Mortals

by Norman Rush

  And worse, and genuinely surprising to him, too, they had found smoke grenades in the compartment, two of them. He was too worn out to be enraged at Boyle or whoever the quartermaster had been who had equipped the vehicle. The smoke grenades had been somebody’s idea of a useful extra. They hadn’t bothered to mention them to him. Of course, he hadn’t been as scrupulous about inventorying the gun compartment as he should have. He had been slipshod. He hated guns.

  They had gotten him out of that tent not a moment too soon. The canvas was impregnated with insecticide and the fumes had been making him feel sick. Also, some solid creature in the soil under the tent floor had been trying to get into the tent, eat its way in. So it had been good to get out.

  He had to compose himself as well as he could for the serious interrogation he knew was coming. Technically, all he was required to supply would be his name, rank, and serial number. This was a war zone, so the Geneva Convention applied, he would say. The difficulty was that he had no rank and no number other than his Social Security number, which they could have if they wanted it. Frame of mind was what was critical for interrogation. He had to be calm.

  He was going to be calm. He should be able to be. He was fairly sure he knew where he was being taken. So there were unlikely to be surprises in that respect. It was the logical place, and if he had it right this little period of conveyal, which was not a word, conveyance was what he meant, would be over in less than an hour, at these speeds. He was all right. He was riding on events. Aside from the jolting he was taking, he didn’t mind the feeling. It was the polar opposite of entrepreneurship. There were drivers and passengers in the world, more of the latter than the former. And in his obscure and secret way he had been among the drivers. Whether or not Iris or anyone had ever fully appreciated it, he had lived a consequential life of more or less permanent effort, exertion, listening and matching and watching and putting two and two together. So he didn’t mind the feeling of reposing on events. It felt all right. Who was it, someone important in Africa, Livingstone, who had described relaxing into a sort of bliss when the jaws of a lion closed on his leg? And then the lion hadn’t eaten him. And if he remembered correctly it was because when he went limp he appeared dead to the lion and lions abhor carrion. He didn’t know if he was making that up. He forgot why the great man hadn’t been eaten.

  There was a vehicle closely following. He knew the sound of its engine by heart. It was the Cruiser. And that was favorable because it meant that it was still conceivable that they would dismiss him, tell him to drive off. With the Cruiser available, that could happen, that should calm him.

  They were changing direction, which fit with his notion of their destination. He had three tasks, to sum up. First, to remain calm. Second, to retain what he could about anyone who laid a hand on him or anyone else so he could give evidence against them, not that it would ever happen. These bastards were finished in this part of Africa anyway. He wondered if they knew it. This was their last roundup. Mandela was coming. Mandela was going to rule and these bastards would have to get out. Nobody would have them except warlords and other scum farther north. But that was number two, to be ready to testify. And his third task was to get hold of Strange News again. He could do it. He would consider violence to get it. No he wouldn’t. But he would get it.

  It made sense that the koevoet command center would be set up at Ngami Bird Lodge. That was the way they were headed. There was a lurid tale connected to Ngami Bird Lodge. It had failed. It was bankrupt. The facility was shuttered and empty but not derelict. It was in litigation. But the infrastructure was intact, the generators, food stores, and so on. And, ah yes, it had a landing strip.

  It was famously grandiose. Iris had wanted to see it, the mock-Moorish buildings, the rock gardens done by a famous landscape artist, date palms, chalets so-called, a zoo, if he remembered correctly. It had been built on the edge of a famous pan where flocks of birds came and the migrating wildebeests and the others. And then the drought had come. The pan had dried up. There was no birdwatching to be done. Pink marble facing had been trucked in from South Africa for the main building, he remembered.

  There was more to the story. His knowledge of it was a cartoon, though. An English lord, the last of a noble lineage, had blown his patrimony on Ngami Bird Lodge and on a celebrity tart, a Coloured lounge singer supposedly then the toast of the Cape Town demimonde. He had brought her into the Kalahari to be the lodge’s chatelaine. Then he had proceeded to drink himself into irrelevance as the project failed. There were remarkable things about the woman, the main one being that she had had devil horns strategically tattooed on her lower belly so that they appeared to be emerging from the top of her pubic escutcheon, had been the story. English eccentricity had come into it too. The earl had commissioned the creation of something called a sand fountain, a monumental device and the only one of its kind in the world. It had never been constructed. Aside from the drought, the lodge had been affected by the accelerating collapse of apartheid. The idea had been to create a mini-rival to Sun City that ethical tourists and gamblers and birdwatchers could visit in good conscience. But apartheid had faltered spectacularly. There had been a shooting, the earl was having a prolonged recovery somewhere in Dorset, and the woman had escaped justice and gone back to singing in bars in South Africa.

  So, finally, he would get to visit Ngami Bird Lodge. Unfortunately he was going to be blindfolded during his visit. But that was life.

  30. Tomorrow It Would Be Combat

  He was where he had predicted to himself he would be, on the grounds of the Sand Castle, that being the original name for what became Ngami Bird Lodge. It had been abandoned when one of the backers of the project had pointed out the negative associations the name carried.

  His home, for the time being, was a storage room twenty by twenty laterally by eight or so feet floor to ceiling. He was obligated to think about escape possibilities, even though he had just arrived, and he was sorry to have to say that the possibilities looked dim. The zinc panels forming the ceiling were laid over gum tree pole joists and securely fastened to the joists via wire lashings run through perforations in the metal. This was a solid structure. The walls were cement block. He had stamped on the softwood planking of the floor. It was chewed up and featured a display of standing splinters here and there, but it was in good shape. The planking had been pressed directly into the concrete footing. Clearly, heavy equipment had been stored in this space. There were oil and grease stains in the flooring.

  It’s roomy, at least, he thought.

  The place was windowless but a pittance of light came in through nine vent slots irregularly distributed along the tops of the walls. It would be possible to push an arm through, assuming he could get up that high. He had managed to get a look into the one over the double doors to the shed by climbing up the cross braces on the inside of the doors while hanging on to a ringbolt set into the lintel. He had just gotten his eyes level with the opening, discovering that crushed wads of fine-mesh screening had been jammed into the slot to discourage ingress by animals and the heavier, more ungainly insects. So now he knew that much. There were hooks and other ringbolts screwed into the walls at shoulder level in no particular pattern.

  His furnishings were basic, limited to a red plastic bucket lacking a lid or cover of any sort, and his pallet, a twin-size canvas sack filled with chopped maize husks. In fact there were three more pallets, so it was possible that he should be expecting company. He wouldn’t mind company. No blanket had been provided, but the pallets were wide and could, he supposed, be doubled over if it got cold. He would see. He understood why it was that his captors didn’t want him to have a blanket. They were afraid he might do something untoward with it.

  They were still treating him acceptably, he would say. They had given him a plastic water bottle, half full, and a Cadbury chocolate bar, hazelnut, the jumbo.

  He wanted to wash up. Tomorrow he would see if they’d allow it. He wanted his toothbrush. He woul
d ask about that tomorrow, too. He’d try to present his requests all at the same time. It was a good idea to group his requests together, to avoid bothering them repeatedly.

  He wanted his belt back, which they had taken. But that was delicate. There was a hyperthin carbon steel saw blade sewn into it. They were unlikely to discover it. But he didn’t want them handling his belt unnecessarily. He truly needed his belt. His jeans were loose about the waist. He was losing weight. He would have to improvise something. He had known they would take his belt. It was standard procedure.

  He was in his stocking feet. They had taken his boots. It was the laces, primarily, that they wanted him not to have. They could have unlaced his boots, or de-laced them, but it was easier for them to simply take them. Well, they were busy.

  He had made one pleasing discovery. If he pressed hard enough against the closure line of the massive double doors to the shed he could create a slit of a view. There was a deadbolt lock on the doors, but there was enough play in the wood and the hinges and enough slippage along the bolt to allow him to see … another wall, the wall of another building a couple hundred feet away, a pinkish wall.

  It was almost night. He hated it to be night so soon after he’d been liberated from his blindfold. He would be in pure and total darkness until morning came. But there was nothing he could do. And logic told him that the blindfold would be back.

  Night had come. He was tired of listening for anything that might tell him something. There were voices but they were too far away. Nothing was happening. Vehicles were coming and going. A generator had been started up and was chuffing along.

  He had eaten half of his chocolate bar. He had a back tooth that was sensitive to sweets. Rinsing his mouth out sparingly hadn’t helped. He had scrubbed his teeth with the tail of his shirt. That was the best he could do. At last his sensitive tooth was quieting down.

  He was facing a trial, tonight. It was minor, but it was real to him. He was lying down, his arms folded on his chest, considering how he could slide toward sleep with nothing to read. What he had for a pillow book was Strange News, if he could get it back from these villains. It was somewhere here on the grounds of this madhouse. He almost felt like escaping for the sole purpose of getting hold of it and a flashlight. And having them, he would be willing to creep back into his cell and not complain for a while. Of course if he asked outright, they would be more convinced than ever that his brother’s manuscript was sinister.

  Tomorrow it would be combat. He had to sleep.

  He had to conquer his thirst by not thinking about it. He was thirsty. He wanted to save most of his water for the morning.

  He was a husband. Every path he took swung around and led to her and so to guilt and worry and wakefulness. Every path did.

  It wasn’t the agency, his life in the agency, that filled him with agitation. He had conducted that life in a certain way that fell short of being shameful. Regret was one thing and shame was another. If everyone in the agency had conducted himself as delicately, as carefully, as he had … then the agency would have been an innocent ineffective waste of the taxpayers’ money. Unless he was overly flattering himself, that was true. He had lived a Kantian life in the agency, for the most part, unless he was flattering himself again. There were certain parish priests in the Roman church who winked at everything and did palpable good while the mother church rolled on telling poor devils never to use condoms on pain of hell.

  That wasn’t exactly the analogy he wanted. There were better ones. But the fact remained that he could think about it without falling into shame and despair, and he would think about it, later. There would probably be time.

  No, it was Iris he had to keep his mind away from, his failure with her, the great failure of his life.

  He needed the right mental games. Earlier he had tried one game and it had failed him.

  He had played Backwardation for a while. Backwardation he owed to his brother, whose ability to pronounce words in reverse had shown up at an absurdly early age, during his prodigy phase. It had been pretty remarkable and Rex had flaunted it, with the help of their parents, of course. And of course Rex had been challenging about it to his older brother, and as his older brother, Ray had been unable to elude the challenge. There had been various ways to lose to Rex, having to do with the length of words as well as the rapidity with which they were successfully reversed.

  They had been out walking in the neighborhood when Rex had begun reading street signs backward, just like that, in his piping little voice. At first it had only been street names and the names of landmarks and points of interest. Nedlit Krap, he remembered, Tilden Park, had been a very early success of Rex’s. But then there had been Llihtoof Draveluob and on and on.

  So he had played Backwardation briefly earlier, giving it up for a couple of reasons. He had seemed to be unable to keep the place names he was backwarding, African place names being the category he had chosen for himself, unable to keep them from getting closer and closer to home, to Gaborone, to his neighborhood, their street, their neighbors, and ultimately to Siri Hcnif herself, the evol of his efil. He would try something else.

  One thing he could do was settle the question of what the best food, the best taste, was, the best-tasting food, in the world.

  He thought about it and decided that the answer was bacon, crisp, hickory-smoked. That was if only one single food could be chosen. But if foods could be combined, then it would have to be ripe avocado slices on freshly baked whole wheat bread, with olive oil, with shreds of red onion, and with fresh-ground pepper and sea salt. Which would be very good with the crisp bacon on it. And this was a mistake. He was salivating. And it wasn’t a game.

  But there could be a game connected to food. One had just suggested itself. The game would be to convert great literary names into main dishes. Salmon Rushdie would be an example. And there was Rice Edgar Burroughs.

  There could be Bacon Francis, of course.

  Nothing was coming. Rex would be an ace at this. The problem was that this was not a game they would ever play. Rex was dead. He knew it. And if he was, it was too much.

  There could be Oats Joyce Carol or it could be simply Joyce Carol Oats.

  Some people, like Rex, were very good at games, and other people were not. He was not, himself, very good at games. He was very good at a game no one knew he was playing, or almost no one, only the people who paid him. So there was that.

  Ermine Melville was a possible, if people ate that animal. Probably in the Middle Ages they had. In the Dark Ages they ate anything.

  Lamb Charles and Dorothy was too easy.

  Another possible would be Edgar Allan Po Boy, after the New Orleans sandwich made with oysters and something else and with hot sauce. They were supposedly delicious.

  He had run out of anything presentable. He was going to reject Edgar Allan Poi and Sole Bellow and Spuds Terkel and Graham Greens.

  He thought of what he should do next. It was an exercise and not a game, but it would work. It was something Iris had come up with. The point of the exercise was to recapture the feeling of utter fatigue and physical constriction that passengers suffered on endless nonstop transatlantic flights like the one from New York to Johannesburg, seventeen hours with one brief refueling moment at Ilha do Sal. They had taken that flight together how many times? And the trick was to remember the yearning and envy everyone felt toward the flight crew, whose members could take shifts napping full length on foam rubber pallets in a special compartment. And then the trick was to identify your own present ability to be lying flat in the bed you were tossing and turning in with what it would have felt like to be permitted to lie flat sometime during the last three or four hours of that flight. All paths led to his girlfriend.

  He put himself in the plane again, with Iris beside him. Unconsciousness would sweep toward him now. It had begun to move. It would have him in no time.

  31. Beware Me

  His first formal interrogation was about to begin. He was in pl
ace. It was morning, still early.

  Early rising was the order of the day. He was famishing for light, because the gap between coming awake and being blindfolded for the day’s business had been disappointingly narrow, a blink. He was under the impression that they would dispense with the blindfold when he was on his own in the cell, as they had yesterday. So far, the drill being imposed on him was straightforward. When the banging on the door began, the prisoner was to rise and go to stand at the far side of the room, back to the door, hands high on the wall. Then came the blindfolding. And then came a little breakfast, cold maize porridge in a tin bowl which he had been expected to eat with his fingers, a cup of tepid bush tea. There had been two people in his cell, a male to handle the blindfolding and the cuffing, and a female server. Their voices, in the fragmentary exchanges between them, in her murmurs, had told the story. She had guided him to rinse his hands in a basin of water, after drizzling a substance like Phisohex on them. And then his hands had been cuffed behind him.

  He had been expected to remain standing for eating and ablutions, such as they were. All he could say was that his captors seemed to be following some definite set of standards of treatment. This was not, as yet, chaos and the fiery pit. The woman had been in a state of fear, though.

  They had led him across open ground to the main building. He had counted exactly two hundred and twelve paces between his cell and this venue, a room, probably a bedroom. What he had picked up in ambient noise on the way over was mundane. There was poultry somewhere around. There were a few dogs. Someone had blown a police whistle. Confused shouting had gone on elsewhere in the building he was in, but briefly. That was all he had.