Mating

by Norman Rush

  The reference to elephants baffled me, as did the wavelet of approval the comment got from elements not limited to the group around Hector. Dineo explained it to me later. Elephant herds are matriarchies from which all adolescent males are expelled and only a handful over time allowed to return and function as adult companions. The females are careful to keep the males they let back in outnumbered and cowed, and they rather cavalierly exploit the satellite expellee males who mope along after the herd, using them as guards and sentries. Later I wondered whether the murmur I’d heard had been not pro Hector but pro-elephant society as a model for Tsau, which it was assumed we’d find scathing. I could tell Denoon had been stung in some way. I understood how aggressive Hector was being but not how recklessly and in what tender directions. The paucity of men in Tsau was a real issue for many of the queens but was seen differently by most of the aunts. Nelson’s power base was in the aunts, I think it’s fair to say, with a salient of support among a minority of what I would call the most advanced younger women. It was Denoon’s position that gender imbalance was structural and it would self-correct down the line, but only at a point when female primacy had been established as normal. There was everything to be gained by keeping this issue from becoming anybody’s action item, which of course Raboupi geniusly sensed.

  Nelson was vibrating with rage. He was now up on his knees. If Hector succeeded in provoking him to get to his feet, I saw a debacle. The bo-so bo-so chant began again. In perfect Setswana, Nelson tried to say against the chant A strange beast is sending its breath across Tsau, and now we are hearing the name of the beast, and it is Boso. This beast is known to be chewing the shadows of certain chiefs who are drunkards and wifebeaters. This beast declares it loves the women of Botswana so much, yet can find not one woman to take her place among the men who tell it what dance to do. This is not a living beast at all. No, though it makes sounds such as goats make, as we hear at this moment, it is no more than a skin thrown over scoundrels whose design is men at ease again, with women serving. This beast is known to take money from the Boers in Mafikeng.

  I saw that Hector was in a crouching position. Whatever was going to happen would be worse than what would happen if I acted. I was born to intervene, obviously. What I should do came to me.

  I got up and performed a fainting fall. It was good, but I still cringe at the little outcry I felt I had to embellish it with in order to make sure I was noticed. Still, clearly my act was the pretext the forces of good had been waiting for. The event was over. I was the center of an exaggerated rassemblement. People had been in such a hurry to get to me that another diversion had been created: a hurricane lamp had gotten knocked over and set fire to a blanket briefly. There was no going on. Denoon’s being baited to his feet had been converted into a dash to see what was wrong with me.

  I reassured everyone with lies about not having eaten, knowing full well that the true cause would be assumed to be pregnancy. People were already acting knowing as I showed them I was okay again, completely steady on my feet. I agreed to stop in at the clinic. Nelson was acting stressed and paternal. He badly wanted to get me aside, but he was the one who put the most pressure on for me to see the nurse.

  We went. In the distance I could hear Hector laughing. His laugh was distinctive.

  Oh, but There Was No Debacle

  The next day, once he was convinced that my faint had been a feint and that I was truly all right, suddenly Nelson was not interested in talking about the symposium. I sensed this was because his interpretation of events up to the point of my intervention was going to be radically different from mine, meaning ipso facto that we differed on whether I should have intervened at all or not, id est whether I had made a fool of myself at least insofar as he was concerned. I was frustrated. He was being unjust. There were things to be learned from yesterday, such as how he’d felt for the interim during which he had to entertain the idea I might be pregnant. And was the sanguine way he was acting today about yesterday the way he’d felt then? And if so, how could that be?

  But he immersed himself in his map of Tsau project, erasing perfectly good—I thought—sections and penciling in legends in handwriting even more microscopic than mine in my journal. He was semisacrosanct when he was at work on the map. What could I say, since making the map was my idea? First he put an hour into looking everywhere for the art gum eraser. I had begun to hate the map on other grounds. It functioned as a meditative device for him lately, negatively from my standpoint, because when his sessions of sweet silent thought were over he would usually come forth with some grandiose thing that needed to be done right away or that should have been done earlier, when Tsau was started.

  As day turned to night I got more incredulous that I was plainly not going to get the slightest credit for staving off the physical imbroglio I’d seen coming.

  I brought him tea and set it down nonobtrusively, then when he said something I mistook for an opening, something like Ah shit!, I thought Ah, this must be the return of the repressed, that is, yesterday in all its glory. So when I asked if he wanted a scone with his tea, and he said, being scrupulous, How many are there?, I replied Oh, many, many tekel upharsin. I thought he would get this as my lead-in to presenting my interpretation of the implosion of yesterday’s event as handwriting on the wall, meaning that it was perhaps time to think concretely about moving on. But it produced only puzzlement.

  And all Ah shit! meant was that he was annoyed with himself for forgetting to include somewhere in yesterday’s presentation the only contribution to science ever made by religion, namely the invention of logarithms by a Scottish lord nuttily obsessed with figuring out the dimensions of the New Jerusalem from inane clues in the Book of Revelation.

  Oh spare me, I think I said. Yesterday was a catastrophe trying to tell us something like that Tsau is an organism trying to deal with us as foreign bodies. Yesterday was only the latest trope.

  Please, he said, showing incidentally how pleased he was to have gotten perfect points on two pencils, meaning that now he could resume with the map and I could recede.

  This is denying me, I said. You don’t listen. Where were your protectors yesterday except for yours truly? If you had gotten up and pushed and shoved Hector or done whatever, dealt with him physically, then what? And don’t tell me you weren’t ready for it, ready for demolishing this whole sitting down and reasoning-together tradition you revere so much, or used to. Did I save that or not, that tradition if not you personally? Say something.

  But he began writing or tracing, whichever it was, again. You’re in another world, I almost shouted. Why can’t we talk about what was a debacle?

  Oh, but there was no debacle. It was incomprehensible that I thought so. But we couldn’t talk about it right then.

  Whatever false consciousness is, you’re developing it in spades, I said.

  This was my unkindest cut, and I knew it. He tried working for a few more minutes, then got up and left the octagon for a midnight ramble lasting a couple of hours. I went to bed.

  I was asleep when he came back, but not for long. I got a harangue. He was wound up. The symposium had been positive. Why couldn’t I see this? Tsau was evolving. Tsau today was only a foreshadowing of what it was going to be ultimately. He would be whatever Tsau wanted him to be, needed him to be. This was a new formulation. I was astonished. What did it mean? This was new. I pressed him in my usual gingerly way. Does this mean that if Tsau wants you to end up as the village atheist while she goes her merry way, while she or it turns into something entirely different, you’re up for that because it would be such a privilege just to be there to witness for the old idea of Tsau? I was being rough, because I was involved. I must have been very rough, because he changed his mind about staying in bed and went out for another midnight ramble. As he was leaving the second time I called after him I hope you remember you were the one who said the answer to the question What is the meaning of life? is The meaning of life is abnormal psychology. I doubt that he
heard the whole thing, in his hurry.

  He was back beside me when I got up the next morning. I made oatmeal and thought my kitchenizing would rouse him, but it didn’t. I ate alone, looking at him, wishing I had power, some kind of power.

  I Measured Dimensions Not Standardly Taken, Why Not?

  His not responding in any way to my breakfast activities led me into a brief and I think genuine mania. I think that was the effective cause although something else might have done it later on.

  I sat fixatedly staring at him. I moved my footstool around and stared from different distances, getting into it, getting into not washing, sitting there in my yakuta, not getting dressed, feeling aggrieved. How could I believe he was truly asleep? I knew his habits, his sleeping modes especially, since my insomnia gave me such amplitude to study them. I deserved to be talked to about yesterday. If my intervention was stupid I deserved to be comforted. I needed to be kept from succumbing to a certain metaphor for marriage I was recurring to too often, that is, of marriage as a form of slowed-down wrestling where the two parties keep trying different holds on each other until one of them gets tired and goes limp, at which point you have the canonical happy marriage, voilà.

  There is a condition you can precipitate in yourself by staring intensely enough at another face, or even your own. The face reorganizes itself subtly. The condition resembles the feeling you get when you look at a face upside down until it seems correct, a real face with eyes where the mouth should be, a possible kind of face. The face you’re staring at reorganizes itself into another face. The Rosicrucians encourage you to stare at yourself in a mirror by candlelight in a dark room until your face changes and you get a glimpse of yourself in a previous incarnation. Actually I knew about this from Nelson, whose father at the very end of a lifetime of florid atheism became a Rosicrucian and performed this very exercise so excellently that Nelson heard him yell with fright. The story was that he had seen himself as a bearded man imprisoned for his beliefs in a dungeon. The whole subject of his father’s fall into Rosicrucianism was painful for Nelson. Somehow his father had gotten into it as a crutch for his final abstinence from liquor, but then he had begun believing its tenets, going so far as to take up chanting mystic vowel sounds supposed to vibrationally lift the mind to a higher state. This was a morning and evening thing. He would begin with low steady sounds like Aum and Ra, which were all right, but he would end with a piercing nasal cry of Ain! which could be heard on the lawn.

  I was staring at Nelson, and there was a flicker, and then something made Nelson’s image seen smaller, as though he were receding. It was instantaneous, but there was no question about the reality of it as I was seeing it. What I saw was a distinct event, not on the scale of a cartoon character shrinking or anything remotely like that, but a shift, a recession away from me. I reacted with chills. I knew the answer had to be brain chemistry in essence, but I still felt shaken and weak.

  Try not to interpret everything, I warned myself as I concluded instantly that I knew what the experience meant. As things were going, I was going to lose Denoon, one way or another. This was my unconscious taking the bit between its teeth in a friendly way, for a change. I was going to lose Denoon because I wasn’t acting intelligently. And I was acting unintelligently because there was too much of him I didn’t understand. And I was failing to understand because the situation of trying to learn while I was in the act of living with him recapitulated my difficulties in absorbing material in lecture settings as opposed to absorbing material from a text, from something I could reread and underline. And this illumination yielded a subillumination to the effect that I had to reduce everything about Denoon to writing, classify it, so I could learn Denoon the same way I ever learned any subject decently. This did not seem bizarre to me in any way.

  My project came to me with insane clarity. My previous piecemeal treatment of Nelson had to go. It had been wrong simply to strew bits and fragments on him through my Tsau notes-cum-ongoing-analysis of my unique self. I needed to cull and put together under the right headings everything I had on Nelson so far, and I had to get more. What I had on Nelson had to be inadequate and misleading. He was the one who talked about protean behavior, namely the tactic in almost all mammal species of jumping erratically and randomly around in response to being chased. This could apply to him. I had pursued him. There was no argument about that. So a lot of what I’d captured was undoubtedly not what it seemed.

  As a task, this project was perfect. Of course, this is as I see it now. It was perfect because of its penultimacy. It was concrete and it was urgent, but it was the act preceding the final act or decision, which would have to be postponed, necessarily.

  I wanted to begin right away—in fact it felt urgent to begin right away. Whatever the mental equivalent of flailing around is was what I was doing. I knew it but couldn’t help it. Somehow I had to get the true dimensions of this man. The word “dimensions” galvanized me. The minutiae of this are important. My attention was caught by Denoon’s beloved retractable steel measuring tape. It was Swedish. It had been everywhere with him. The reel case was the size of a compact, but the steel tape seemed to come out of it forever. The quality of the tape was amazing: it was like silk but indestructible. He loved his measuring tape. It was on the floor near his head, where he could reach it. It and his slide rule and his hunting knife were equivalent pet things. The hunting knife I was ambivalent about because he wore it around too much and also because by using it in mundane little chores he rendered them overdramatic, in my humble opinion.

  I know there are lines in the Greek lyrics that describe the frantic state of mind, derived from love, I was entering. You burn me, someone says to Eros, and in one epigram someone complains that Eros is inside him and he feels his limbs being shaken by Eros’s wingbeats, approximately. I crept over to Denoon and lifted the blanket. He was deep asleep, naked as usual. He was sleeping the sleep of true exhaustion. He was on his left side, his right arm stretched out as though reaching for something and his right knee raised. He looked like a hurdler. I was going to measure him.

  I wanted him to wake up and not to wake up, both. I was pulling his blanket off but I was keeping the place dark, not opening the curtains. I was going to measure him, but gently, not letting the metal tape measure touch him, lest the cold of it startle him.

  I measured dimensions not standardly taken, thinking Why not? I measured across his buttocks. I measured his right calf. I wrote the numbers in ballpoint pen on the palm of my hand, like a Motswana clerk in a small general dealer shop. I was being outré in other ways too. I never sit around in the morning in my yakuta. The yakuta was for sex. Sitting around in a kimono was too much like my mother clinging to being not dressed for work as long as she could. But there I was. My hair was a wreck. Either he was genuinely sleeping the sleep of the dead or he was faking: whichever it was, I had to know, because my personal motto should probably be You lie to me at your peril. I measured his fingers, still keeping the tape from touching them. I decided I would measure his penis.

  Obviously I wasn’t delicate enough because voilà he was awake, explosively. He pushed me away. It was understandable. I was a shadow to him and was no doubt conforming to some invasive hag archetype we all carry around within us. Also he’d caught the glint of the metal tape and hadn’t had time to process exactly what metallic thing he was seeing. Then also I give him credit for sensing I wasn’t in normalcy, the proof being that it was no problem for me to wait until he spoke first, even though I was the invasive one and the convention of the female speaking first when an unresolved conflict has gone on long enough was alive and well in our house. Ah good, I thought, another thesis topic although unfortunately not in my field, id est proving that women are almost invariably the appeasers when fights occur that lead to stalemates. Nelson was alarmed. Finally he said something like What was that?

  I believe in the existence of situational genius and that I occasionally possess it. An explanation of what I was doin
g leapt into being. It was that I was planning to make something for him, clothing, pants in fact, a surprise, so I’d been measuring his inseam on the q.t., I was sorry, his pants wardrobe was useless for getting an idea of how long a normal pair of pants should be because it consisted of pantaloons and shorts, and I was sorry.

  He apologized for startling me with his reaction. I could see he was simply going to accept my explanation and not probe to see if there was any element of provocation in what I was doing. Something in his attitude convinced me, in the state I was in, that reducing him to paper was the right idea. I needed to proceed with it. I wanted him to leave the house so I could do that. I hope never again to undergo the state I was in. I even remember one peculiarity of it: I was aware more than usually of the edges of my field of vision, my lashes, the ghostly nose we forget is always there.

  Religion, the Most Effective of the Placebos

  Surprisingly, the conviction that getting Nelson on paper was urgent was just as strong in the days following. Denoon Evaginated was the secret working title for my compilation.