Mortals

by Norman Rush

  There was a cessation in the gunfire, and Ray said, loudly, “What was it you wanted to tell me about Milton?”

  Morel sat up, blinking. Ray felt guilty. He should have been man enough to let him sleep through as much of the carnage and all its corollaries as he could manage. Sleeping like that in such circumstances was unusual. It was going to be up to Iris to figure out all these aspects and pockets in her new beloved.

  Ray said, “You said you wanted to tell me about your theory of Milton and me, why the connection, I think you said.”

  He had really been asleep. Morel was struggling to get himself in hand. He began preambling about how Ray had to understand he had no opinions whatever about Milton’s qualities as a poet, he had no opinions on the poetics. Some lines and passages were, he acknowledged, striking. But most of it he wasn’t qualified to judge, other than to say that it seemed like a lot of the rest of classic English poetry, which he really found got interesting only in the late nineteenth century, because so much of it was crypto-Christian apology before that.

  Ray thought, That’s all I need, crouching here. All he needed was an attack on English Literature, which at that moment was giving him, Ray, two useless nothings, the phrase A Great Reckoning in a Little Room, which was by somebody about Marlowe’s death, and then the other … bits of blurred recall of Beckett’s plays, many of them taking place in settings like the one he and Morel were in. And Morel was saying again that the reason he had strong feelings about Milton came from having been forced by his father to read Paradise Lost. And then there were some disparaging remarks about Thomas Traherne and about Wordsworth and it was all too much.

  “Listen to me,” Ray said, trying to be commanding.

  “Okay.”

  “Know what, I want to jump ahead here. Just admit this. Milton came up, or her attitude to Milton did, Milton being important to me, and you realized you had an opinion and a theory and you went for it and she thought it was brilliant. It was negative. A negative take, shall we say. You had something negative in your backpack about Milton and you used it. It was part of courting. You went … Hm, Milton. You wanted her. You took a shot. Admit it.”

  “It was something like that.”

  “It was the equivalent of a cheap shot, but let’s hear it. It might even be right. Just give me the Reader’s Digest version of what you said. I guarantee you I can take it. And come on, do it. By the way, if you think you hear police whistles you’re right. But it doesn’t mean the police are here to save us. Guerrillas use them for signaling between units. Or it could be the villains. But it’s not the police. So just give me a diagram of what you said.”

  “Okay, but I have to stand up.” He was apologetic. He knew they had agreed that the huddled-down position was optimal in the situation they were in. But he was being asked to present something of significance. He had to be standing, to deliver his thing properly. Ray understood this from teaching.

  Morel began walking around.

  Ray got up. There was no way he could remain huddled like a pupil while Morel stood over him. So that was it, they would both have to risk being cut in half by heavy-weapons fire until the issue was ventilated. That was life.

  Morel needed to get on with it.

  “Just give me a diagram,” Ray said.

  “Okay, man. Yeah, here it is.” But he continued thinking, preparing.

  Unless Ray was wrong, Morel was reverting to a blacker, more plebeian speech mode, the rhythm different. It was undoubtedly reflexive, a mode that offered some sort of protection. He had seen Morel do it before, but more subtly.

  Morel said, “Okay, but, man, I can’t hardly remember the whole thing, you know? Let’s see …” Ray knew Morel was ashamed of the lurid can’t hardly because he had half swallowed it to the point where it had been hard for Ray to pick up. Morel had to be embarrassed by the blunt black thing he was doing. But distress was behind it, it should be remembered. It did raise the question of who Morel was and the question of false pretenses … which, Ray realized, was a classic redundancy. And generations of linguistic professionals had looked at it and not seen it and it was exactly like rapid eye movements being discovered by a graduate student after generations of sleep experts and theorists had droned on and on, not seeing it. Typically of life he didn’t know the name of the graduate student who had finally seen it, discovered it. He should be famous. His name was Jewish, he knew that much. But that was all he knew, except that he Ray himself had used false pretenses all his life up to that moment.

  A nearby blast shook them, and Morel resumed, finally.

  Morel said, “No, what I said to her about Milton … in fact she probably mentioned it to you …”

  “She didn’t.”

  “That’s funny. She seemed to be struck by it. Well anyway I don’t know if this is anything or not, but when I asked myself why in hell you liked a poet I especially didn’t like and that I had been forced to read reams of …”

  “You can stop mentioning that. It’s been established.” Ray sensed that Morel, now that he was having to present his thoughts on this subject, was feeling slightly in over his head. He had tossed something off and now he had to engage someone who had spent years confronting the Hydra of Milton interpretations, slashing at them in the privacy of his office.

  Morel said, “Okay, so I asked my question and I saw a pattern. Here’s what I’m saying. Paradise Lost the great Milton thing is a parable about how terrible disobedience is, using Satan’s disobedience to God as a metaphor for disobedience generally, with Milton’s disobedience to his king in the background.

  “So now of course before he wrote Paradise Lost, hey, he had joined up against the great evil of his time, monarchism, the king. He goes for republicanism, joins up with Cromwell, who kills the king but then turns himself into Hitler. Milton works in the Ministry of Propaganda. Sad thing. And Milton is doing his job writing public relations stuff defending slaughtering the Irish and getting the English deeper into the slave trade. Then Cromwell loses, falls. Monarchy comes back and Milton has to live with it. So Paradise Lost is where he takes it all back, takes back his embrace of Cromwell, of republicanism, of political dissent. Paradise Lost is how he gets himself rehabilitated. The royals love it. I think that’s about right.”

  “Well, it’s too simple.”

  “But hey, let me finish, man.”

  “Proceed.”

  Morel was hyper. He said, “So here’s where you come in. You’re at the right age, pliable. There you stand. Communism is abroad in the world and it’s a great evil and there just happens to be an instrument, like Cromwell was an instrument in his time, there happens to be this instrument that’s working against the evil of our time and the instrument is the CIA. And the agency gets hold of you just when you’re studying Milton and the sixties are happening.

  “So you see an evil and you see an instrument against it and you join up …”

  “If you could make it not sound so much like joining the Boy Scouts that would be better.”

  “Okay. So you’re twenty-two, twenty-three, and you go with the instrument that you, well, you’re in it. And the instrument you’ve joined up with is gradually becoming Satan. You signed up before Vietnam. And there you are, in revolt against your generation, your peers, their sentiments, their ideology, because the war in Vietnam they see as pure evil and they associate the agency with it. And it gets interesting because Satan is secretly the hero of Paradise Lost, despite Milton’s intentions, Satan is the secret hero. Milton couldn’t help it. He set out to glorify obedience, but disobedience hogged all the glamour. No wonder it fascinated you, Ray. Okay, so you stay with the instrument. You have doubts after a while, the impulse to draw back, maybe, but you’re in it. Your generation is against the CIA in the most fuckingly absolute way. And they focus on the exact things in the work of the agency you disagree with and reject, yourself …”

  “Just a minute, Davis, aren’t we the same generation, the two of us? How old are you?”
/>
  “Just forty-six.”

  “And I was just forty-nine.”

  “So you think I should have said our generation?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Okay. But Iris I put into the next generation down. She’s thirty-six. At thirty-six.”

  Ray had to bite his tongue. It was a shock because if she had given thirty-six as her age it meant she had been willing to lie and the lie was a sign that she had wanted Morel starting as far back as filling in the date of birth on the medical history form, on her first visit. He couldn’t believe it. This was so far beyond unlike her that he couldn’t believe it had happened. Could Morel be misremembering? That had to be the answer.

  “Finish your thought,” Ray said.

  “That’s about it. What I proposed is that Paradise Lost addresses all your ambivalence about what you’re doing with your life. And the ambivalence gets more acute as your side wins. You feel it winning before it finally happens. You have the victory, not like Milton, who had to see the kings come roaring back into London. So I think Paradise Lost tells you not to abandon an imperfect instrument, the agency, just because most of your peers say you should, just the way Paradise Lost told Milton not to abandon an imperfect institution like the monarchy just because the people, a lot of them, said he should. And with your enemy down and out you have the option of leaving the imperfect instrument … But it looks like you can’t.”

  Let this go, Ray thought. There might be some truth in it, but there was a great deal that something so simple left out. Morel was stripping away everything in Milton that didn’t serve his thesis. For starters there was the conflation of biography and art, a quagmire. He wasn’t saying there was nothing in Morel’s construct. But showing Morel why it was inadequate was something he had no strength for.

  A loud explosion occurred, closer than the last one.

  Ray said, “Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? I’ll have to think about it. I point out, though, that you generated this analysis of me not out of an interest in penetrating a fascinating truth, but out of an interest in penetrating my wife.”

  Morel looked stunned. “That’s not the way it was,” he said.

  Ray said, “Some other time we can talk about it. I’ll give it some thought.” He was curt. There were numerous things wrong with Morel’s thesis, not the least of which was taking a cartoon of Paradise Lost as representing the sum of Milton’s huge labors and leaving everything else out, the Areopagitica, the pamphlets on divorce …

  Coldness seized him. It was the word divorce. There would have to be one, of course. There would be procedures, papers. Only an idiot wouldn’t have realized that. But it would have to be worked out even though it conflicted with his image of a quick vanishment into a new life, a quick and sharp exit. He was divorcing the agency too. It was over, all over. He was through. He wouldn’t discuss it with Morel. He couldn’t. Of course it would seem to him like a lunge or an adaptation late in the day to get Iris back by giving her what she had wanted for years, now, when it was too late. Tsk tsk goes the clock, he thought.

  An explosion came, about as loud as the last one. A new flux of white smoke began feeding in.

  Ray asked, “You know another thing white smoke tells you?”

  “No, what?”

  “It means we have a new pope.”

  It was nothing, but they both laughed, a peacemaking laugh.

  Iris had been his pope, or something like it. He had believed in Iris, in her goodness, her patience. There had been an early time when he had believed in the agency. But that had gone. But he had always believed in Iris and her steadfastness, the way Irish drunks believed in their saintly wives. But that wasn’t quite right. Now Morel was her pope, or she was Morel’s pope. It could go either way, in life.

  He thought he was understanding things better. A god that was not only gratifying but actual fun to obey was what everybody wanted, maybe. He didn’t know. Or maybe he did know. Maybe she was looking for a god in Morel, the atheist. He had never been that for her, himself. Ah well, he thought.

  Morel was disgruntled, Ray could tell. He had returned to his corner. He was muttering to himself. Ray picked up the phrase Obedience is paradise.

  “We’ll talk about this another time,” Ray said.

  Morel said nothing.

  “It’ll be something to look forward to,” Ray said.

  Ray returned to his corner and hunched down. Morel was going to be Ray’s first vignette. He had decided that. But it was important to get him right.

  Morel looked glum. Iris was good at cheering people up. She could be funny. He remembered her recounting a dead serious argument among her preteenage girlfriends over whether it would be more embarrassing when the time came to disclose one’s breasts to a man or one’s genitals. The position arrived at had been that it would be less embarrassing to unveil genitals because female genitals were all more or less alike, whereas breasts differed a lot and so were more personal, and also they were on a scale of judgment that genitals weren’t, more might be expected. And it was funny when she talked about changing her raiment before they went out to eat. It was strange that he could think of so many amusing things she had said to him but virtually nothing amusing he had said to her unless you counted throwaways like his saying to her, You are like Power because you abhor a vacuum … cleaner and then he had used the phrase “multiplying like coat hangers,” but he couldn’t remember what it had been applied to. And she had laughed when he had taken to declaring horniness by saying, It’s sex o’clock. But then after he had done it a couple or three times too many she had asked him to give it a rest.

  The sounds of battle were closer and louder. Voices were part of the mixture. The notion of what it would be like if he managed to get himself killed saving Morel’s life in some mayhem yet to unfold was something not to pursue. It would be an ironical gift for her. This was regression. It was ridiculous, wishing he could see her face when she found out what had happened. He was in a sundering process in his life and he had to embrace it and not end up like the British painter who kept writing letters to his first wife for nine years after her death, Stanley Spencer, an interesting painter, too. Ray had appreciated being shepherded by Iris to exhibitions in cities they’d visited. She had seen it as her responsibility. Now he would have to figure out on his own what to go and see when he was in venues where there were museums or galleries. He was going to be somewhere. He wasn’t sure where that would be. He would be consumed doing something that consumed him. That was all he knew.

  Ray thought he could hear the sounds of running feet. The sound died.

  A deafening, confounding blast, the worst yet, jarred them. The air was full of white dust. Something nearby had been pulverized. Dust had puffed in through the vents.

  Morel stood up, coughing, brushing at himself. His hair was white with dust. He had been caught directly beneath one of the vents. Ray thought, I’m getting to see how he’ll look when they’re old.

  Morel was pointing, jabbing furiously with one hand and holding a finger to his lips with the other.

  Ray saw what it was. The north wall was showing real damage. A ragged crack ran upward for a foot or so from the floor near one end of the wall and curved over and ran to the proximate corner and down the crease and back to the floor, which, in that area, was sunken, canting down. Plainly it had been partially undermined. The wedge of masonry outlined by the crack was roughly the size of a duffel bag.

  Ray crouched down to get a closer look at the damage, his heart racing. He tried to insert his fingers into the crack. He couldn’t, but it was close. Air was feeding in through the crack, whose bottom edge was inset a little. There was a definite separation between the base of the wedge and the plank flooring touching it. He pushed at the wedge. It wouldn’t budge. If it could be driven out there would be an exit that a man, men, could fit through. He wanted to say to the wedge, You are yearning to be a door, so be one, swing open.

  Morel was elated. But he w
as conducting himself ridiculously, in Ray’s opinion. He was gesturing frantically to the effect that they shouldn’t say anything, that they should be quiet, avoid attracting attention. Ray understood Morel’s impulse, but he was going on too long with it. They had to get to work to see if this crack could be made, ultimately, to let them out. They had no tools.

  They knelt together at the crack.

  Morel was shaking. He tried, himself, to work his fingers into the crack, but with more force than Ray had used, which struck Ray as dangerous and premature. The wall might shift in the event of another blast and Morel’s fingers could be crushed. Or the wall could shift on its own. There were other fractures in it, higher up.

  “This is just cheap cement block,” Morel whispered.

  “Get your fingers out of there.”

  “Don’t shout at me. We have to be quiet.”

  “I didn’t shout. I just don’t think it’s going to be helpful if you get your hands stuck.”

  “This cement is cheap shit. It’s crumbling.”

  Morel had thrust the fingers of both hands well into the crack. It was reckless. Ray thought he could see blood. He was considering pulling Morel forcibly away from the wall. He didn’t think that what Morel was trying to do could be done. Unaided brute force had its limits. They needed to think together, think how to combine their strengths. He thought Morel should stop acting Herculean. Or probably he himself should join Morel in futility just to be friendly. He had to come to a conclusion. He had no role, just standing around observing.