Mortals

by Norman Rush

  —Be there for you is a phrase that will quickly make you as sick as it has me, because it means nothing. It is everywhere. It is a phrase that purports. What it promises is that the promiser will lounge lovingly in the vicinity of the person who is in terrible trouble but without undertaking anything as concrete as lending money or driving him to the clinic from time to time. On television recently the phrase was used by a woman who has the largest collection of teddy bears in the state of Oregon. She was asked why she collected the teddy bears so madly, and yes the answer was that it was because they were always there for her. Yes, this phrase says, I will always be there watching the mess you’ve gotten into but not really assisting you, just sadly smiling. You will discover that if you get into deep trouble the people who said they would be there for you really did mean in fact only and nothing more than that they would hang around as spectators to your decline and fall. There is no love.

  Ray thought, Man how he hates America! There were apparently no redeeming features! What had America done to deserve his hatred, other than destroy the gay-hating Nazis and the Russians who until recent years had thrown gays into prison? And hadn’t it been the great god of Russian literature Gorky who’d said homosexuality was a product of fascism? Rex hated America, but how could he explain a guy running for the presidency and pledging to legalize homosexuals in the military? Of course Bush was going to crush him, but still.

  He didn’t want to read more. He wanted Iris to prance into the room naked. She might.

  This last item he was supposed to read was startling. It wasn’t clear what it was. Was it a dedication?

  Partly it was. It was a series of statements printed in turquoise ink, waveringly, drunkenly lettered, on a sheet of vellum. There was no heading.

  I present this to the great friend of my life, Iris, my great friend, this assemblage of truths and secrets to peruse.

  O my coevals! The secrets of a people are revealed in individual asides. Our lies reveal the deepest truths about us.

  Please, Ray thought. This man was supposed to be the nemesis of the cliché.

  In jests we show our deepest sorrow. All the secrets I possess are here, somewhere. You must juxtapose. Wake up and smell the offal!

  The thing was signed ungracefully, atypically, which reminded him of something odd in his own history. His signature had been rather stiff and careful up to the time of their father’s death. And then he had begun signing his name more loosely and in fact in a form very much like their father’s. He hadn’t thought much about it.

  Well, he was surprised. Unless this was a draft of something better, he was very surprised. But it seemed not to be a draft. It seemed to be a demonstration of Rex’s gnomic and aphoristic aspirations going mad on the page. They were feeble.

  Ray felt he was on the point of being dragged into collaborating with someone seeking the lowest form of literary immortality as established and pioneered by the annoying James Joyce, who thought it would be such a good idea to create puzzle palaces for thousands of specialists to wander around in forever, using his genius to fabricate and drop clues and conundrums, or conundra, that would turn the body of his work into an everlasting object of academic interest and industry. That had been Joyce’s crap idea of immortality, endless lines of clerks, really, clerks fondling his clues and getting tenure out of doing it, hives of clerks working to reconstruct the so playful so antic so smart mind of James Joyce. There was enough natural mystery to go around and enough social mystery as well, and mystery was his enemy. Of course Dubliners was great, and Portrait was, unless the concluding sentence was a trick and joke intended to let you know you had identified with a protagonist who was in fact an intellectual peacock and a fool, but his great work had been prior to all the puzzlemaking, for which fuck him.

  He sat there.

  Iris was in the doorway, naked, virtually, with a gauzy green stole around her neck and hanging down over her breasts and leaving her beautiful lower self exposed, to his joy. But she looked unhappy.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, don’t you see the decline I see?”

  “Yes, his penmanship, unless he was just in a hurry to throw together this preface or whatever it is.”

  “But Ray, not only in his handwriting. There’s a loss of clarity.”

  “You could be right.”

  “I am and you know I am.”

  She was back at the luggage again, bent over delightfully to him and then squatting, searching for something, more evidence. She had it. She presented him with a snapshot, a Polaroid, of Rex. It was dated February 1990 and it didn’t tell him anything. It was his fat brother, unsmiling, wearing a beret.

  “This doesn’t add anything,” he said. He studied the photograph.

  “There’s something pitiful, Ray.”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t like his teeth. He always had to be begged to smile when anyone was trying to take pictures.”

  Ray was having a definite event. It was inward but it was also visual and felt like an image coming forward through his head and through his eyes and out vaguely, out into the air between his eyes and the photo of Rex. It was the image of a minor character from his boyhood, Crawford, a contractor their father had hired to build an addition to their house and who had become a recurrent presence with them over the years, when something needed to be done or redone. His father had made him redo a flooring project. Was Crawford his first name or his second name? Ray couldn’t remember. Rex looked like the dark, heavy Crawford, the heavy but preening Crawford. This could be a picture of Crawford. Ray had always been uncomfortable around Crawford, for no reason that he could remember, for no reason that he would have been able to name at the time. Crawford had never been a handsome dog, and in his forties, whatever charm he’d had was gone, or almost, although he strutted around like a peacock. He had gone around with the collar of his windbreaker permanently turned up, a sure sign of vanity in that period of time. Ray felt peculiar and light. His brother was a cuckoo, or cuckoo’s egg. He was sure of it. He couldn’t tell this to Iris. He had no proof at all.

  “You’re pale,” Iris said.

  He didn’t answer. Someday he would talk to Iris about this, but not now. He couldn’t. She would think he was trying to slide around and away from what he knew she was going to come out with now, her conclusion. It was remarkable. He wondered if he had known this about Rex but without letting himself know it, a kind of thing that could happen. It was true. It was absolutely the case. He must have known, without knowing what he knew. He felt so peculiar.

  “You’re pale,” Iris said again.

  “No I’m not,” he said.

  “You are. You think what I think. I think your brother is ill, Ray. That’s what’s happening.”

  “HIV, you think.”

  “It’s the first thing you think of.”

  “Well, in the Polaroid he’s still pretty heavy …”

  “No he’s much heavier in some earlier ones I have, much.”

  “Well.”

  “It can affect the nervous system. I think that must be the explanation. I mean, God help him. I think it is the explanation.”

  “Well, we don’t really know, do we?” This was terrible, all of it. She could be right. Or she could be wrong.

  “Something is required,” she said.

  He knew it.

  23. The Denoons

  Ray and Iris were there early. Ray doubted that much of a crowd would turn up for the celebrated couple, the Denoons. Tricks had been played, not by the agency so far as he knew, but by others, the government. There had been last-minute cancellations of the venue and even, briefly, a false venue and date carried on Radio Botswana. It wasn’t impossible that the agency had been involved. These two would be certifiable radicals in Boyle’s view. All Ray knew was that he hadn’t heard anything. And while he was thinking about the matter, he decided to make an inward pledge never to engage in pett
y obstruction campaigns in the future, in his onward life. He knew how to evade getting involved in certain categories of business, as things stood, and he would just add another category to the list. That’s that, he thought.

  He was very eager to have a look at Denoon and his wife in the flesh. They had an interesting history, not only in Botswana. And of course Iris knew something about them, enough to make her adore them. They were social heroes, both of them.

  Iris was very fixed up. He wondered if she expected Morel to attend. There was nothing he could do.

  The venue was a classroom normally used for nurse training, one of two modules in a flimsy annex to the administrative block at the Princess Marina Hospital. They were in a long, narrow, windowless room with pea-green walls. There were seats, student desk-armchairs, for sixty. As was standard for government space, the room was scrupulously clean, the floors were gleaming, the blackboards scrubbed, a scent of lemon soap was in the air. On the wall above the blackboard were two framed portraits, the obligatory photograph of the current president, Masire, and beside it, to the right of it, interestingly enough, an unofficial portrait, obviously cut out of a magazine, of the deceased founder of the country, its first president, Sir Seretse Khama. Masire’s photo was hanging crookedly, but not Khama’s. It could mean something. When Masire’s likeness had appeared on the currency there had been a shortlived movement to turn in the new bills for the older ones bearing Khama’s likeness. He himself had overheard a woman on line ahead of him at Barclays explaining to the teller that she preferred the old pula because the new pula carried the picture of a jackal and she would not be happy to have such pictures in her purse. It had had to do with tribal feeling, Masire not being a Mongwato. It was a typically Tswana sort of protest, in its mildness. It was what he was used to. Now everything was changing around him, for the worse, for the worse, and he was to blame, he was to blame, not for all of it, for some of it, he was. Woe, he thought. He controlled himself.

  The room was lit by a train of large hanging lamps containing very dim lightbulbs, inverted milkglass pyramids serving incidentally as receptacles for the remains of dead insects. The pyramids were open at the top and each one held a black load taking up, he estimated, about a fifth of the lamp interior. It was remarkable. The character of the light delivered was affected. It was remarkable, like everything.

  They had their choice of seats. There were a few attendees, women, Indian and Batswana, in the back rows. Iris wanted to sit at the front so she could see everything, which was fine because the room would fill, if it filled, from the back forward, and they would have some time to talk freely. He had something to tell her that he was trying not to think about.

  They took seats in the second row directly in front of the lectern. A small table and a chair had been set to the left of the lectern, and a chrome steel utility cart had been pushed up against it on the right. The cart bore a display of bouquets obviously recycled from the hospital wards. The centerpiece was a protea in a pot, drooping in a gold foil calyx. A gooseneck microphone was mounted on the lectern, needlessly, considering the dimensions of the room.

  “These chairs always make me want to write,” he said. He made writing motions.

  “Then we should get you one.”

  He left it there. He was going to decline to pick up the invitation to reopen the question of the glorious, or at least better than this, life he was going to lead someday post-agency. She wanted him to go back to poetry, be what he had tried and failed definitively to be. That was what she seemed to want. She had all his ancient efforts somewhere in her files and boxes, her archives. She wanted a vocation for him that she liked better. He understood it. He wouldn’t mind living a life closer to what she might consider ideal. For the Denoons it had worked out rather oddly and bitterly, it had to be said, although they were living a life that by Iris’s standards had at least started out ideally. They were full-time against injustice wherever they could find it, and they had been lucky enough to find supporters who were living less than ideal lives and who were delighted to pay them for their efforts. So Nelson Denoon had founded a city of women in the heart of the Kalahari, where women ran the show and were ennobled and so on and where they inherited, as against the standard Tswana pattern, and all he had to say was bully for all concerned. Who wouldn’t love to found an actual city, given the opportunity and the resources, running according to one’s own notions and preferences? What human luck to be able to do that, found the most celebrated development project of the 1980s, place it in the hands of the beneficiaries, derive a splendid mate out of it, and go hand in hand off to some new venue of injustice, trailing clouds of glory, go to India, as they had done, India, constituting a buffet of injustices for them, a perfect place to go, castes, bonded labor, purdah or other woman’s problems, all of that. Iris adored them because they were wearing out their souls in the service of man. And she wanted to wear out her soul in the service of man, if it could be arranged, before it was too late, and she wanted him to do the same, if only obliquely, by for example writing poetry, an improving thing to do, something she could accept. He was being unfair.

  He said, “You didn’t bring your book for him to sign.” She owned a copy of Denoon’s Development as the Death of Villages.

  “That’s not why I’m here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I have her book, too.”

  “I know.”

  “I’d be embarrassed.”

  “I understand that.”

  Iris wondered aloud why the meeting was being held in such an inadequate setting and he told her that the Denoons were in bad odor with goromente for reasons not entirely clear to him. The government had put certain obstacles in their path. For example, they had been given a stingy, five-day-only visa. She wanted to know why. She was under the impression that the women’s colony he had established was a success, something the government was proud of.

  “Well, yes, a success, but it’s a success as a German plantation. That’s what it’s turned into, in effect. It’s true that a sort of female elite runs it for the Germans, but it’s not the same place it was. Grapple plant grows wild in the Kalahari and the Germans were buying all they could get to put in some aphrodisiac concoction. The biggest health food chain in Europe got involved. There was a boom. And then a collapse in all the growing areas except the one around Tsau. It’s a tuber and you have to leave half of it in the ground if you want it to regenerate, which is the way Denoon had taught the women at Tsau to proceed. The other foragers had just ripped the whole thing out of the ground. Anyway, so the Germans moved in on Tsau, gave them contracts … and paid plenty because devil’s claw, which is the other thing they call it, had gotten so scarce. Now it’s like gold. So Tsau is a little like a company town on the order of Hershey, Pennsylvania. The women are doing quite well. Some of them are married to Germans who’ve settled there. There’s a long waiting list to get in, and the female-line inheritance deal Denoon got the government to allow is a big draw, but it hasn’t spread anywhere else and it’s breaking down informally at Tsau. It’s very gentrified, compared to what it was. And the Denoons are unhappy with the way things have turned out and they are letting everyone know how they feel. So they won’t be making a visit to Tsau on this trip.”

  She said, “Hm. That’s sad. But why is the government being so unfriendly to them?”

  “Well, goromente is perfectly happy with the way Tsau is going. So that’s one thing. But it’s not mainly that. I think it’s because of what happened in India. Botswana wants to keep the Indian community here happy. They’re well off and they have a lot of influence. And the Denoons made trouble in India. They’re persona non grata there. They got kicked out of Poona. So—”

  “Yes, and kicked out when he was still convalescing. After what happened. And he’s still convalescing. I think it’s a scandal.” She looked at him. “You’re a cornucopia of information on almost any subject I raise, Ray. That’s lucky for me. I’m serious.” />
  “I try, my dear girl.” He lowered his voice to say that the file on the Denoons was huge.

  “I hope more people come, Ray.”

  “We’ll see. But anyway, I don’t know a lot about what happened in India. Essentially, he was invited out of Tsau because it was time for the women it had been meant for all along to take over. So she, Karen, came back from the States and took him by the hand and married him and when he told her he wanted to go to India she said fine, they would find something useful to do there. And so they did. You know what I know. They got into the movement against dowry murder. They plunged into it. She learned Hindi …”

  She said, “I wonder why she took his name, though. For a feminist, and one so prominent, it seems slightly strange. Do you have any idea why?”

  “Oddly enough, I do. Her true maiden name wasn’t the one she grew up with, Karen Ann Hoyt. That was the name her mother gave her, but it was an invention chosen because her mother thought it sounded classy, better than Dooley in any case. You may think it’s amazing I know all this, and it is, it is. Karen Ann hated her name, and that was because her mother, a simple person, at some point confessed to her that she had chosen Hoyt because it sounded like ‘hoity-toity.’ And the name Karen Ann had been copied from some local subdeb in the area who was always in the local news.”

  “What’s a subdeb?”

  “Subdebutante. I guess that term is out of use now. So she had reason to hate all her names. Her birth certificate reads Baby Girl Dooley. She dropped the Ann part of her name when she married Denoon. So now we have Karen Denoon and your question is answered.”

  “I understand the feeling of wanting to change your name. I don’t love my name. And I know what you’re going to say, Ray, so don’t bother. Also, thank you for telling me interesting things.”

  “What I was going to say was that I love your name. And I do.”