Mortals

by Norman Rush

  He reparked, changing the heading of the car so that it was angled toward the mouth of the access road. He would see that the afghan was placed within the lee of the open doors on the driver’s side. They would be shielded from the vantage of any approaching vehicle, but headlight beams would alert them before any intruder actually arrived.

  They were out of the car. With the side of one shoe Ray knocked away the largest pieces of gravel on the ground immediate to the car. He opened the car doors. Iris spread the afghan out. He could see that her nipples were hard.

  “We don’t have to do this,” he said. It seemed odd, saying it, considering his erection, the state he was in. It was not going to seem sincere to her, but it was. Her weeping was less, at least.

  She shook her head vehemently. The silence protocol was still in effect.

  “And you’re not cold?” Her response was as before.

  He said, “I’ll go with you if you want to pee.” He had the torch ready. He escorted her to a spot behind the toilets. He couldn’t believe that they were taking care of business naked in South Africa, but they were. He lit her up, as she squatted, but just long enough to see that there was nothing threatening in the vicinity. He stood guard. He couldn’t remember what the name of the odd duckbill bone at the base of the spine that showed when anyone squatted was. Delay was only making him more adamant, his penis more adamant. Iris made Ray turn around while she used some towelettes. She was so fastidious.

  They returned to the afghan. She knelt and she motioned to him to do the same, facing her a foot apart. He did. She had some inner plan for this.

  They touched palms and then interlocked fingers and gripped hard. She had touched her what, her introitus, briefly. He didn’t want to think pussy at that moment, he didn’t know why. It was only an opening in a human body but it was, in her case, so nice. Her pubic escutcheon grew in a neat compact bar over her introitus, with almost no growth to the sides. It was like art. He was not going to be pushed, once they began. She was going to wait. He needed to be superb, if he could.

  Without warning she pulled him over and down, to the right, to get him on his back. Her touch was like fire, as she guided him. Why did he have to lose her, he wanted to know. She was unusual. He remembered her observing at an embassy event when the subject under discussion was the food choices available at Kopano’s Market that certain avocados here smelled like semen when you cut them, which was true, but not the thing to say. Other people had mentioned lame things like the teardrop-shaped potatoes and fluted tomatoes.

  She straddled him. Her hair was loose. It was cut straight across at the level of her shoulders. It was hanging forward, hiding her face, except for her eyes, which she was holding shut tight. She was being careful about his cock, leaving it alone so far. On his back meant fun for him, Iris taking her time.

  He had to push his anxiety away. It would be easier for him to get up and take care of an emergency if she weren’t on top of him. He had to forget about that. Some of their best sex had been with her on top, using him as a dildo, taking her sweet time.

  One thing he loved that she sometimes did was to align their nipples and rub. Hers would be hard and his would be too. He didn’t know if she would do that. In an ideal world she would do everything she had ever done with him, in farewell, a variety show, had they but world enough and time, which they didn’t. There was too much.

  She was dragging her hair across his eyes. Kiss me, he thought, anguished, because she wasn’t going to, he knew. She lightly bit his shoulder. She was lowering herself more. She was brushing her breasts across his face. He wanted to take one of her breasts into his mouth, either one. He was frantic. He wanted to get as much of one of her breasts into his mouth as he could. Her breasts were killing him, her blunt instruments. He had called them that and she had laughed, long ago.

  She was kissing his eyebrows, licking them and kissing them. He didn’t want her to do anything tonight that they hadn’t done before, anything she had learned elsewhere. He couldn’t tell her that. But he could will her to stay within those lines. He felt pathetic. He was sure she had kissed his eyebrows before, maybe not as dedicatedly, though. When they got to it, she would come first. In a second or minute she would be using the head of his cock to open the lips of her pussy and that would be perilous. He would imagine a knot in the base of his cock. He would make it tighten as she tried to draw it loose, undo it and make him drown in her, which he would not do.

  He wanted to turn the torch on her, to look at her. He couldn’t do that.

  She was pressing her pubis against his right hipbone. In a minute she would use his knee against her labia, hard. She was sweating lightly, despite the temperature. Her parts were perfect. In time of course they would go the way of all flesh, and he felt tender toward the body he would never see. He wondered if Morel would still appreciate her. Months back when she had described herself as perimenopausal he hadn’t paid attention, hadn’t linked it up with all the other medical jargon creeping into her conversation since she’d gotten in with Morel. She would be good for the long haul. It was genetic and it was never smoking and drinking and just by instinct keeping out of the sun. She was a genetically advantaged person. And she had been his. The world is a desperate place, he thought. Overhead the stars were like salt in the wound that he was, as the band played on, she played on, teasing her cunt with the head of his cock, like old times. She was very wet. He tried to touch her there and she slapped his hand away. It was going to be no kissing and no hands sex. He would take it. She had an idea about this encounter and whatever it was would be okay.

  He was going to remember every second of going into her, this last time. He had told her more than once in the past that he wished she could be him long enough to know the unspeakable pleasure of going in, hot, going in, being let in, rather, being allowed.

  She wasn’t ready for him to go in. She had his penis where she wanted it. She was sliding hard against the underside of the shaft, sliding her labia hard along it. His heels were in the gravel. He wanted a pillow. He would do better if he had a pillow. There was no pillow.

  She was sweeping the wings of her hair across his mouth, her hair dark as death. In junior high school the words Eat hair had been a dire male-to-male insult. That was when oral sex was considered a perversion. She was sitting up higher again and he wanted her not to stop bending closer to him. He caught her hands and pulled. She resisted. He pulled again and she resisted again, harder. For a moment it felt like rowing.

  He thought, We are all rowing toward death, keeping it behind us but rowing toward it and not looking at it while we study our pitiful accomplishments receding. In sex you might forget death. He could feel drops of something on his chest, tears or it could be sweat. She was being rough. He didn’t think she was trying to make him come, really, before she did, to make some kind of point about his stamina, a mean point. No, she was doing the cooperative thing they did. He hoped that was right. But she was being rough. She knew his limits, or thought she did. Tonight was different.

  She had raised herself up and was touching herself again. That was almost too much for him. When she masturbated she always wanted him to hold her free hand, which made it love and not sex, only, not only sex. She wasn’t masturbating now, she was teasing herself, for him, he knew. She stopped. He wished she would say something.

  This was not going to be dawdling sex or karezza or any halfway sex fun practices they had fooled around with. Here is my body and the things we can do together with it, was what she was also going to be saying to somebody else.

  One thing she knew was that his cock could take pretty substantial provocation outside the snug sanctum it was aiming for. She was using that. But going in, the first minutes after that, were delicate, but if she helped they would pass and the band would begin to play and that would be fine, it could play on.

  She was letting him in, just, and stopping there, and then bending over again and dragging her hair all over his face, which was
cruel, if it was cruel, if it was anything but an impulse she was having but not meant to be cruel the way kissing would be. He wondered if what she was saying was You will never get a fuck like this again in your whole mortal life unless … unless something he couldn’t imagine, something other than stay with me and see what happens. He knew it wasn’t that, nothing as crude as that. It was something else. He had his own idea, by God, which was to ask for help from not God but Rhonda, help me Rhonda, help me keep her out of my heart, something cheap to make him slightly hate her, help me Beach Boys, anyone, help me, help me keep the knot tied in the heart the base of my cock, tied tight. She was letting him in.

  He felt strong. He inhaled as hard as he could. That was usually helpful. He needed help. He needed everything to be different. He needed a time machine, of course, like anyone else. He was strong.

  The knot keeping him from coming was threaded on his will, his willpower, his will, out of the night. Out of the night that covers me, out of the nineteenth century, the will, yes sir.

  He was in and he was going to fuck her until she said to stop in the name of God.

  And he needed to think of his semen bolt as a pearl of great price, a pearl, a containable thing.

  He was in a little more. He grasped her waist. In Eden sex had been like a handshake according to Augustine, before there was hot sex, after the Fall. This was not going to be a handshake, except that a handshake could be goodbye as well as hello, as well as Hello I must be going.

  He was in even more. She was being so careful. When she got close she wouldn’t be able to maintain herself on top. She would clutch him and fall on him and drop and roll over onto one side and pull him over on top. Now she was grasping his shoulders.

  He was in deep, she was letting him in, she was sinking down to seal it, that was it, it was perfect. She was pausing, holding him there. He didn’t know what she was doing, whether she was trying to leave him with a fuck he would use the rest of his life to search for, to search for one like it, or was she trying to do something else, by this act, to change everything between them, everything in his mind having to do with what he should be doing, with what they should be doing. He had no idea.

  She was starting and stopping. She was coming down hard and then she was drawing back a little way and then coming back down slowly and then waiting. There was sweat shining in the little hollows on either side of the base of her neck. She was moving her pelvis in a slow circle.

  She was moving now. He grasped her breasts. I’ll just hold on to your breasts so’s they don’t get away he had said to her once.

  She was moving less carefully. It was going on. He tried to get outside himself. He tried to see the stars and the glints of light in her hair and on her teeth when she opened her mouth and looked up as one combined field. She was oblivious to the strength of her movements. She was edging them off the afghan. She was making small sounds in the back of her throat. She was a noisy lover, normally, but she was trying to be mindful of prudence, because of their situation, he understood.

  There was a tear of sweat on each of her nipples. She shook them off, onto his chest. She was going to stay on top until she came. That was now. It was all right. He wanted to see her face when she came. She was getting close. Her legs were shaking. He wanted her to go first. He wanted to hold back and let her go and then fuck her just after she came until she came again, and until she said no, it was too much.

  He thought of Guatemala, the agency, Boyle, to cool himself. He thought about Malawi and Banda and one or two things he knew about the agency there, things Marion Resnick had told him, a man who never lied. But he thought about these dark things in a new way for him, not by acknowledging them as things at a distance but as sites of horror, bodies, dead bodies, fields of them, like the bodies at Ngami Bird Lodge, spread on the ground, pitched into the flames of the burning lodge.

  He held his breath. He held himself in. There were things he wanted to say to her. He wanted to say I want to say goodbye. And he wanted to say Remember me.

  It was good. She came. She fell against him. He managed to stay in her as she fell and he maneuvered her over and under him. It was done with art and it reminded him of something they had talked about, which was how amazing it was that the configurations two people could get involved in when they slept in the same bed never seemed to be exhausted.

  He wanted her to tell him to fuck her, but it didn’t matter if she didn’t. He moved in her. She was in one of the afterwaves of coming when he began. That was what he had wanted. His heart was killing him. He loved her.

  He drove himself harder into her. She was whining with pleasure and that was good. She would climax again right away.

  He kept on, slowing himself. He pushed her knees up higher. He was almost there and so was she, again.

  And then the knot at the root of his cock dissolved in fire, melting. He shouted when he came. Then she was snorting, trying to say something. She was telling him to stop. She had come a second time and she wanted him to stop. They disengaged, shaking.

  He felt heavy. He accompanied her while she urinated and cleaned up. She was very quick about it. She took care of herself not far from the car this time. He went off by himself, further off, to urinate.

  They pulled their clothes out of the car and dressed hurriedly. Before he buttoned his shirt she stopped him and reached in to touch his chest, his sides, tenderly.

  He felt leaden. Because he didn’t know what the message was, the message of what they had just done together. Or he felt leaden because there was no message. She looked ravaged, tired, not the way he wanted her to look after what they had done.

  When he bent down to gather up the afghan she said, “Leave it.”

  They were in Johannesburg and almost downtown. They were passing through the Observatory District, an odd, middle-class residential area laid out on abrupt hills that had formerly been vast heaps of gold mine tailings. The streets were empty.

  Iris said, “What are we going to do?”

  He said, “I’ll tell you exactly. You’re going with Morel and I’m going to be down here, alone. I’m going to find Kerekang. And then I’m still going to be here. But that’s not what you mean. What you mean is what are we going to do once we’ve done what we’re going to do and it isn’t working out so magnificently, when we have regrets, if we do. That’s what you mean.”

  There was more, but he wasn’t going to go into it. There was going to be a school connection. He would be joining the new South Africa. There was a certain heroic vagueness to his plans that he liked.

  She said, “There’s a certain heroic vagueness about your plans.” He was startled. It was a cruel reminder of the way their minds followed, tracked together, unless it was telepathy, which was nonsense. He must have used the phrase in some historical situation and it must have stuck in her mind.

  “We have telepathy,” he said.

  “Ray, I always wanted us to be in a school, set up a school together, you know. Or open a bookshop together. I’ve had that idea.”

  “Right, an idea for going bankrupt.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Believe me.”

  “I’m so glad you’re out of the agency. It’s what I wanted. I hated it.”

  “I’m glad too.”

  “We’ll be friends,” she said.

  “I know. Of course. Forever.”

  “We’re having a sighing contest. We should stop it.”

  “Okay, my dear girl. One last sigh.”

  “We’re saying goodbye.”

  “Not yet. In the morning.”

  38. At the Beginning

  He was sleeping well, better than well. It was one of the things about his life that he couldn’t help wanting Iris to know. It wasn’t the kind of information that would be of interest to anyone else he could think of. His bed was a cot with a foam rubber pad on it. His blankets were rough. His bedroom, in fact his entire domicile, was a caravan, a small one, an aluminum antique held together by in
genious repairs and wholly unlikely to survive any effort to tow it to some other site. But it was clean. It was overclean. He couldn’t stop women, mothers and sisters of students in the school that was being organized, from coming in, whenever they liked, to clean up. The tiny galley was spotless. His shelflike table was polished every day. His water containers were always kept full. It was often cold in the caravan and he had been chided by the women for not making use of his paraffin heater. He would use it when he needed to. The cold wasn’t keeping him from sleeping and he enjoyed being as frugal as he could in the circumstances. His life was like his circumstances, it occurred to him. It was poor and cold and clean. He got out of bed.

  He lit his Coleman stove and put the kettle on to heat his tea and wash water. He felt like writing. In the morning he felt like writing. So, when there wasn’t too much pressure to get over to the school, that was what he did. He liked writing by candlelight, in the dark mornings, but the mornings were getting brighter day by day and he was up a little later than usual and the light admitted by the peculiar lozenge-shaped windows in the sides of the caravan was adequate for writing. He was kept supplied with candles, too, by the women.

  Outside it was bright and windy. A solitary slablike cloud was sliding away. Bleak fields of stubble ran northward toward a line of stony hills. Thorn trees grew in clutches at the far edge of the field. His caravan was beached adjacent to the derelict farmhouse now under reconstruction as a schoolhouse. A toilet block had been his suggestion for one of the first improvements. It was done. He was glad. He could use it and it was a step up from the pit latrine he had had to make do with at first. To the south, across a red dirt road that carried almost no traffic, were more fields sloping down to a depression where the shanties the farmworkers occupied were laid out near a chive-green pond. Something was going to be done to cleanse or rectify in some way the pond. He wasn’t sure what.

  Back at his table, cleaned up and with a mug of tea at hand, he decided not to write anything else for the time being about his brother. He had already written too much. He was going to impose an arbitrary limit on each Life, maybe even a fixed number of words for each one that no one would notice or think of counting until later, when they were looking at the Lives for a second time. He liked the idea of some analogue of haiku being imposed on these lapidary biographies he was doing, going to do.