Mortals

by Norman Rush

  Ray wanted to laugh. He said, “Man, relax. This is my brother’s manuscript. I found it.”

  “Well take it off.”

  “Are you kidding? I won’t. Never. This goes with me just like this until we get out of here. Or not.”

  Morel threw his hands up. He turned away.

  Ray saw that Wemberg was beckoning to him. Ray was delighted. Definitely Wemberg was alive. He felt kinship because Wemberg was a widower and so was he, in a way. There was no noun, not in English, for the man who takes away another man’s wife. There should be. It could be something like plucker. And there was no particular word for the man whose wife had been plucked away. The French undoubtedly had a word for it. There should be an Académie Anglaise. He wouldn’t mind working for that kind of body. He was going to need a job. It would be a job that would let him elevate some of his brother’s coinages like to harbinge into the dictionary, some dictionary. There were other coinages that weren’t bad. He was carrying them around on his chest, next to his heart.

  Wemberg was rolled up in floral drapery. One arm was free. He was rolled up like Elizabeth Taylor or Vivien Leigh in a carpet in Caesar and Cleopatra when she was hauled up into the fortress and let out of the carpet by the then handsomest man in the world, Stewart Granger. We have too many images for things, he thought. It was the media. It must have been better before the media.

  He sat down next to Wemberg, whose eyes were closed now and who was no longer beckoning. He had certain things to say to Wemberg. He wanted to tell him that he appreciated, really appreciated, that Wemberg and his wife had done good in the world. He wanted to let Wemberg know that he was going to be doing good, himself, next, in his life. He wanted to tell him that he was going to be more like him and Alice.

  “Dwight,” he said, but that was all he said. Wemberg had a smile on his face but he seemed suddenly asleep. Ray thought he must be dead. Now look what you’ve done, he said to himself, in agony, involuntarily getting back to the question of why in the name of God his mother had found the Laurel and Hardy movies so funny.

  He couldn’t stand the idea but Wemberg was dead. He wanted to shout. He did shout. He shouted for Morel to come over.

  “What?” Morel said, unable to contain his irritation.

  “He’s dead. Wemberg is dead.”

  “No he isn’t,” Morel said. He prodded Wemberg with his foot and Wemberg began to cough.

  “Don’t get him excited, he’s weak,” Morel said.

  Wemberg was plucking at his headband and whispering something urgently.

  “What does he want?” Ray asked. He wanted to do anything Wemberg wanted. He put his ear next to his mouth.

  “Wear my witdoek and go to the stairs. You have to be at the stairs. Take the rifle and go to the stairs. I told you.”

  “Okay, don’t worry, I understand.”

  He knew he had to leave Wemberg if he was going to be a combatant. But he was reluctant to leave the man. Morel was busy. Wemberg was odd, he was phasic. He would manage to get out a few words and then he would fade into silence. His face would go slack. And then in a few beats he would be back to himself and he would produce another set of words. And for some reason each time he commenced again he accompanied his effort with a forced smile. It made no sense to have priorities in a situation like the one he was in, but Ray had a couple of strong ones. He wanted Wemberg to live and settle the hideous problem of his wife, her disinterment. He wanted to be able to help Wemberg with that, as one of his last acts in this part of the forest. And he wanted to get hold of Kerekang and talk to him and see if he could extract him from what he had gotten caught in and get him away and into safety of some kind. He had confidence that he could do that if he got the chance. He had a set of unusual skills, thanks to his years in the agency. He knew how to get behind the arras, that kind of thing. He would expend his skills, burn them to the ground, to help Kerekang and Wemberg to undo things. He wanted other things, too. He wanted Morel to survive, of course. He deserved to.

  Ray took Wemberg’s hand, and that stimulated another smile and a string of words.

  “Take my doek,” Wemberg said. He repeated it.

  Ray slipped the headband free. It had a rank smell. He didn’t care.

  Wemberg’s head was larger than his, apparently. Ray had to retie the doek rather than slide it directly on, which, strangely, disappointed him.

  He was ready, then. First he had to push away certain associations he didn’t want to have, associations from Kurosawa movies mainly, of samurai getting ready to go out and do battle by, as a final preparatory act, tying on a headband. He wanted what he was going to do to be what it was and not what it resembled. He patted Wemberg’s forehead very softly. He had to detach himself from the compulsion to keep seeing if the man was still alive.

  He was ready. Unfortunately he was going to need help getting to his feet. It was his knee, not to mention the millstone around his chest.

  “Thusa,” he shouted. Two Batswana heard him and came to him and hauled him erect.

  The Enfield was heavy. He picked it up and made sure that the single shell he had was correctly chambered so he could fire it into someone’s body.

  He hesitated. He wanted Morel to notice that he was on his way to war.

  He posted himself at the foot of the stairs. He stood there until he felt that he should be doing more. He would go up, at least to the second floor.

  The staircase was a beautiful thing, he realized. Money had gone into it, rare hardwoods. The railings were artworks. The handrail was carved in a serpentine shape. He didn’t want this stairway to go up in smoke. There must be much more throughout the building that was worth preserving. Eccentric rich people had indulged their tastes here. The treads of the first flight were bare, but he could see, from the landing, that the carpeting that had once covered the treads of the second flight had been ripped free and pulled down into a hump, an obstacle. It was difficult employing his torch and keeping his rifle in any sort of threatening pose. Everything was too heavy, including the torch. The stairs were crowded with boxes and rubbish.

  He decided that it would be best to set the rifle aside and take his torch and negotiate the stairs to the second floor. And when he got there, after surmounting the debris in his way, he would creep around and attempt to locate whatever stairs or ladder gave access to the roof. It was clear in his mind that he had to go up onto the roof, where hell was. But first he would come back for his rifle. But for reconnoitering he would need to be nimble.

  He found a niche for his rifle between two wooden crates filled with metal shavings, the sort of waste that collects under lathes. He wondered why it had been saved, or if the answer was that plans to dispose of the waste had been interrupted by bankruptcy. You’ll never know, he said to himself.

  He was at large on the dark second floor. He was using the torch in short bursts. He thought that was best, even though someone hanging head down clinging like Dracula to the wall might see it as a code, if they were near a window. The battle was directly and loudly on top of him. Individual voices, taunting or imprecating or whatever it was they were conveying, were distinct. He had to keep reminding himself that when his breathing was laborious when he was exerting himself it was because of his medallion, Strange News, which was still cleaving reasonably tightly to his chest. He decided to discard his shirt. He took it off and rather than look for a place to cache it in he tossed it over his shoulder.

  It felt better with his shirt off. He prowled swiftly through the second floor, looking into rooms, finding one bedroom mainly intact and ready for tourists once the dead insects were swept up and the dust had been beaten out of the various upholsteries and the bolsters. Every room had apparently been supplied with giant bolsters. He might have occupied this room with Iris if life had been different. Pausing to look at himself in the baroque mirror the room contained gave him an idea, the inspiration to do something with the fact that he looked like hell, skeletal, his ribs showing, his arms womanish
and thin. He was minimal. If he was anything he was the object he was bearing more than he was anything else.

  Back in the corridor, he was toying with the idea of going up, once he found the way, going up onto the roof naked, although not naked so far as his feet were concerned because he would cleave to his shoes forever or until Christ came again. He wanted to do something helpful with the impression he seemed to be capable of giving that he was carrying an infernal device around. Taking his shirt off had been smart. It made the bomb central. But dispensing with his jeans might help even more, because arriving in hell showing his sacred penis, showing he didn’t care who saw his sacred penis, would mean that something serious was up and that they should be afraid. He felt suddenly that he could do it. Embarrassment would be nothing to him after he was dead. He removed his jeans, half disbelieving what he was doing. He would certainly be an alarming spectacle unless, of course, somebody just turned around and reflexively shot him the minute he popped up and they saw his white headband. And that thought suggested he should dispose of the headband, because, on balance, it created more potential problems than it solved. When it came to Kerekang’s people he could just shout out who he was. A problem was that his head was going to be the first visible part of him when he emerged from a trapdoor or looked around a corner as he arrived on the roof. He pulled the headband off. My Brief Career as a Human Bomb could be the title for a chapter in someone’s unfinished memoirs.

  He went back to find his discarded shirt, folded it neatly, and carried it into the intact bedroom where he pushed it under the bed, out of sight. He wanted to be able to reclaim it. He didn’t know how things were going to go. People might say you’re dithering, but you aren’t, he thought. He was planning. He was doing his best to plan.

  He was listening hard to see if he could make out anything in the firing patterns that might tell him how the fighters were deployed. Unfortunately it was hopeless. Either the firing was lighter or he was losing his hearing.

  Sweeping his torchbeam around the bedroom one last time, he noticed a possible accessory for his human bomb costume. A metal crank showed at the edge of the heavy purple drapes shrouding the windows. That was how the windows were opened and closed. He wanted the crank. He seized it and tugged at it and it slipped easily off the shank it was meant to turn. The shank was square and it fit into a square slot in the butt of the crank. There was no securing pin or screw. He had been worried that the crank mechanism might have been rusted. But in the Kalahari nothing rusted. That was worth keeping in mind. He wanted to laugh. He had the crank. It was going to look good. He forced the butt of the crank deeply into the overlapped tape bindings so that the handle projected at the foot of the bundle, where his right hand could quickly grasp it. Of course, it was a joke. But it was a joke that only had to remain unpenetrated for a relatively short period of time. He went to the mirror again and lit himself up, armed as he was for war. He realized that there was a sense in which to the intelligent eye the crank would seem to imply that the bomb he was carrying was primed by clockwork of some kind. He didn’t care. It was the overall effect that counted and the overall effect was good.

  He disheveled his hair. It was an afterthought. It seemed appropriate.

  In the corridor again, he felt he was getting better oriented. This main building was in the shape of a laterally stretched-out block letter U, with the shorter elements, the uprights, constituted by the east and west wings, and the long base span between them constituting the central mass of the building. It was a considerable piece of construction. He was through with this wing of the building. The stairway connecting the first and second floors was located at the southwest elbow of the building. The endless-looking corridor to the east wing lay unexplored before him.

  The place was eccentric. The baseboards were carved in the same serpentine pattern as the banisters. Armies of people had been charged with keeping the woodwork polished. There were heavy black beams in the ceilings. He didn’t want this place to burn.

  Exactly halfway down the corridor of the main section of the building he found what he was looking for. There was an alcove with a narrow tin-clad door set into one wall. There were nail-punch designs in the tin facing, fruit motifs, insofar as he could tell. This was not going to be a door leading to a closet or pantry. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

  The door was unlocked.

  He inched the door open. There was light coming down from above. A wash of heat touched him. A steep, straight flight of iron stairs led to the open sky. The sky was streaked with smoke. There was a trapdoor at the top of the stairs and it seemed to be secured in the open position. He closed the door. There had been blood on the stair treads. He knew the smell.

  He could go up immediately or he could go back and retrieve his gun. He was feeling strongly that he had cached the gun too far away. If he had the gun, he could drag it inconspicuously behind him as he proceeded with his original plan or he could stow it someplace closer to where he was going to be. It wasn’t that he was giving up his plans, his plan, it was that he was trying to refine what he was going to do.

  He ran to retrieve the rifle and returned with it to the alcove, where he let himself collapse, sinking down against the door, to get his breath. He was hungry.

  He had to go up there now. He supposed his idea was to terrify people into doing something he ordered them to. He would decide how to act once he saw what he was going to be confronted with, that is, whether he should act like a fou, a nut, or like a coldblooded type, a zealot but cold.

  He started up the stairs. He couldn’t let go of the gun. He thought, Anyway, we are all fragile puddings, doomed slumping puddings trying to stay hard as long as we can. It was conceivable he was just about to expose himself to sudden death. He had to get himself in order, be clear, concentrate his mind. He couldn’t set aside more time to do it because he’d already dithered enough. He had to be in order, though. He would give himself until he got to the top of the stairway to the roof. He would have to be succinct. But he had to mount the stairs very deliberately anyway, because he had to avoid slipping in the blood on the stairs and because he had to favor his knees, his right knee, spare it for whatever exertions were going to be called for.

  He began the ascent. The angle was not quite vertical and there was no railing to grip. Dragging the rifle up with him, behind him, was difficult and made for slower going. He wanted to be clear, as clear about what he was doing as Yeats’s Irish airman.

  One, step one, was Iris, and there was nothing to say about Iris beyond love and the size of his loss and that was it. If he was going to be shot to death and Iris was the last thing on his mind he wouldn’t mind.

  Two was Africa. He had been happy in Africa and he was guilty about that and he would do something for Africa in the next act, because it looked bad for Africa, and not only Botswana. There was the virus, seropositivity as they called it, and Morel saying that it was going to be a holocaust. There was nothing he could do about it. Of course Morel no doubt thought the answer was to go and dynamite churches, and possibly Parliament as well. They were doing nothing, and Africa was slipping into the valley of the shadow of death. He didn’t know whose fault it was. He wanted Morel to be wrong about this and for science to come up with something. He prayed for it.

  Three was the agency. He had to have mixed feelings about the agency. After all it had come into existence only after the West realized that the communists had organized a huge espionage machine larger and more aggressive and successful than anything in the West or even than the whole West together, and after the West realized that legal communist parties everywhere were being used as spotters and resources for spies, and after it became obvious the communists were setting new standards in ruthlessness, as in throwing oppositionists into crematoria during the Spanish Civil War. And then there had been the likelihood that the people at the top of the communist machine were clinically insane, paranoid, as the Moscow Trials demonstrated. So, all that was true. But th
en the agency had gone wrong, in places, in many places, in the marches of the empire, in Indonesia for sure, in Central America the same, in Afghanistan, and in Africa, especially in Malawi and Zaire, but not only there. And he knew that the agency was going to survive the collapse of the Russians and continue using its power dubiously, which was why he had to be out if he escaped this alive. Being in the agency meant making impossible judgments, weighing justifiable or virtuous acts against inexcusable ones, mainly because so much on either side of the equation remained secret.

  The rifle was proving useful as a crutch. Four was English Literature. He loved it. It was always with him. He thought, On the roof I will do such things as will be the terror of the earth, but what they will be exactly I have no idea, like Tamburlaine. He had been attracted to the Elizabethans, Webster especially, but had decided they were too bloody. Imagine that, he thought.

  The stair treads were fixed in a metal casing. There were no risers. He had to grasp at the treads above, using one hand only, and drag himself up, hellward. Sweat was sliding into his eyes but the best he could do to get rid of it was to rub his eyes against his shoulders, which was ineffective. He needed a spare arm. The smell of blood was making him ill.

  Five was Rex. He wondered how anyone was supposed to compete with a brother whose first word was brioche and whose last word, according to what had been reported to Iris and relayed to Morel and then to him, whose last word was Mama. My first word was car, he thought. Apparently his parents had given Rex a bite of brioche at some early point and he had loved it and wanted more and voilà. Ray had gotten tired of hearing about it and about Rex’s magnificent and precocious vocabulary in general. Rex had been impossible, but still, on his own end, Ray knew he had mismanaged things. He would do what he could for his brother, who was one of the aoroi, the dead-too-early. He didn’t know why he remembered that. In any case, if he lived, he was going to do a Life of his brother, a vignette, and maybe a chapbook of the best bits and pieces from Strange News.