to have her. He had to be careful. He had to be gradual. He could do prolonged kissing all over her body, in some pattern he would think of, and postpone touching her puss and going in until she said uncle, please, enough. Of course that was fine as a plan but less fine as a campaign on the ground because it got him too fucking hot too soon, her too. It was possible he could surprise her with how long the kissing would go on. She would be expecting something else. It had to be fine between them, that way. It had to, with Morel hovering, it had to.

  Rex was clever. He granted that. And he would like to forget it if he could. It had been his luck to have as his brother a sacred monster. The designation had never occurred to him before, but it was apt, and it was a little comforting.

  Here was Iris. She handed him two airletters dated well before her trip, with certain sections checkmarked. Then she turned and went to her luggage and began rooting through it for something, another piece of writing, which she found and brought to him, murmuring that he should take his time while she took care of a couple of things. She fiddled with the papers, arranging them in the order she wanted them read, before leaving the room. She was agitated.

  He took up his task, thinking Love your enemies. She seemed to have it askew, poor dodo. She seemed to love his enemies, his brother. She was indiscriminate. She loved the world, and insofar as he could love it at all, it was via her in some way. He should tell her that, or, rather, never tell her that. She would resent it. In her place he would hate it. It would make her responsible for him just at the moment she was what, experimenting with her feelings or whatever she was doing. It would be fatal to interfere with that. He had to keep her, keep her or what, die, was his situation.

  Iris reentered. She presented him with a magnifying glass, a surprise. She left again, hurrying.

  He hadn’t known she owned a magnifying glass. He did appreciate having the use of it, not because there was anything wrong with his eyesight, but because his brother’s small but perfectly formed handwriting could be a trial for anyone. Rex’s excruciated hand was on the border between the eccentric and the insane, in his opinion. Good eyesight ran in his family. He needed to be attentive to reading in a good light more now than previously, was all. He would begin in a minute.

  He had to get going. He would like to know what, exactly, she was doing, as he began. He held his breath to help him listen in her direction, for any clues. He thought she was on the phone. He wasn’t sure.

  Item one before him was a segment of Rex’s tips for long-absent returning natives, a joke genre created specifically for Iris’s benefit that of course relied on the canard that Iris was hearing nothing about movements and events in American cultural life from her husband, not to mention that she was herself an assiduous reader of everything from the International Herald Tribune to The New Yorker. Rex obviously wanted him to be a what, a stumbling block, an incubator of ignorance.

  Here was his brother:

  I want you not to be amazed by a startling development taking place within the African-American, formerly Afro-American or black, community. What we have is a significant element in the community, a vanguard element, executing something called the Islamic Turn, and dragging a good part of the masses along in that direction. It is serious. You will be greeted from time to time in Arabic. These leaders have brilliantly found a way to align the justified complaints of their people with the interests and image of the main certified declared enemy of the United States of America, the radical Muslim powers. This of course is an eerie replay of the situation in the thirties, forties, and fifties when the vanguard of that time, notably Paul Robeson and W. E. B. DuBois, cleverly sought to align their followers with the then main enemy, the USSR and its cat’s paw the Communist Party of the United States. So how excellent is it for black/white relations to have leading African American intellectuals sucking the hem of the main new enemy, now that the former main foe has collapsed in a heap, switching their adulation to the political descendants of the champion slave-trading powers of all time? Yes, the Muslim slave trade went on for thirteen centuries versus two for us, involved a higher overall total of slaves taken, by about a million (thirteen against our twelve), and, nota bene please, featured the castration of black male slaves. Nota bene that there IS NO BLACK DIASPORA IN THE MUSLIM COUNTRIES for precisely that reason. Also nota bene that the only places in the world where chattel slavery persists like a fossil are, guess what, Muslim countries, Mauritania and Sudan. O my coevals! (You can ask my brother what this comes from.) O tempora, O morons! Oh and by the way, with this brilliant feat of identification (Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, is a pal and associate of Muammar el-Qadaffi) these guys are giving the back of their hands to their former best and most effective friends and costrugglers the Jews, friends with power and influence and money and conscience. In addition, not only does the Islamic Turn cut the black community off from bien pensant Jews and their resources, but down the line it also threatens relations with the bedrock of African American community strength, the bedrock black Christian churches, in the following way—it is stone doctrine in Islam that Christ was a fake, a kind of hologram, on the cross. You can read it in the Koran in so many words, Christ was a phantom, of sorts. Of course this has yet to strike the consciousness of the black church, but it will, as the pastors rouse themselves to figure out why Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the United States, leaving them in its dust. Oh by the way, above I should have added that the Nation of Islam has gone specifically out of its way to defame the Jews as being leading slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries, a calumny, of course. And also of course, what they forget is that the Islamic Arabs of Palestine in the thirties and forties were fans of and collaborators with the then main enemy, the Nazis, through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Also, just as they line up next to the new main enemy, these guys are shouting out the main demand they have agreed on, reparations for slavery they would like the present white person majority to vote to give them, good luck, given their public relations status. Oh and naturally nothing is going to be asked from their pals the Muslims, who are still in the slave trade business in Mauritania and Sudan. O everybody! But such is this mod’n contemporary world of today in which we live in, to echo Paul McCartney, my dear.

  Ray thought, Rex sees himself as Mencken, the gay Mencken, and also as the gay Tocqueville, apparently … and what he doesn’t realize is that what he’s doing is exactly the same thing the trend analysts that Marion made fun of think they’re doing … This is thin stuff: I could do it.

  This was Iris’s next assignment:

  You need to appreciate certain important deformations that are becoming prominent in Americanese. What is manifesting in our language is a strange hatred of consonants, especially the letters t and n. M is shouldering n aside, but m should not rest. It too is doomed. I realized I had to lay this out for you before your arrival when, the other day, I heard a word used that completely eluded me but that was perfectly intelligible to the people it was being addressed to. The word was plampaernheut. What was being said was, of course, Planned Parenthood.

  Anyway, here’s a compilation that will show you what’s happening, pretty much—

  imput

  turmpike

  temminutes (ten minutes)

  avertising

  love one (loved one)

  produck

  aministration

  aventure

  owrage, owlook (outrage, outlook, the t

  swallowed)

  he braw me home (he brought me home)

  gramparens

  exackly

  carboa
r (cardboard)

  Febuary

  tempature

  goverment (the t survives in this one so far)

  ornjuice

  estatic

  Ray detected a carelessness or coarsening of his brother’s handwriting in this specimen.

  The next selection seemed to be about the same vintage as the one before it, at least in terms of the peculiarities in Rex’s handwriting. But there was something else about it worth noting. It seemed oddly or badly organized, for Rex.

  You could call these some useful current tropes you are sure to run into. I am providing them to you partly for desensitization purposes, so that you won’t be disoriented when you hear them used so repeatedly as you will, and partly for you to use, yourself, should you wish to pass for an uptodate denizen anytime you like.

  Herewith the candidate tropes and prefab expressions social interactions are increasingly made up of.

  —The premier thing to say if you should injure someone whilst you are regrettably in a rage is Let the healing begin.

  —Say of any scene of natural disaster that it is just like a movie and if people have been hurt just like a war movie.

  —If there is a huge government scandal but you happen to be favorably disposed toward the party in power and responsible for the mess, say There’s enough blame to go around for everyone.

  —Remember that however miserably you have wasted or screwed up your life, you should say I’m a survivor, meaning that you are truly proud of uh, well, not being dead. And if you have had a grossly misspent life, be prepared to tell anyone critiquing you that it has been all for the best because you are about to embark on a career as a motivation counselor.

  —If a close friend or someone in your family is killed by a malefactor but the malefactor is caught, say Good, but nothing can bring him/her back.

  There was more, which Ray was going to skip because it would be similarly annoying. He would read a little more of this rant and then go on to the last assignment.