Mortals

by Norman Rush

  “Doctor, I do but we’ve got to sleep, if we can. I do, anyway.”

  “I know, yeah. And they don’t tell you anything. These people. They don’t tell you anything.

  “They tied me up. Blindfold. But I had to come up here.”

  Ray thought, Sure you did because you love her, you fucking miserable what, cock. He said, “So you came up Route 14 and they snagged you at Nokaneng. I don’t know why they didn’t just turn you around, though. Did you use my name, mention me? Bad if you did. Did you?”

  “I did.”

  Morel didn’t know it, but his voice was being studied by Ray, because there was going to be a discussion, an interrogation, about Iris that would let the truth escape, get it out. That was coming. He was getting a base reading of Morel and how he sounded when he was delivering true things, trivial things. Morel would try to lie. It wouldn’t work.

  “I shouldn’t have,” Morel said.

  It was clear as a bell that the one thing Morel was never going to want to admit was the truth about his cock and Iris. But Ray would get the truth however he had to, keeping in mind that they needed each other, he and Morel, to survive this, survive koevoet, get out okay, if possible.

  Morel would defend his innocence with his life. It didn’t matter. The answer was there, burning. I have my ways, Ray thought.

  “They took my boots,” Morel said. He could barely say it.

  Ray said, “They took mine too. They tend to do that.” He was sorry for Morel. He was going to be hobbling around. One of his legs was shorter than the other and it was going to be humiliating and ugly. Ray wanted to say something that would help, but there was nothing to say. Pity was his enemy.

  It was colder than it had been recently, unless he was wrong and it was just that his reserves were depleted. He had to fortify himself with sleep. Morel had to shut up.

  “Listen,” Morel said, being relentless.

  “We’ve got to sleep. And I mean now. It takes work.”

  “Yeah, but listen. One thing I have to tell you tonight. I’ll tell you why I have to. We don’t know what’s going to happen. They’re in charge. They could separate us anytime, right? She sent me up to tell you this.”

  Ray was rigid. The secret was burning its way out into the open. He could smell the smoke. He was afraid. He wasn’t ready. It was asking too much. He was thirsty. He was clenching up and it was making his wounds blaze. He would prefer to be up and around when the news came. That would be his preference. He had no strength.

  “Listen, this is what I have to tell you. She wanted me to tell you personally, if she couldn’t herself …”

  “What, please,” Ray said, his voice unnatural.

  “Your brother died two weeks ago. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah,” was all he could come out with. He was in agony at the news and at the interposition of this news over the secret yet to come, to be extracted. Life is pain, he thought. He had taken too long to do what he could, what he should have, for his brother. Iris had pushed him, but it had been too late.

  He began to groan.

  Morel said, “She said you had to know. It wasn’t painful for him at the end. I’m really sorry.”

  Ray wanted to press his forehead hard against the wall. He thought it would help. He was sure it would.

  He got on all fours and set his head against the wall. He groaned more. He released low, grinding groans.

  Morel was distressed and came closer.

  “When I get my bag back, I’ll give you something,” Morel said.

  Ray slipped down and lay on his side.

  “You must have been close,” Morel said.

  “No, no we were not. There’s no point talking about it. I knew it was going to happen. In fact I think I knew it already had happened. I really did. There were signs.”

  “Your wife thought it was important for you to know.”

  “My wife. Of course she would. She probably would have liked me to go for the funeral. She could have gone herself. I don’t care what she does. That isn’t what I mean. Look, she was closer to Rex than I was. She liked him. He was a queer duck. He wrote some stuff I have to get back from these cocksuckers. It’s too complicated to explain. How is my mother doing? Did Iris mention her?”

  “Only that there was a ceremony, large thing, in San Francisco for him and that she wasn’t there, your mother wasn’t. That’s all I know. Iris has material to show you about this event. It was big. He was apparently a local celebrity.”

  Ray folded the pallet over because the cold was strong and he was beginning to shake and he didn’t want Morel to know, if he could help it. He was shaking. It was strange, he thought, that he had no impulse to weep. Of course, he was dehydrated, hugely. He wasn’t sure if the system that made tears was the same one that made saliva, which he had next to nothing of. He was shaking embarrassingly.

  He said, “Don’t worry. I’m all right. Nobody worry. I’m going to write his Life and I’ll be in it as shit, a villain, so don’t worry. I’m tired. Right now I am. My role as a shit will be there.

  “But watch out. Any Life I want to write I will. I spare no one. You don’t understand. I spare no one.”

  Morel put his hand on him, then he was feeling his face, and then his wrist, trying to take his pulse, Ray supposed.

  “You mean you’re going to write his obituary.”

  “Nah nah no, you don’t understand no. Watch out. I …”

  Morel was at the shed door, kicking and shouting, butting the door with his fists and knees. It had to be with his knees, because they had taken his boots. He was going to fuck his knee up, with this.

  He was keeping up the ruckus for what seemed a remarkably long time. It came to nothing.

  Morel gave up finally and came back to him.

  “You’re still shaking,” Morel said.

  “I know.”

  “Look, it’s freezing. So this is what we need to do. We’ve got to pile these extra things on us. We fold you into one and I get next to you. We have one under us and one over us, or two over us, and we use body heat, trap it.”

  “I think this is psychological,” Ray said. He was ashamed of his trembling voice.

  Morel said, “It doesn’t matter if it is. It wears you out. We have to control it. I don’t love this idea, but we are going to be buddies tonight. No, wait a minute and listen. I am getting in with you. If you stop shaking, I’m gone. I can’t check you out in the dark. I should check you out. I don’t know if this is malaria …”

  “It’s psychological,” Ray said.

  “Yeah but I would like to look at you for bites, lesions. I can’t. You’re taking your chloroquine?”

  “Well, I was.”

  “When did you take your last tablet? Try to remember. It’s very important.”

  “I don’t know when it was. A while, is all I know.”

  “Well do you have any prominent bites on you, things that itch, anything like that?”

  “You know, you get bitten constantly around here. But everything itches anyway. I’ve got cuts.”

  Morel was hauling things around. And then he was flat against him, his front against Ray’s back, holding him still as he finished arranging things.

  Ray was being pushed into a corner and held there. That was his life.

  He thought he should bid goodbye to his brother. He whispered what he wanted to say until Morel asked him what he was saying.

  He went silent. He thought, My dear Rex, silly fucking poefter goodbye you poefter: We missed the boat.

  He meant everything. But he was shaking even more.

  He continued, out loud, We missed the boat and you are going away, goodbye mon semblable mon frère goodbye: Something you wanted to hear is what I want to say, you were smarter … I hated that, but you were.

  It was difficult. Morel was saying Hey, hey, calm down, hey, hey.

  Ray whispered into the pallet, Goodbye, we are all turning into ghosts bit by bit anyway … you were smart, a smart person
, and you could write, and that is the truth.

  There was something he wanted to promise but couldn’t, because of life, the way life is. What he wanted to say was I will tell you this, your life will be famous. He couldn’t quite. He was in captivity. He didn’t know what was going to happen. How could he?

  I will help your ghost, he thought.

  “I will make you live,” he said aloud, alarming Morel.

  They were in a corner. Folded over, the edges of the two pallets covering them barely made a closure that would keep the bitter cold out. And then there was a third pallet laid on top of the other two. And the point was to move around as little as possible so as not to disarrange all this delicate architecture Morel had organized because then the cold would come in like a knife and wake them up. It was the coldest night he remembered, by far. There had been a shift in the weather. The skies change, but not ourselves, was a quotation from somebody on the subject of not expecting too much out of sheer traveling to exotic places, like Africa, the Kalahari.

  Ray was on the inside, toward the fold. It was Morel’s job to keep the lips of the pallets together if he could.

  They had evaded calling each other by their first names. That wouldn’t do. That needed to be settled in the morning. The idea of having to call Morel Davis was intolerable. The vivid fact that Morel had so far never just spontaneously called him Ray was a further burning indicator of the guilt he was bearing inside himself like a nasty jewel. It was there, like the jewel between the eyes of the nasty monstrous frog idol in adventure stories. He was going to pry it out. He had to because it was all he could see when he looked at the man. He would do it.

  If anybody had to get up to pee during the night the whole house of cards would fall apart and they would have to start over. He rarely needed to get up at night to pee. And of course just now he was so dehydrated there would be no question of who would be to blame for wrecking things, if anyone did. My prostate is fine, he thought. That was a plus about him he wondered if Iris appreciated. Would she miss it in him if she got with someone who had to pop up to go to the toilet two, three times a night? Would she think back, Ah, those were the nights? Nights she could sleep like God, who could presumably sleep at will. Benign prostate hyperplasia was what most men his age had, if he was correct, or possibly it wasn’t most, but it was many. He could ask the doctor. He could ask Davis. In any case he didn’t have it, thank God.

  Definite warmth was slowly materializing.

  There was a falling asleep trick he just remembered. He didn’t know where he had picked it up. He hadn’t thought of it for years. It was possible that it was something he knew from training, or from beloved Marion Resnick. The idea was to take the sparks and lines and curlicues and all the other bright fragments in the eidetic display that shows up behind your eyelids every night, eidetic debris it had been described as, and catch the bits and pieces and through willpower force them into a solid coherent shape like a triangle or an oblong or a circle. He remembered doing it successfully. It was a strain to do it and it no doubt worked because the peculiar effort took your mind off the crimes and failings that rose up gnashing their teeth when it was time to rest so that you could continue your crimes when the sun came up the next day.

  Morel would be interested. Davis, he meant. But Morel was asleep, judging by his breathing pattern.

  It was a measure of the state Ray was in that he had to quell the impulse to wake Morel to tell him about this wonderful trick. He was insane. It was a thing Rex would appreciate. It could be in Strange News.

  He used his trick and sleep came.

  It was daylight. Bright gray was what he would say the light regime was.

  Morel was up and active.

  Ray pushed his way out of the pallet mound.

  Morel was performing calisthenics of some kind. He halted when he saw Ray emerging and gave an almost joyful cry. He had reconstituted himself as a fighter and winner, Ray could tell. He was acting buoyant. Some of that was for Ray, including possibly all of it. It was pitiful when Morel came over, walking unevenly despite his best efforts to correct for his short right leg, trying to make his gait more normal by arching his right foot, walking on the ball of that foot. He couldn’t help wondering if Iris had seen Morel hobbling around much. Ray’s guess was that Morel would keep his built-up shoes on as much of the time as he could. That was what he would do, in his shoes, so to speak. Maybe she had seen him in his true state in the bathroom, the shower. Although it was possible he had special clogs to wear. All he knew was that in Morel’s place he would be doing his utmost to reduce the moments of elision when he would have to appear as what he was, afflicted.

  The roosters were up and screeching.

  In any case, this was the man Iris wanted. She preferred him. No question he was the sturdier type, more sturdily built. He was very squarely made, straight-out shoulders for example, not sloping at all. He was athletic. In his safari shorts and shortsleeved shirt and khaki kneesocks he looked like a large Boy Scout or better yet a scoutmaster. He was thick through the chest. He had heavy calves, like bleach bottles. His arms and forearms were bulky, both, and about equally, by which he meant in good proportions. For guys who worked out it was so common to get the proportions wrong, and Morel clearly worked out. It wasn’t unusual for people with a disability in one quarter to devote themselves to making the other three quarters superb. He understood it. There was more he could have done in his own case, just to contradict the weediness that time brings. And in fact he could still do it, take it up, except that it was a little late and if he did it would be a little obvious.

  Morel was a good specimen, a goodlooking devil. He had good dense close-cropped hair, a little grayer maybe than Ray recalled, but not much grayer. It would be easier for him to remain within normal ranges of acceptable appearance, even in absurd conditions like this, because that kind of hair cut that way took care of itself. Morel seemed to have more and deeper lines in his brow than Ray remembered, but that only served to make him look consequential and serious. His underjaw was very tight. His throat was not swallowing his chin. He looked younger than forty-five. When it came to teeth, it was Morel hands down, for brightness, evenness, the works. Women would notice his eyes, too, and that would snag them, because the man was black, but his eyes were a light bluish gray. His eyes were counter to his usual type and in an aesthetically pleasing way, or so Ray supposed. I am completely within my type, Ray thought. That was it. I look Dutch, he thought.

  What Ray had been looking for was anything unexpected and pleasantly negative that he might have missed before, some negative detail or other. But here was the man she preferred, surviving stress and fatigue and the humiliation of having to hop around and there were no new debits. He looked good.

  Black was of course not entirely right for Morel, not in black Africa. He wondered if Iris was tired of whiteness, white men, like he was. He was both, he was one, and he was tired of them. He felt like laughing, but it was too early in the day. He was queasy.

  Just for the sake of completeness he wouldn’t mind if a glance at Morel’s penis came his way. Living cheek by jewel, by which he meant jowl, it was probably in the cards.

  “Let me look at you,” Morel said.

  He led Ray to a spot where a spray of light came down through one of the vents in the upper wall.

  Morel began with an unbearable, to Ray, diagnostic stare. Morel moved him around gently in the available light. Morel’s nails were clipped and clean. Ray’s were filthy. There was no point in being ashamed of his grooming, but he was.

  “One thing first,” Ray said.

  “What?”

  “We’re not using our first names. We’re avoiding it. I think I know why.”

  Morel went past that, shot past it, saying, “Right, yeah, of course. Right. Ray …”

  “Call me Ray.”

  “I just did. And you call me Davis.”

  “I will.” He would try to have sympathy for Morel. It had to be an o
rdeal for the man to try to keep reasonably level, compensating for his disability. At the moment, he was bracing his right foot on the wall six inches up. It was acrobatic. And he was trying to make nothing of it, keep it invisible.

  Morel said, “In fact call me Dave.”

  That enraged Ray, for some reason. He contained it. He said, “Who calls you Dave? I never heard anyone call you that.”

  “Oh some people have. But Davis is good.”

  “Well, does Iris call you Dave?” He was getting ahead of himself. It was a mistake.

  “No.”

  “Then Davis.”

  “Put your tongue out,” Morel said. Ray was sure it was a move to break this line of discussion. But he complied.

  “Jesus,” Morel said, and then said, “Sorry, but do you ever scrape your tongue, usually?”

  “No, but my wife does.”

  “She scrapes your tongue?”

  Ray knew an attempt at lightening the discourse when he heard one. It was a leaden attempt.

  “No of course not. She scrapes her tongue, as you undoubted know. Brushes it, anyway, when she brushes her teeth. She is devout about it.”

  “Okay, well, it’s an important thing to do and most people don’t. Frankly …”

  “Frankly what? My tongue looks bad, so what else?”

  Morel turned him around. He fiddled with the scab on Ray’s scalp, disengaging strands of hair that had become stuck in it. That seemed pointless to Ray and he wanted Morel to stop. Then Morel pressed the margins of the scab in three places.

  “That hurts,” Ray said, lying. He wanted the examination to end.

  “When is breakfast?” Morel asked.

  “Any moment now. But you realize that it’s all the same, what we get to eat, breakfast, dinner, it’s all the same. It’s mush. And some powdered milk sometimes.”

  “No vegetables or any sort of fruit?”

  “Please be serious. No.”

  “What about water?”

  “They play with you about water. I had a water bottle and then I didn’t. And then I did and it was half full. And then they took that and now I don’t. I need water, though. I’ll tell you. It’s serious.”