Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Tonight he had the back seat. For reading it was workable, but it was shallower and not as comfortable as the front seat. He had learned on this excursion that he could fall asleep in a propped-up position and stay asleep for as long as a couple of hours before cramping made him change his position. Also he had learned how inextricably connected, for him, reading and falling asleep had become. It was alarming. It had crept up on him and established itself and he had never noticed it because in his life, his normal life, there was always a surplus of reading matter. And now his ability to fall asleep for the immediate future reposed on his brother’s what, his bits and pieces, his ejecta, his literary essence supposedly, his literary effrontery, his posturings. It didn’t matter. He had sworn he would read through his brother’s corpus, this ragbag pretending to be a florilegium, whatever it was. He could be fair, but he knew what he was going to find, to wit, the debris of Rex’s ambition to be the gay Mencken, one, or two, the gay La Rochefoucauld, or both.

  He could begin anywhere. He could skip around from flotsam to jetsam. He had before him pages and pages of isolate phrases, sentences, paragraphs, each entry numbered, the numerals in ink, in differing hands, it looked like. There was plenty of white space. He had a twinge briefly relating to the fear that unless he rationed his reading, this collection wasn’t going to last him all that long. He was in a ridiculous position. The numbering of the different entries was not consecutive, which you would think meant that ultimately they would have to be reorganized consecutively, but according to what Rex had told Iris, no, the numbers were what, decorative. Iris had irritated him by referring to his brother’s slumgullion as a poem, some postmodern equivalent of the classic epic poems, some conceit like that which it would be no trouble to disprove. Strange News was something, but it was not going to be Milton.

  STRANGE NEWS, or BRIGHT CITIES DARKEN

  He began with the face page.

  12. Cries and Chants for Sale, with Indications of Their Possible Purchasers, in Some Cases

  Arm the Homeless!

  What do we want?

  We don’t know!

  When do we want it?

  Now! (for the younger set)

  All Together Now: Every Man for Himself! (Libertarians)

  Power to the Feeble! (Left)

  Reason’s Greetings! (atheists, holiday card)

  There was a note in the margin, in pencil, in his brother’s microscopic penmanship, which gave him a stab. Def.: the Homeless—Roofless Cosmopolitans, Rex had written.

  Ray saw that he was going to have to endure Rex’s penchant for antic capitalization.

  8. Types

  Fair-haired boy: a gonnabe

  118. Proof of God’s Love

  Proof God loves us is that he makes us deaf to the vile, wracking snores we emit that so torment those who choose to sleep beside us.

  That was odd, a synchronicity, given the sleeping situation he was stuck with. Synchronicity was boring. Keletso had an intermittent tendency to light snoring, to which Ray felt he had adapted pretty well, without complaining. He could sink directly back into sleep most of the time. It was part of life in the Kalahari. But what is life? he asked himself, taking a sheet of typescript at random from deeper in the stack of pages. I don’t like this, he thought, seeing what he had come up with. Strange News was turning into the I Ching on him. He resented it.

  359. Life Is …

  Life is a sentence of corporeal punishment. Or, Life is corporeal punishment. Life, passages of Sturm interrupted by sequences of Drang. From puberty to senility life is continuous foreplay interrupted with declining frequency by actual sex.

  So what he had before him was Rex’s desperate attempts to achieve wit, and then what, then use it as a hammer to smash the stale cake of custom plus the frozen lake within and all of that, all of that wrongness, Wrongness. But Rex was not the soul of wit. Twice he had gotten his column suspended because his bons mots had given offense to women, in one case when he’d referred to them as the leaky darlings, which alluded tastelessly to the fact that they menstruate and are sentimental and prone to weeping, and then in another case when he’d called them the Cleft Sex. He was reckless. Rex had been writing for gay publications, and Ray could see that he’d been attempting to carry off a sort of parody of old-hat gay attitudes toward women, but he’d misjudged his readers and the power the new literalism had over them. In the same spirit he had defined men as the Apposite Sex, but he hadn’t gotten in hot water over that. Probably people had just found it baffling and gone quickly past.

  I am not your editor, Ray wanted to say. But that was going to be the plot. He was designated to boil this froth down into a bouillon cube of near greatness, even if there was only enough for a chapbook of the best thrusts and gems, to be given away, distributed somehow to some population he had no idea how to identify or reach. But he had to, because Rex wasn’t well. There was strange news coming, bad news, and there was nothing he could do about it. This was what he could do. This was his fate, part of it. It was hard to credit.

  An unwelcome sound came from the front seat, followed by a few low-spoken unintelligible words of, conceivably, apology. Barely audible mutterings could be called mutterances, why not? Suppose I had turned my mind to producing glittering nothings like Rex’s, what would I have? he thought.

  He plucked out another sheet at random and there was more synchronicity for him, annoyingly. Entry 308 was death-related. Or more precisely, it was life-residue-related. He ought to stop the random selection business for a while. He was toying with some imaginary thing. It wasn’t good.

  308. In Memoriam: A Report

  I have to speak at her memorial service and what kills me is I can’t mention the one thing about her that was genuinely remarkable. I went with her for about six months in the seventies and after that I didn’t see her for years, so it’s not that I know that much about her. But I’m a celebrity so they want me, so I don’t mind. I understand it. But what I’ve never told anybody and what was really the only interesting thing I know about her is this. She had a weird talent. You’re lying down with her watching television and you have one of those moments when your color set goes black and white for no reason. This was before cable so you have no one to call up about it. You fiddle with the set every way you can but nothing corrects it. You even twiddle the little hidden knobs on the back. But this is what she would do. We discovered it by accident. The first time it was more an expression of exasperation than anything else. But this is what she could do. She could spread her legs and buck her pelvis hard at the thing. She would pull up her nightgown and do it, and by the way she had no panties on. But when she gives a couple of hard bumps or grinds, whichever, the color comes back. She did this at least four times. There must have been a rational explanation but we never figured out what it was. Somehow maybe it was some delicate condition in the wiring in her building. But just pounding on the wall behind the set did nothing. We laughed hysterically. I don’t know what I’m going to say about her unless I make something up.

  There you have nothing, he thought. He went back to working consecutively through the manuscript and immediately couldn’t believe his luck. There was an inclusion, something from Iris stuck in with his brother’s flotsam, something with her writing on it. This was Iris. This was the kind of thing she did.

  It was a Xerox of a Peace Corps document headed INTERRACIAL EXPERIENCE ASSESSMENT FORM. Across the top of it Iris had written Do you know what you have to go through in order to get into the Peace Corps and get sent to an African country? Somebody at the embassy got hold of this and is passing it around. I love you, Ray. Iris.

  You used to, he thought.

  Interracial Experience Assessment Form—Page One

  1. Recall your first significant interaction with a Black person. Describe the situation and your feelings at the time.

  Answer: My first significant interaction with a Black person was when I was five and ran away from home with a friend my age and we wen
t to the dock area, the harbor area, and a Negro dockworker gave us some of his lunch and called the police. My feelings were as follows. I felt relieved yet betrayed.

  2. What was the strongest fear you developed as a child about interactions with Black persons? Estimate how strong that fear is today.

  Answer: You might fall in love with a Negro and have children that would have a miserable life because neither race would accept them.

  That fear is much less strong since we began doing all the questionnaires and games, by far.

  At the bottom she had written Sorry I only have page one. Love again, Iris. He touched her name in both the places she had signed it.

  Sleep was being coy. A lot of what he had to read he was finding vaguely agitating. To convert Strange News into a pillow book he was going to have to separate out and consolidate the longer paragraphic entries, which tended to consist of various micronarratives, subanecdotal most of them, illustrating some hilarious defect or other in the mental landscapes of everyone in the world except the author-observer. It took narrative to put Ray to sleep. Narrative was the syrup. It wasn’t the sheer dynamics of reading that did it. Poems, even, needed some narrative weight to work. The Conversation entries were dubious, from the narrative standpoint, judging by what he was finding in them so far.

  19. Conversation

  Two guys had been drinking together.

  The slightly older of the two said, “My friend, I will confess something to you. My old friend, I find my children boring.”

  “Me too.”

  “So if we find our children boring, who is to blame, is it the peer culture, is it—”

  “Nononono. I wasn’t saying my children are boring. I was agreeing with you about your children.”

  “I see,” the older guy said.

  Ray thought, Here is the problem: This is not a joke: It’s on the verge of being a joke but it doesn’t arrive. Rex had something, but he wanted to be more, to be brilliant. There was a roster of the brilliant and there was a roster of the nonbrilliant and there was one for the formerly considered brilliant. Every serious writer considered any appellation other than brilliant an insult. If the word appeared, glittering, somewhere in a review, then any objections the review contained surrounding the word were nullified. They turned to mist. A brilliant failure was just fine. He was prepared to salute anything brilliant he found in Strange News. He meant it. He would be happy about it. This was Rex’s attempt at a monument and he was willing to help, more willing than he had been. His feelings were changing. How serious the core of Strange News was remained a question, but that was all right. He pitied serious writers. The best that ninety-nine percent of them could hope for was a glancing appearance in a survey course at lengthening intervals. Even Milton was dropping to survey status more and more, even at the graduate level. It was true. And the next step down would be the collateral reading in a survey course, the books only the strivers got around to. I was a striver, a Striver, he thought. And then it would be down to a footnote in a title in the collateral list. And then what, some academic trivia game. And then nothing. It was possible for a writer’s creation to be of academic interest solely for whatever influences could be seen in it of prior writers, more brilliant writers. That was life, the literary life.

  114. Untitled

  X decided to stay home and pass the time by counting his feet.

  Shall we watch TV?

  X said, “That’s what it’s for.”

  X said, “I really think people watch television

  because there’s too much to read.”

  Where are you going?

  “Out this door,” X said.

  It was clear that a penstroke had converted an original J to X. J would be Rex’s Joel, these were echoes of Joel.

  Not all were cases of camouflage, only some.

  His brother was sick. He could be dying. He could be dead. Ray couldn’t bear it. He would work with the fact that Strange News was a mélange, workroom scraps, with lame political shots and shafts that would get dated. Rex’s trust in a campaign of bons mots against the world’s evil was touching. He believed more in the power of the word than Ray did. Rex had no idea how solid the machine in the basement was. He was an innocent. Literature is humanity talking to itself, Ray thought. Rex thought it was more. Ridicule changed nothing. If its targets even noticed it, all it did was madden them. Ray had the beginnings of a fair collection of narrative-like entries to use for soporific purposes.

  There were little lists of enemies in different spheres of the arts that were going to be difficult for Ray to edit because so many of the names were unfamiliar to him. He had to be careful. Some categories could be combined, he supposed, like the Wisdom of the Mob and the Wisdom of the People entries. The Mob wasn’t the Mafia. The Overheards could remain, or most of them could.

  408. Overheard I

  At a party one time I asked who a familiar-looking ancient guy was. He could hardly stand up. X couldn’t remember his name but said he was a Yale Younger Poet.

  X said The best way to keep a secret is not to tell it to anyone.

  This is true. A woman I know went to a psychotherapist and was upset when the diagnosis she got was that basically she was too greedy.

  I feel so good after a high-fat meal I could run around the block and beat the shit out of somebody, unfortunately.

  Man and wife were buying sundries in a job-lot discount emporium. The woman filled her basket and took it to the counter to pay for her choices. Her husband, who was handling tools in the hardware section, suddenly ran up and added a hammer to her purchases. “We have a hammer,” she said. “So, I’m getting another one. It’s cheap.” “Why would we need two hammers?” “I’m getting this. We need it in case two people have to hammer at the same time.”

  Hey how about air burial for pilots and stewardesses and plane passengers who die in flight.

  It was more fun than eating on the roof.

  My penis is sensitive lately.

  Well I should hope.

  His problem is he can’t tell his anus from the Mammoth Cave or some other tourist attraction like that.

  Ray realized that he was encountering very little gay matter in Strange News. Has it been sanitized? he wondered. Because it would be logical to have something so central represented, if this was Rex’s true monument. Anything he could learn on the subject from Rex would be fine with him. But maybe there was nothing to learn and it was what it was and that was it. Something else was hanging over his efforts. He might as well acknowledge it. It was possible he was searching for something directed openly to him, some statement or apology or he didn’t know what, something.

  All he could do was doctor this chowder he had been given. A certain amount of shuffling was required. For example All Power to the Country Clubs! should go into the Cries and Chants for Sale section, and maybe Put Paid to Poverty! which he had apparently thought of as something appropriate to the British Labour Party. If the gay aspect had been left out by Rex himself, the reason might have been to make Ray love him as a soul, if he thought Ray held that against him. Ray was tired. Nobody likes to say goodbye, he thought. His eyes were burning. Tears rushed from my eyes, Keletso had said in some connection. That’s what he needed. There was a jingle going through his mind, ending mea culpa youa culpa din dan don, which was from “Frère Jacques,” the din dan don, if he was right. People separated from their siblings in childhood moved heaven and earth to find them, these days, to get back in touch. He knew he had been singing a deformed “Frère Jacques” to himself as mental background music. What could he do? He was far from sleep. Now his brother was trying to kill him with love, with guilt, with proof he should have appreciated him. Too much is enough, he thought. He would be able to sleep nevertheless. The span of time he could sleep soundly in untoward positions was lengthening. But sleep had to come knocking. We can be wrong, he thought. We can be wrong about anybody, he thought. His eyes were tearing, a little. It was the Titles sections th
at hurt the most, stung hardest, because presumably they stood for ideas for potential books, articles a healthy person might have attempted. The Importance of Being Important, The Future Assembles, All I Can Tell You Is This, The Urbane Guerrilla: Etiquette for Revolutionaries, and another similar one, Out to Luncheon: Notes Toward a More Elegant Mode of Disparagement … The Bungless Cask … Fumes from a Vial of Wrath … Flea Circus Rebellion. Rex tried things. He wasn’t afraid not to be great. I have to honor that, Ray thought. Pity was attacking him, threatening to fill him up. He was fatigued. There were animal eyes out in the darkness that flashed when he swept the flashlight beam around. They were low to the ground so were, presumably, attached to bush babies or some small and similarly unthreatening species. Ray pulled out a few narrative entries to read.

  803. Friends

  Two friends who worked in different departments of a Catholic orphanage met to talk. The kindergarten director had recently begun working additionally part-time in a different institution, a state mental health facility, one evening a week, teaching crafts to adolescent patients. She wondered if her friend might be interested in joining her.

  Sylvia, the art therapist, said, “You know, I might. It would be easy for me. You know what we did today, for example? I brought in shoe polish …”

  “What kind of a project can you do with shoe polish?”