Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Wearily and almost gently Quartus said something about teasing being pointless and about his not enjoying this situation no matter what anyone might think, and then he began screaming at Ray, from a distance of a few inches. It was one more redundant demonstration of florid unpredictability, niceness turning into hell without warning. Never think you know when you can relax, is what it said. He was putting his heart into it.

  Briefly Ray lost the power to follow the thread. His lightheadedness was coming and going. It was cumulative, being hit. And he was hungry. The burden of the diatribe was that there would be no further discussion of who Ray was. There was no time for that. It was Strange News they were going to discuss because the truth of Ray’s assignment was buried in those pages. Quartus seemed to have convinced himself that everything in Strange News was somehow coded, that it was a master document, a skeleton key to the uprising, something like a set of instructions. Together they were going to tear it apart, he was saying.

  He was sorry for Quartus. How could he conceivably get what Strange News was, lacking any acquaintance with the genre, which, say, Coleridge’s Notebooks would be a reasonable example of, lines like My Bowels shall sound as an Harp interspersed with all sorts of oddments and sentiments like Let us contend like the Olive and the Vine to see which can bring forth the best fruit rather than contending like wild beasts or whatever the negative comparison had been. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t be expected to remember everything. Also it would be a safe bet that Quartus had never bumped into, say, a reproduction of the Mayan Codex, which Strange News with its sequences of enigmatic bits and pieces reminded Ray of, sort of. And then there were the nosegays the French made, bêtisiers? compilations of everyday grotesqueries and stupidities. Intelligent people spent their entire academic careers staring fruitlessly at items like the Mayan Codex.

  Iris adored Michael Ventris, or was it the type, the type being any academic lucky enough to decipher a dead language that had resisted the best efforts of generations of other scholars, to the eternal disappointment of their particular wives. He knew he was making assumptions about Quartus’s educational history, the man at best graduating secondary school in some pathetic dorp before his descent into the maelstrom of military life … But he was sure he was right.

  “My memory is not what it was, right now,” Ray said, eliciting a sound of disgust from Quartus. I am not making complete sense, Ray thought.

  “I’m a teacher,” Ray said. He knew it was disconnected of him. But he was sincere. It felt urgent to keep saying it. Thin places were appearing in his what, his thought-flow, thin places or bleached places. Quartus needed to be careful with him. Quartus knew that. Unconscious he would be useless to Quartus. And they were being careful with him. All hands were aware of that, all hands on deck. They were observing limits. Being white was a significant protection. It was a fact. There was nothing he could do about it. This was a drôle d’interrogation, so far, and a good match to the drôle de reconnaissance he had been conducting in the bush himself, when he had been so rudely interrupted.

  Quartus and his beast were consulting in murmurs. They could do their worst, even kill him if they wanted to. He was even curious to see how far they were going to go. It was a feature of the situation, was all. He was ready to fight them, and to fight them adequately he had to look ten steps ahead, at death, and not be afraid.

  Out of nowhere came thoughts of his mother, overwhelming him. It was a deluge. He didn’t often think about his mother. They kept in touch in a nominal way, with Iris doing most of that. It could be that all the death business was making him regress. But there was something else, an insight utterly new to him. It was that the secret key to his mother’s whole mode with Rex had been her fear that Rex was a potential suicide. Iris had described his mother as stupid but not shallow, which was about right. So all his mother’s favoritism might have come out of, had come out of, an apprehension about something that happened with gay adolescent boys at a rate far above the average. She had sensed something in Rex, an inclination. It would have been instinctual with her. She had sensed it in him when he was little. Dealing with Rex had been a campaign to keep him willing to carry on living, however annoyingly he needed to conduct his life in order to enjoy the process. And of course now, with the virus, it was conceivable that he would take his life, or had, probably had, fulfilling her fear, her intuition. He was dead, his brother was, his little brother.

  Ray was struck from behind, on the top of the head. It was bad.

  And then he was struck again, on the back of his neck, on the skin. He had been hit by a fist armed with rings. They had made him bleed. He had been struck with that intent. It didn’t take much of a cut to produce enough blood to be alarming. Blood was sliding down his spine. Breaking his skin had been the point, to establish that they were willing to do that to him. They had multiplied his problems, too. Now he would have to worry about infection, take that worry back to his cell with him. They knew that. He had to try to keep his neck immobile or as close to immobile as he could, so that the clotting would start. This last blow had been a demonstration. He knew what it was about. It was to create intimacy. His wound had lips. He was supposed now to be really afraid. They would see. They would see.

  He would take the initiative. If they wanted to talk about Strange News he would lead the way. Quartus had moved the card table closer, Ray had heard him doing it. There was a way to quell, to overcome, a feeling of impending faintness that he had learned in an agency workshop, if he remembered correctly. But he couldn’t remember the particular move, the trick, no, only that he had been taught one. He could hear Quartus preparing, pulling pages out and talking to himself, reminding himself of questions he had. So far, only Quartus’s assistant had physically abused him. They were preserving a distinction. It was fine to think of Quartus’s assistant as his beast, his creature, his beast. But the true beast was Quartus, who was about to destroy something he needed to think about, his mother and his brother, his new thought, the light it shed. He couldn’t do it there and then. He had to get the interrogation over with so he could think.

  He said, “You think Strange News is something it isn’t. Because, look, it isn’t anything. It’s literary, you could think of it as a codex …” Ray knew immediately that he had chosen the wrong word, the wrong word.

  “A codex,” Quartus said, weightily, and spat, on the floor, doubtlessly, a good sign confirming that keeping the room neat and clean for extended use was not a concern, which in turn meant that this would be over sooner rather than later, if he was correct and not grasping at straws. He was outsmarting himself. He had wanted to attack the question of what Strange News was without using the term postmodern, and he had chosen a bad alternate route. Obviously what Quartus had heard in codex was code.

  Ray said, “No, look, a codex is just a certain kind of manuscript volume with certain materials in it in a disorganized state, materials we may not immediately understand, exactly … for example, there are a couple of them left by Leonardo da Vinci full of stuff that’s still mysterious to us. That’s all I meant. By codex.” There is such a thing as too much education, Ray thought.

  Ray continued, “I want you to understand what this is, meneer.” It was dubious, calling Quartus by his own term of mock respect. He felt a little insane doing it. But he had to call him something.

  “What this is is a work of art, by my brother …”

  “And where is the name of the author, then …”

  “It doesn’t have a standard title page. It’s just a manuscript. But his name is Rex Finch.”

  “I don’t see it here. Very strange.”

  “Take my word for it. And it’s a work of literary art and that’s all it is …” Quartus laughed nastily. “Em … so what does he mean by patriotute? What is that?”

  “Well, someone who … well it could mean someone who sells himself to the nation, or it could be someone who sells the nation itself, I suppose. It isn’t exactly clear. There ar
e a number of coinages of his in there. Pollutician is another one. Mostly they’re clear enough.”

  “And why is it given number four hundred, meneer, that number?”

  “No idea.”

  “And here, this little story, what does it mean, about the chap who is a blood giver, blood donor as you term it, but then here he says he’s through with it because he’s afraid his blood might go to someone who voted for your President Reagan, since there is no way to prevent that? What sort of story is that, meneer? A man who hates your greatest president in this century, isn’t it? I tell you I pray God will send South Africa such a man.”

  “Well, that story is about someone with strong feelings against our former president, obviously. My guess is it’s probably a true story, something my brother heard somebody say.”

  How he could be having what resembled a regular conversation on a political topic with someone who was torturing him was a question of its own. Reagan, the amazing Reagan, had acquired a universal cult following. The left reviled him, but the great mass of everything to the right of the narrow left loved and adored him, why? Was it because he was a mirror figure unaccountably raised to power and getting away with it, an amiable man with about five simple beliefs … astrology, the Second Coming, America Columbia the Gem of the Ocean the Greatest Country in History, succeeding in business being proof positive of virtue and genius, what else? Oh, never changing his mind … And he was always optimistic. Nothing got him down. He had luck, geopolitically. The Russians had imploded, or started to, during his tenure. People worshiped good luck.

  Quartus said, “So what is this, number twenty-five, A specimen of surprise is to discover on your wife’s buttocks handwriting in ballpoint pen in letters of a minute size?” Ray had detected embarrassment in Quartus’s reading of the entry.

  Ray didn’t know what to say, other than, “I don’t know. It’s an image, something that seemed funny to him …”

  The blood drying on his back was making it itch. Stuck away somewhere among the things Iris had packed for him was an aluminum backscratcher with a collapsible handle, a Japanese novelty, something he could count on to be there as unfailingly as his nail clippers and his chloroquine. She loved him. She was wonderful with splinters. What would he do? His bleeding reminded him of something, Iris when she’d cut the palm of her hand slightly in the kitchen and had come to him holding her palm out and saying, Hey I’m getting stigmata … It must be our relationship. There had been a storm of clues about trouble coming and he had just stood there in it.

  Quartus and his hitting-beast were consulting in murmurs. Ray interrupted them. He needed to speak rapidly. “I’ll tell you something you’re right about, if you let me.

  “And it’s this. You’re right there’s a puzzle in this manuscript. In a way it’s a bigger puzzle to me than it is to you, and you can believe that or not. My brother … somewhere in these lines is his soul as he wanted me to see it. That’s what I think. So very good, ask me questions. Maybe it will help. Because the truth is I treated my brother badly. I was unfair. I was ignorant.”

  “You are talking shit. I have no time for this.”

  “Do you have a brother?”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “Why do I have the feeling you do? I think you come from a very large family. I just think that.”

  “It is no business of yours.” The man was roaring.

  “I hear you,” Ray said.

  “This is shit you are talking,” Quartus said, but Ray thought he was detecting a hairline crack in the man’s vehemence, a wavering, as though he might be considering letting Ray go on wandering in this area on the chance it would lead to something productive.

  “I was not the friend my brother needed. That may be the message in these pages, I don’t know. Maybe you can help me.” Ray felt himself edging into a certain state. He was a little aside from himself. He was a companion to his speaking self, for the moment. He sounded unafraid to himself, strong, even.

  “Also I believe he’s dead. There it is. Here we are. Oh and by the way, yes he is what you would call a poefter, my brother. Yes indeed. But he’s dead. Or so I believe. No, he is.”

  The beast was objecting to the turn things were being allowed to take. He was grumbling and hissing. “He must shut it,” he was saying repeatedly.

  Ray said, “And he was no fool, my brother Rex.” He wanted them to know that. He wanted it said.

  “I’ll tell you how he made his living. Listen to this. He thought of things. He sold ideas. How many people can do that and live on it? He’s a clever bugger. Or he was, rather. Why don’t I just stay with the past tense, since he’s dead?

  “For example, did you ever see, in the early eighties, about, a comedy series The Triumphs of Inspector Lestrade, on television? Granada television, British, but it was shown all over the Commonwealth, like Mr. Bean was, which I know they had on in South Africa. Lestrade was my brother’s idea. He sold it to the producers.”

  A snort of disgust from Quartus or the other was his only reply. Ray didn’t care. Rex deserved credit. The concept, built on reversals, was clever. In the series the thickheaded Inspector Lestrade of the Doyle stories was instead a brilliant Scotland Yard detective perennially harassed by a bumbling, intruding, fantastical screwball Sherlock Holmes, a formerly celebrated consultant to Scotland Yard who had gone off the rails through cocaine abuse. That was the nut of it. Lestrade had provided a steady trickle of money to Rex, culminating in a really handsome lump-sum payment during the ultimately abortive run-up to a feature film version of the property. Ray had never wanted to know the details. He had avoided paying close attention to his brother’s coups and deals, out of envy, pure and simple. And he had erected an unjust caricature of his brother as someone who scanned the world for literary cultural figures people got pleasure out of and turned them into figures of fun. He had seen him as a specialist in mockery, a mercenary specialist in mockery, but where had that come from? There was only Lestrade, as an exhibit. And Rex thought of things and gave them away, too, he should remember. For example he had given away gratis the idea for a short subject consisting of three or four minutes of banal family drama and twenty minutes of credits, a thing that had been a hit for somebody in art house cinemas during the period when movies of sleeping people, Warhol movies, had been in vogue. The film had won a prize, in those stupid days when prizes were awarded for flies crawling up walls. He wanted to tell his brother something. He was sorry for certain things. People had apparently found the movie with tedious credits hilarious. And Lestrade looked like becoming a permanent cult item. His brother’s name was there forever in the credits, which was immortality of a sort, more than he himself would ever have. Rex had probably been looking for a reaction from him, anything, and he hadn’t given one. He was sorry.

  He said, “It’s a parody of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It makes an idiot out of Sherlock Holmes. You can rent it.”

  It was oddly interesting to return to Lestrade, which, of course, had been a delayed attack on his own personal boyhood cult of Sherlock Holmes. He had wanted to be Sherlock Holmes.

  Quartus said, “That’s enough.”

  “This is interesting. You watch television. Of course you do. It’s on videocassette. Maybe you’ve seen it.

  “By the way, the whole thing was an attack on me. Because Holmes was a hero of mine. I was bookish. I read all the Holmes stories over and over and forward and backward, really. When I’d read them all I was very depressed that there weren’t any more of them. Anyway, my brother made Holmes an idiot, in this series. And he made the true hero gay, by the way, a poefter, to you. Ah well …”

  He was struck on the neck. It was pro forma.

  He hadn’t thought about his Sherlock Holmes phase in years. It had been important. He had saved money in his adolescence to buy a book of pastiches of the Holmes stories, a limited edition, by a man named August Derleth. They had supposedly been the best of the pastiches produced by fans
of Holmes who wanted more. But they had been inadequate. Reading them had made him feel worse.

  “This is real,” he said. They wouldn’t get it.

  Another hit to the neck came, more a swipe than a hit.

  He was having insights, ridiculously. He understood something that had been pestering him. He had made a deduction. Recently he had developed a slight mania to have something in his right hand to grasp, like a tube of Chap Stick or a pen cap. It was the recurrence of a mild grasping mania that had surfaced earlier in his life during periods of stress, although mania was too strong a term for it. Out in the Kalahari it had resurfaced and it had only defined itself as a problem when he had to take over the driving, because he needed the use of both hands, obviously. He had never inquired into it, this tic. It had been transient enough that he had never bothered to ponder where it came from. He was feeling the need just then, even. It was present. But now he understood why.

  “You know what,” he heard himself saying, stupidly.

  He ignored a shouted question about Toromole, another one. Because what he was onto was much more interesting. It was as though lights on the bottom of a swimming pool had been switched on, showing various bodies in the depths, some moving, some not. It was as though the light pouring up was hot and was showing or melting little frozen scenes from his early life, his early boring life. He wanted to look at these things but stay safely above them. Scenes starring himself were lighting up, saying Hi. This was nothing Quartus could understand. He felt like calling him Watson, but he wouldn’t. It would be funny to address Quartus as My Dear Fellow, except that it wouldn’t, it would only mystify him more.

  There was another slap. Quartus said something unclear. Ray’s ears were ringing. They were interrupting his thoughts.