Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He was alone. He was looking up at a ceiling, a slanting-to-the-rear ceiling, or rock. It was low where he was and ascended higher toward the back, higher than, lying there, he could determine. His head was elevated. Whoever had placed him on the tarpaulin had stuck Strange News under his head, like a good person. A candle was burning back in the more open part of the definite cave he was in. It was Houdini who had slept with a special pillow full of his mother’s letters every night. He had been interested in Houdini, as a boy. How Bess, Houdini’s wife, had felt about the mother-pillow was a question. There were questions no one could answer. There were going to be permanent secrets. But in his case he would know soon why he was being taken care of in this cave. The cave had a sour, organic smell.

  He sat up. He could touch the rock surface above him, so he did.

  Sounds were coming to him from the narrow mouth of the cave. Whatever was going on was going on there.

  He was hurting everywhere. He was delighted not to be dead. Waking up, he had thought for a second he might be dead, dead but also alive, alive in the way you would be in all the religions, with their various hells and paradises and so on.

  He turned himself around and began to crawl toward the opening of the cave, and he had the thought that in fact he might be existing in some kind of illusion, the illusion that everything was real around him, that this cave was real, but that in fact he was dead, and crawling toward the dim light at the mouth of the cave was an illusion that was a kindness to him.

  And as he crawled the fifteen or so feet to the dim light and toward the discussion he could hear going on he hoped to God this was real because there were the stories of people dying and going down a tunnel toward a source of light and meeting their relatives and a neon version of Jesus at the end and then a voice saying your work is not done and then snapping back like a rubber band to the operating room.

  Ray thought he would be willing to die if it was going to be pitch black, hello zero, diving through the zero like a clown through a burning hoop and then nothing. He hoped to God the atheists were right. Because if there was an afterlife it would be institutional because somebody would have to run it and he couldn’t go through that again. And the only worse thing would be reincarnation and back to the ocean of human institutions again.

  Ray crawled and rested and crawled on. His knees were in hell. He realized that he wouldn’t mind meeting his brother, now, in the death place. They would have new things to say to one another.

  He emerged.

  “Here I am,” he shouted. He wanted to see if that would have some effect. Because if he was in a death drama, a comic opera of crawling toward the light and toward relatives, nothing he could say would have any effect on it because it would be a script, an ordained thing, like Orientation Day in college.

  His voice was better, he noted.

  He wanted, by now urgently, to see people he knew were alive, still, as of the time before he went into sleep.

  No one was answering. The opening into the cave was raised above the ground by six feet or so. It would have required effort to get him ensconced in that cave. The stars were thick, as usual, in the sky. But of course the managers of the afterlife could arrange whatever decorations they wanted.

  “Stay where you are,” Morel shouted to him. A torchbeam swung up to find him.

  “Help me down. Please!” Ray said. He could have shouted, but he wanted to preserve his voice, for what purpose beyond talking to Kerekang, he was unsure, but he felt strongly that it was important to be able to shout if the need arose.

  He cleared his throat. “Testing, testing,” he said softly. He was better. He wondered how long he had slept. He hadn’t been able to find his wristwatch before they’d left Ngami Bird Lodge. His guess was that it had gone from some koevoet to some witdoek. He didn’t care where it was. Iris was in favor of cheap watches. His watch hadn’t been cheap but it hadn’t been expensive either. He was going to stay with even cheaper watches in the future.

  The cave mouth was set back from a ledge. He sat on the ledge and rubbed his throbbing knee.

  Morel was being very canny with the torch, using it for short intervals and then turning it off. They were being hypercautious about signs of their presence being picked up. But he didn’t know if they were being extreme or not, really. They were afraid of helicopters. He didn’t think they had to worry about helicopters being used for spotting. They might be used for extraction, getting whatever was left of koevoet out and away before too much attention got fixed on the exercise and especially on where the villains had come from and who had organized them to come and who might be paying them. They were mercenaries. They were supposed to disappear.

  Morel was reaching up to help him down. Ray knew he was better because small things were bothering him again, as they normally would. It was bothering him that they were being so chary with the torches. He wanted to light up the black rocky bulk rising up behind him. He wanted to know where he was, physically. He needed the free use of a torch.

  “I can make it okay,” he said to Morel, and pushed himself off the ledge.

  He landed and collapsed but got up right away and began dusting himself off. He could smell food, something frying or roasting. He was salivating so copiously it was an impediment to telling Morel he wanted the torch for a minute.

  “Can you give me that?” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I just need it for a second.”

  “Here it is, man,” Morel said, surprising him.

  Ray was grateful. He would be brief in his investigation. He could see where they were immediately. This was a monadnock, a pile of boulders, some of them huge and all leaning against each other like a tumulus out in otherwise flat country. It wasn’t part of a chain of hills it was just a solitary upthrust of reddish granite. The red rock wilderness shall be my dwelling place was something from the Bible and the only person in the vicinity he could ask about the Bible was his wife’s boyfriend.

  Morel was examining Ray’s wrists and his neck. There were new bites, little ones, not so many of them, on his wrists and hands. Ray wanted to know how badly his face was bitten but didn’t want to ask Morel.

  There was a small fire burning out among the debris boulders on the monadnock. He wanted to go to it. The food smell was coming from there. He was ravenous.

  There should be no light if that was the object, really no light at all. He wanted to tell them about his father, who had been an air raid warden during the Second World War for about three or four months, and how strict he had been, Rex and he had heard about how strict he had been, with an armband and a helmet and a torch, or flashlight, rather, going around, saying to put this or that light out. And there had been black blinds on their windows. His father had been handsome.

  “Where is Wemberg?” he asked Morel.

  “It’s fine. We buried him here. I’ll show you the grave. And this place is on a topo map, so it can be found again, his grave. I’ll show you.”

  “And did you say anything, did you say a word, a farewell or anything?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t because I didn’t know what to say. I know I should have. Kerekang said something. In Setswana. I couldn’t hear it because he mumbled it, but he did. And another guy spoke.”

  “Show me the grave, then.”

  “And don’t worry about finding this place. It has a name, something knob, it’s a knob, it’s very prominent. I’ll show you. Come on.”

  There were three graves, three patches of darker earth with a small boulder sited at what would be the head end, Ray supposed, of each. The graves were laid out close to the base of the monadnock. They would fade into the landscape so rapidly it would be a genuine task to find them again. Ray was going to try to fix in his mind anything particular about the configuration of the monadnock that would mark the spot. The stones marking the graves could shift or be rolled away.

  Morel followed along uneasily while Ray studied the monadnock. It was an abrupt feature, a r
oughly pyramidal jumble of stones, some of them huge, with thorn brush growing out of crevices, especially lower down. The monadnock was about a hundred feet high, Ray judged. It wouldn’t take long to walk all the way around it.

  Morel said, “Don’t keep it on. Shut it off once you’ve seen what you need to.”

  The pressure was making it impossible for Ray to make out anything distinctive, anything he was likely to be able to remember. In order to do that he needed to be in a more composed state.

  “I need a hatchet,” Ray said.

  “A hatchet for what?”

  “Look I need to chop a mark, an X, into the rock above where his grave is, just to be sure. In case these boulders you put there happen to get moved.” Boulders was hyperbole. The markers were stones the size of soccer balls. They were half buried. It looked good. But they could be exposed if there was a downpour, which sometimes happened, if not very often. He wanted to chop a mark onto something huge overlooking the graves that was not going to be affected by any freak weather event. The earth around the monadnock was soft, not hard. He didn’t know why that was.

  Morel said, “Nothing’s going to happen to the markers.”

  “But it might. And by the way, which one is Wemberg’s? It matters which one gets buried next to Alice.”

  Morel hesitated, it seemed to Ray, before indicating that the middle grave was Wemberg’s. That was intolerable.

  “Aren’t you sure which one it is?”

  “The middle one, right here. I told you.”

  “You hesitated like you didn’t know.”

  “I fucking did not. You’re being crazy. It’s the middle one. Calm down.”

  Ray couldn’t. Things were getting him excited more than they should. It didn’t matter. He was feeling urgency and anyone who wanted to say it was undue was welcome to.

  Morel said, “Kevin helped us. I’ll get him and he’ll confirm it. Just wait.”

  That seemed to tally wrong. Morel clearly intended to go and get Kevin, get him out of Ray’s sight, get him and fix it so he would say whatever Morel told him to say because Rra Finch was going mad. And it would be like Morel getting to Iris first, to warn her to say this, say that, because he knows, her husband knows, and the two of them cooking up what to say. He knew what was going to happen, if Morel had his way, which was that somehow they would be traveling back together, somehow either in the Cruiser or some other way and at some point it would happen that Morel would say Wait here a minute I have to pee and he would disappear and there would be a call made and Iris would be forewarned and there would be an exculpating scenario devised that he would have to use his last ounce of strength to penetrate. What he wanted was the naked truth. He wanted to surprise her. He wanted to look her in the face and see if she would lie. He didn’t want to know in advance she was going to lie. She had always been truthful with him.

  “I’ll go get Kevin. You stay here,” Ray said.

  “You can’t get Kevin.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you look over there, where the light is, Kevin is in there. We can’t go in there. They told me. It’s the cadres, talking. They said we had to stay away until we get a sign. That’s what they said.”

  “I need a hatchet or a crowbar or something hard I can gouge with and I need Kevin. I mean it. I’ll tell them.”

  “Then go ahead and ask. You want me to stay here, I’ll stay here.” Morel was dealing warily with him.

  The blackness around them felt irregular, like a fabric being shaken. It was bats at work, swerving and fluttering their ugly wings.

  Ray wandered toward the light and the food and the murmurs.

  An armed man came out to stop him.

  He saw where the cadres were. Tarpaulins had been thrown over the crests of two low thorn trees growing in the midst of an isolated group of tall boulders, making a false cave. There was a Coleman lantern burning and there was also a small bright fire and meat of some kind roasting over it. There were sleeping bags on the ground. It was cozy, in there. He could see Kerekang. He thought, They have no idea how hungry I am. There were others in the faux cave.

  Ray said, “Kea batla Kevin.”

  The armed man said “Nyah.”

  Ray raised his voice. “Kea batla Kevin. Kevin can you come and help? Kevin.”

  Kevin appeared.

  Ray said, “I’ll need a hatchet, rra. And can you come with me and point out Rra Wemberg’s grave?”

  Kevin was hesitant.

  “Just tell me which one it is, of the three.”

  “He was put in the middle.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “I think it will be okay. I think it is deep enough. I think so, rra.”

  That meant he was doubtful if it was deep enough and that some beast of the wild could come and dig the body up. The picture filled Ray with horror and a renewed exhaustion. The task of exhuming Wemberg and putting him in a deeper hole was beyond him and it was something he couldn’t ask for help with. People were doing their best. He had to think.

  Kevin was chewing.

  I need to eat immediately, Ray thought. The need was connected to what he had to do next while there was time, which was to make a cairn over Wemberg, collect stray stones and pack them over the grave to create a good-faith impediment to the beasts of the wild. He would do it himself to the best of his ability, after he’d eaten. And whoever wanted to join in could. And he would put stones on the plots of the men buried on either side of Wemberg, too. He was ashamed that he was only thinking of that now, that he hadn’t inquired who they were, their names, paid attention, any kind of attention, to them.

  It was meat he needed. There was something ultimate about meat on an open fire. Barbecuing was supposed to be bad, and it was possible Iris was right and it was, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t ultimate. There was the story by Jack London about a Mexican revolutionary who came to the United States to raise money for the revolution by fighting for prizes, prizefighting. And the Mexican had somehow been unable to get a steak to eat before the fight. He hadn’t been able to afford it. The title of the story was blunt, “A Piece of Meat.” And then the fight had taken place and the Mexican had fought like a demon as hard as he could and had almost won, then he had lost because he hadn’t been able to get his piece of meat. Rex had been a fan of Jack London’s stories. And there was the one about the guy struggling to build a fire to save his life someplace in the Arctic and getting the fire going and the fire melting snow stuck in the branches of a tree overhead and killing the fire, and him. Rex seemed to love stories where you struggle with all your might and then at the end you lose.

  Ray said, “I am interrupting your supper.”

  “Nyah, gosiame.” Kevin sent the armed man away. Kevin was using more Setswana, becoming more Tswana, it seemed to Ray. That was called acclimating. His comrades were bush Tswana, a lot of them. There had to be other students, people of Kevin’s type, somewhere in this madness. A number of them had left the university to join up with Kerekang. He was curious about them. He wanted to know where they were, but he couldn’t ask without looking like a spy. He was not a spy.

  Kevin was chewing and pulling strings of tough, unchewable meat out of his mouth and throwing it away. Ray thought, When I say ultimate about meat and fire, I mean ultimate in the same way a woman’s breasts are ultimate, an ultimate thing you want to see and touch, a fact that will never change. When he was old he would still want to touch her breasts, assuming he was in the position to do so, Iris’s breasts, which was not likely, to say the least.

  He wanted to go into the faux cave and eat with the others and he wanted to escape from the feeling that the blackness around them was shuddering because of the bats engaging in their activities.

  “What are you eating?” Ray asked.

  “Rra, you can come to have some. It is noga.”

  That was a word Ray knew. It meant snake.

  Kevin said, “You see when we put you for sleeping in that place w
e first took some snakes. Now you can come and enjoy them.”

  Snakes had been in the place they had slipped him into to recuperate in. It had been a good idea, except for sand flea bites on his wrists and so on. They had gotten the snakes and were eating them for dinner.

  The idea of eating a snake made him want to be able to be the one human being in history who could fly, a human bird, fly to Gaborone and land in his patio and see his wife and see what she would say, seeing him. Here I am, he would say, and what do you say?

  His tasks were mounting up too rapidly. There was getting Strange News, his packet, for one. And then there were all the others. But to get Strange News he would need help, he would have to be boosted up. He didn’t like asking for help. He had asked for help too much already. And in fact if his entire life picture could be put up on a screen he wondered if anyone here, around here, would say he deserved help.

  Kevin was pulling him toward the fire, the faux cave.

  “We are cooking tea,” Kevin said.

  “I would like some.”

  There was a small, hot, resinous fire, and on a grill over the fire, coils of white ribbons of meat, snake meat. Mokopa the one-eyed chief was tending the ribbons with a knife, tossing them.

  Kerekang was looking better. He stood up and held his hand out to Ray.

  “Gosiame,” Ray said. He had a strong desire to apologize for his absence during the time it had taken to get to the point they had all reached, this faux cave, full of men. This was something he wanted to enter and not go away from until he had to. It was a feeling between men that he wanted to have, not that he ever could, not with these men, because he was white, and for other reasons. Everyone around the fire was serious. They didn’t know that was remarkable.