Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Now the gripping-tic could go away. It might. He knew where it came from. In his boyhood he had owned and loved a little lead toy, a rocket ship, blue and white, with minute pulley wheels set between the top fins so that Buck Rogers could be sped along a taut length of string to get him to wherever he and Wilma and Doctor Huer had to be. He had loved Buck Rogers. And he had loved the goddamned rocket ship, and somehow clutching it had gotten associated over time with falling easily asleep. It had been an intermittent practice but it had persisted as he what, adolesced, persisted longer than it should have because it was so inconspicuous a thing to do. It was his version of a teddy bear. He had pretty much forgotten about all this. He had hung on to the rocket ship and how peculiar was that considering that millions of grown Greek men never leave home without their worry beads, which in his humble opinion was not so far out of the rocket ship bailiwick?

  And he had kept his ship cached in a tobacco pouch nailed to the wall behind the headboard of his bed, cached along with kid contraband like the occasional cigarette that had come his way and his first condom, lonely thing sitting there endlessly. And then at some point his ship had disappeared. And he had known in his heart it was Rex. There had been no one else to suspect. And all his maneuvers to force him to confess had failed. And the option of bringing it up with their mother had been unthinkable. How old had he been when it had happened? He didn’t know, but old enough for the issue to be a humiliation. And he had done a magnificent job repressing all this until now, if he did say so himself.

  He was thinking of thanking Quartus for the insight when he was slapped smartly on the mouth. His face was going to swell. The level of pain was rising and was not as episodic as he would have liked. He wasn’t cooperating. They were saying that.

  What else was there about the rocket ship and why had all this disappeared until now? Well, in fact, the ship had been the size of a solid, erect penis, or a little under, but as a proxy penis it certainly made sense. Deep in his soul he had been terrified of masturbation. He had been so infrequent a masturbator as a boy he hardly qualified for the title. He had been afraid. From their mother had come the message that the practice was terrible and weak and it had somehow gotten firmly into his mind that losers masturbated and that winners in the life game didn’t because they didn’t need to. And then of course the fact was that his brother had been a precocious and florid masturbator, not that their mother had known anything about it, but Rex had gone out of his way to let Ray know what was going on with him. MASTURBATION IS SELF-RAPE was something he had seen written on a bathroom wall in junior high.

  This must be therapy, he thought. He was going to change his opinion about therapy.

  “This is therapy,” he said, not that Quartus would understand. He didn’t care, and said, “I don’t care about much that much.” He wasn’t making sense.

  Quartus was saying something about Cuba Ray couldn’t follow. He had a headache, so his head was hurting from the inside out as well as from the outside in, from the hits and smacks it had taken.

  Apparently Quartus had found something about Cuba in Strange News. Ray was tired, but it would be good if he could somehow point out to Quartus that he was being inconsistent in the way he handled the material in Strange News. Because on the one hand he was claiming everything was coded and on the other he was picking out statements like the statements about Reagan that he regarded as openly subversive, inflammatory. So how logical was it that his brother’s book was both things at once? It was too subtle, though. Also how could he explain his brother’s cold eye on certain anecdotes that were bound to strike Quartus as leftish, but that Rex was registering for purposes of mockery, like the one that was very deadpan about the young woman who had abandoned her master’s thesis on Sartre after she realized he was a smoker, a chain-smoker, abandoned it halfway through. Nothing is simple, he thought, Rex’s attitude toward Cuba was focused on Castro’s antigay policies. But all Quartus was seeing was the word Cuba. One thing Ray knew was that Cuba was the only country in the world where married men were required by law to do one-half of the housework. That was just a fact. It didn’t relate to what he wanted to say. He was too tired.

  Quartus seemed far away. His voice was rubbery, going from close to far or from loud to soft. It was stretching away from him. Ray needed to steady himself. He thought of singing a slow song inside his mind, like “Old Man River.” He made himself do it.

  The oddness passed. He felt steadier. Although it would be good not to think about rivers, water, brooks, because he was thirsty. He had to steer his thoughts away from that.

  Nothing was going on, suddenly. He was alone there.

  It was boring, waiting. He wanted them to come back. He wanted to see what they would do next. In fact he wanted them to do their worst and get it over with. There was plenty they could do, even if they were trying hard to keep from marking him up too much.

  They hadn’t pushed his head back and poured water down his nostrils, for example. They were playing, petting him. The thought depressed him. He was violating his own rule about not thinking about water.

  I need to concentrate on my distractions, he thought. He resumed listening conscientiously for anything interesting going on in the vicinity. He could make out music distantly issuing from a radio or cassette player and it was “Rivers of Babylon,” a song he knew, sung by Boney M, a soft reggae piece that had gotten popular in southern Africa and been immortalized on the background-music tape loop that was never changed year after year at the President Hotel.

  He had to conceal from them how thirsty he was, when they came back. He would think about water but try to extract something from the images if he could, instead of suffering from them. He could try it, anyway.

  He would let himself relive going to Orcas Island with Iris, years ago, in August, on vacation. The San Juan Islands constituted a terrestrial paradise. They always would be, for him, a drenched, moist paradise, emerald-green humps sticking up from the gray waters of Puget Sound, silken, the waters, in some places and in other places herringbone. They had stayed at the Rosario Hotel, a rara avis of a hotel, a hybrid of mission style and art deco, built on the beach of an inlet, steep green hills making an amphitheater around the harbor, the jetties, the pleasure craft.

  And at first, when there was no sun, they were unhappy. But then they had gotten more than used to the cloudiness, the fog, the periods of soft rain, the mist sticking in the tops of the firs until noon every day and then lifting. So it had been an apotheosis of succulence, moisture, and they had embraced it.

  And they had walked everywhere on the one-lane roads of the hiking paths forking through jungles, evergreen jungles was what they were, the deadfall so thick you had to stick to the trails. And then coming on the little vestpocket farms with chive-green meadows and a few cows or sheep for decoration. Every shade of green was represented perfectly somewhere on Orcas Island. So then the one time they had ventured off the marked trail and gone wandering through the brush they had stumbled on an abandoned cottage, abandoned for some time obviously because the firewood in its crib had rotted away and there were furnishings going to pot visible through the windows, and then she had found a tricycle completely involved in vines, abandoned in the yard, invisible until she almost tripped over it. And that had been melancholy for her. And for him.

  She was tender. When they had hiked to the top of Mount Constitution and then climbed to the top of the observation tower on its summit, the thing she took away from the experience was not the magnificence of the view but pity for the ranger on the top platform who obviously had to answer the question hundreds of times a day if a particular piece of the landscape was Vancouver Island or not, an unnecessary question because everything was explained by the very clear map under glass fixed to the platform railing. But still people asked. It was not Vancouver Island. It was obvious it wasn’t.

  He had never liked cod until then. True cod, it was called, they had eaten. And they had visited a kelp farm, some
thing he had never known existed until then. Her lips had tasted of salt.

  She understood what was wrong with repetition of experience, vocationally. She understood why he had never wanted to be just the one thing, a teacher, for that reason. She had understood about what the agency work had meant to him. The agency had provided him a receptacle, a chamber, a secret chamber where what was going on was not boring. Secret adultery would undoubtedly accomplish the same thing for other people. He wanted to think about something else.

  He thought, Everything ends … The ferry to Anacortes comes and you have to get on it and go back.

  His thirst was better, somehow.

  They were back and doing names again. When he denied knowing a name he could expect to be hit on the legs with the knot.

  His legs were hurting. He thought he might acknowledge knowing one or two names, just for the respite he might get. He had been asked about Dwight Wemberg and he had denied knowing him. But that now seemed dumb, because their paths could logically have crossed in Gaborone. He would say that he’d been mistaken and that now he remembered.

  Quartus was close to him, affecting weariness, pronouncing names directly into his right ear.

  “You are giving me aggro again,” Quartus said.

  “I’m sorry. I am doing my best.”

  “Is it? Then think again, meneer, if you know who it is, Rra Bloke Molefi? He was very big at UBS, Student Representative Council, very big. You teach at UBS.”

  “No, well, I did. I haven’t for a while, and the way I knew him was just hearing about him. There was a strike. It had to do with the tuckshop, money missing. I paid no attention to it. I was only there once a week. I am so thirsty.” He hadn’t intended to say that.

  It was so boring, the protocols. In a minute Quartus would go and have another of his voluptuous drinking experiences.

  Ray had an idea. He said, “Why don’t you hit me yourself, meneer, when I don’t know? Why make your African hit me?”

  He heard Quartus asking for the knot and then a painful blow to his knee came and that was the answer to that. He wanted Quartus to have to do the hitting himself.

  He would see to it.

  “Who is Dwight Wemberg?” Quartus asked coming back, drinking whatever he was drinking, tea, water, Ray wanted cold tea. I want cold tea, he thought.

  “I’ll tell you who he is. I just realized who he is. He’s agriculture. He’s a sad case. His wife died while he was out of town and she was buried by the time he got back and now they won’t let him exhume her and take her back to the States. I realized that’s who you meant. I think I met him a few times at embassy parties. That’s all.”

  Quartus said nothing. But then in a rush more names were asked and Ray began thinking about names, funny things about names in general. He was going to need a new name himself in the next phase of his life, he realized, if he survived into it, because he was going to have to cut sever and smash any connection to the specious present, what he had been, especially if he was going to write for a living, which he might have to, which he might have to attempt, with God’s help. Names were funny things, like his own name, which was not Finch but Fish or Fisch, in truth, that name glimmering under his public name like a trout in a pool of milk, under a lily pad or something. In the thirties there had been a famous magazine editor with the perfect last name Crowninshield, a name that had struck him at first contact as pretty perfect, Crowninshield. Of course his first name had been Frank, when it could have been what, Beowulf or Manfred. Ah well, he thought.

  Yes, he would need a new name because he knew like thunder and lightning what he was going to do in his new life. Pym, from the Poe story of the guy who went down a maelstrom, might be good, because he was going to pitch himself into the ocean of words, stories. He was going to write Lives, like Aubrey’s Brief Lives, not that all lives weren’t brief, anyway. That was the answer to what he was going to do with the stub of his mortal life that was closer to the bone of everything. It was continuous, as a thing to do, with his work in the agency, his Profiles. He could feel and see himself doing it. Of course there was no market for the little perfect compactions, compactions was the word, the rendering of the life you spent so long in living, the deals, strivings, loves, all that, your shots at love.

  There was a consultation going on. They were taking their time.

  But there would be a market for what he could do. He could compress any life into a jewel. Rex would know where the market for this was, would have, he meant. Of course he knew what Iris would say. She would say, Oh obituaries. But obituaries were the opposite of analytic and the opposite of what he had in mind. And he was not going to limit himself to the dead. He would do anyone he felt like, if he wanted to. Beware me, he thought. He would do the poor as well as the eminent. He would do it. He could. He would find Wemberg and make him a jewel. Aubrey was wonderful but naive, and he, when he did his Lives, would be the opposite of naive. He would do evil subjects, too, which Aubrey as a courtier couldn’t. Quartus would be a good subject. Of course he would need to support himself somehow while he wrote, but that could be arranged, he could always teach in Africa, in a second. He would be the freezing eye of the basilisk. He thought, My eye and hand will be sovereign, beware me.

  “Thank you,” he said. He had reached a conclusion about his life, the life to come that he was grateful for. He was grateful to Quartus and his minions. He was reminded of Iris saying to him, When I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you. It had nothing to do with his situation. But he was grateful to Quartus for the thoughts that had been what, knocked loose. I can be anything, he thought. James Joyce wanted to be a tenor. Joyce was a tenor, but he had wanted to be paid for it. He should have tried more. I might sing, he thought.

  He was clutching the armrests and a hard hit came to his hands, one two left right, pretty hard. Up to that moment they hadn’t hit his hands. We need our hands, he thought. He also didn’t want to be hit on the head more than he had if he could help it. He was too dry to spit, spit at them. But also it was true he didn’t want the consequences of spitting at anyone. It was like joining the army and saying okay, if I die, then okay, if I die doing the job, the job of being all I can be, killing people. People joining the army were prepared to imagine themselves vaporized, made nothing, and to accept that. But they weren’t embracing the possibility of ending up permanently crippled in a ward someplace, which was of course likelier than getting blown to vapor. Someone should publicize the actual odds.

  His thirst was getting dire. If they hurled water at him whatever little he might contrive to catch by having his mouth open would almost be worth it. They knew he was thirsty. There was more water-pouring and lip-smacking water-drinking going on.

  He felt like singing something, but he was afraid to. But he might hum. He was achieving something, being obstreperous. He was using up their time. They couldn’t stay in place forever. He was getting across, he hoped, the idea that he was crazy or being made crazy.

  He wanted to sing, but first he would hum. It was too bad he didn’t know how the Boer hymn went, “Die Stem.” That would have been good. What he was humming had started out indeterminately but was, he realized, turning into “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”

  “He is a moffie.” That was the beast calling him a homosexual by another Boer term.

  “Shut that,” Quartus said, but it wasn’t clear to Ray whether it was directed at him or at the beast. He continued to hum.

  Quartus was very close to him again, close enough that with a sharp lunge Ray would be able to bang Quartus hard in the face. It would hurt too much because his head was already caged in pain.

  Quartus said, very deliberately, “Meneer, this is what you must understand …

  “You can stop this humming. Now.

  “And you must understand that you will tell us what we need to have you tell us. Ah yes. And if you prefer to tell us tomorrow, in the afternoon tomorrow, that will be fine. Or in the evening, fine as well
…”

  Ray was going to escalate into song. They would hate it. Some deep flow of pressure to really sing was rising, rising.

  Ray said, “I am going to sing now.”

  That confused them. They were listening, wondering if he was saying something in American they were not up on that meant he was going to cooperate. He liked that.

  “Yes, meneers, is that correct, the plural, but yes. I have decided to sing. Sing for you.”

  He cleared his throat. He had a faint hope they would offer him something to drink, as encouragement. He couldn’t wait for that. Nothing was offered. He cleared his throat again.

  The flow swelling up through him was fine, it was driving him to sing, but the song was important. It should be apposite, if it could, otherwise it would be a waste, like his life. What we call songs were originally what, cries, roars, screams. An apposite song would be one with the line The guy behind you won’t leave you alone.

  It was a good idea to make them wait for everything, as long as he could, because they were going to have to go and there would be less time for the next victim. Now he was making them wait because the song to rise up with was a problem. He would rise with the song, like a rocket ship, rise, slip upward. He had it. He had it.

  Not only could he sing, he could be a singer, become one. There was the story about Chaplin launching into an aria for a lark at a party and doing it so excellently the crowd was stunned and Chaplin saying that he hadn’t been singing, he had just been impersonating Caruso or whoever it was. Be all that you can be, he thought. He had his song, or the main part of it.

  That was another thing his brother had driven him crazy with, but that now he had to be grateful for. His brother had listened to crap teen music while he had been trying to get the basic classical music repertoire into his head via Doug Pledger on KFO, really trying. And there had been no way to control his brother and the noise coming from his room. And anything he had objected to had made Rex play it more. So he had stopped. But he remembered a perfect thing, “Town Without Pity,” a thing he had heard over and over and over and now it was perfect for his needs. God moves in mysterious ways, when he moves at all, Ray thought.