by Norman Rush
Nelson had closed his eyes.
I let them take him again. I was ready to rally myself, clean up, renormalize. It bothered me that Nelson seemed limited to a purely responsive mode with people. He had initiated nothing. But this must be proof of the depth of what he’d been through, I told myself. In any case I had an audience with Dineo coming, in which she would tell me all she knew and incidentally take up the matter of what was going to be done about the rifle I had lost and the horse that had been taken and was now dead: Dorcas was making an uproar about both, apparently.
The Smile
Below are three dialogs from Nelson’s convalescence, the first two from different stages of his stay in the infirmary, the last from the first night we were back chez nous. They go in ascending order of normalcy—that is, from the least normal to the most. The first two are reconstructed from notes made immediately after each exchange. The last is actual transcript from a tape. I resorted to taping when I finally sensed the extent of the bouleversement in Nelson I was witnessing, one proof of which was that he had no objection to my taping every word that fell from his lips—quite the contrary, in fact. All his irony about my Boswellizing was gone. Where I say the Smile I mean that his response is a particular smile, very tolerant or forgiving and structurally condescending, but not meant that way. The protocol for an audience with the Dalai Lama involves the audient’s agreeing to a fifteen-minute period for the exchange of benevolent glances before any substantive talking begins. Even the Pope had to agree to this. The Smile is what I imagine people in that situation coming up with. A feature that shows in the dialogs is that I become more upset as he becomes more equilibrized. And throughout I seem to be concealing my decision to stay with him in Tsau, if that was a bona fide decision, which is explained, I think, by my understandable interest in getting some hint from him that that question was working its way from the depths of his mind to somewhere near uppermost, where it had been before his, to my way of thinking, misadventure. My withholding my inner decision is of course something I look back on with hindsight telling me that my blaring out at some point my yes to staying might have changed the course of events. In fact I couldn’t do it.
The first dialog began after I’d been telling him yet again how I’d gone from hell to heaven, losing him, being in Tsau with Dorcas raising the winds over his absence and what it had to mean vis-à-vis Hector, the main implication being that Nelson was a fugitive from justice, the general seethings over the taken horse, no one listening to me, and then getting him back alive. He was healing absurdly rapidly, his face losing its swelling and joining his body in a perfection I could do without. Even the little lozenge of fat that seems to appear after you’re forty on the side of your nose was gone. His weight loss was anchored by his current diet, which was largely soup, broths. I think I would have made a perfect gay man, my appreciation for the male form being what it is. Nelson was becoming the pygmalion object I would have carved for myself as a physical mate. We were twinned, me with my response to his corporeal self and he with his self-proclaimed receptivity to the female shell, the beautiful ones, that is, naturellement.
He was still in his original windowless room at the infirmary during the first two dialogs, still under observation. I wasn’t supposed to close the door when I was in camera with Nelson, although no reason was ever given to me for the proscription. I have no doubt the idea was to deter me from bothering Nelson sexually, in his delicate condition. He was being treated like a godlet. If I did close the door, it would be unobtrusively popped ajar by an unknown hand.
Three Dialogs
1. Are we all right?
He nods.
I need you to say it, not just nod it.
Yes, we are, he says.
Is it still so tiring for you to speak up?
No, he says, more strongly but still marginally for normal discourse.
Then do we love each other? because I dot dot dot love you. I said the words dot dot dot in an attempt at lightheartedness and also to remind him of the days when he had seen fit to tease me about the caesuras in my conversation—as when I was too slow to make my point—by saying dot dot dot, just as I had. The point in those days had been for me to realize that I had to hurry to keep up with his fine intellect, the brain of a person so keenly attuned to things that movies were a bore for him because of that flicker of black between the frames that he, unlike the groundlings who saw movies as seamless things, was aware of. I don’t know why this particular claim to fame remains such a burr under my saddle, but it does. But in any case it was his turn to be the provider of caesuras. He was slower and more hesitant than I had ever been at my worst. But I had the feeling he wasn’t really trying, which had never been true of me. I know I was being unfair, in the circumstances.
That day he had let me brush his teeth instead of his doing it himself. He could do it himself. I had offered to do it just to see if he’d let me. This was an epitome of the way he was.
Please tell me everything that happened.
The Smile.
Nelson, do you want to walk around outside?
He said No. But without giving a reason.
Nelson, tell me yourself what happened, or give me a sketch, at least. They’re making things up about you, like that at some point when you were lying helpless you were protected by bees.
The Smile.
I was tired of not hearing the whole story from his mouth. Kakelo and Dineo were together in the position that he should be protected from having to tell the story over and over to every comer. Reportedly he found telling the story very difficult, although anything longer than three sentences, on any subject, seemed to be a trial for him. I had talked to Dineo and others and I knew the vulgate on his misadventures: he’d lain injured on the ground for eight days before being found by the Baherero. He had been halfway to Tikwe when a boomslang had dropped out of an acacia onto his horse’s neck, or alternatively it had struck the horse in the neck from the side as they passed too close to a tree limb. The horse had panicked, thrown Nelson, broken its leg in its thrashings to escape or shake off the snake. When it happened they were in a patch of slippery black sand locally called black cotton soil, which I think is a kind of marl, or sand with marl mixed in. Snakes are supposed to be more common in black cotton soil areas, which was a piece of lore I was surprised he was unfamiliar with. All his supplies were on the horse with the exception of his canteen. Nelson was on the ground going in and out of consciousness. The horse was a shuddering hulk maybe twenty or thirty yards from him when he came fully to. It had been maybe an hour and a half. He was badly sunburned, and an arm and a leg were broken. He dragged himself fifty feet to a termite tump built at the base of a tree and set his arm and fainted again. That night he dragged himself back to the horse and got all his provisions and impedimenta off it and then cut the animal’s throat with his hunting knife. There was no rifle with him, which was his way of making a certain point, I suppose. Then in a paradise of pain he had dragged himself back to his tump, not once but twice since he had to make a return trip to the horsewreck in order to get everything there was that he might utilize for purposes of surviving. Then it becomes fabulous. He had been delirious and had had visions of presences or a presence, a female presence, who had been involved somehow in his immunity from the attentions of the black-backed jackals who had come to devour his horse before his very eyes the next day. Also, bees had been involved in discouraging the jackals. There were different versions. Bees had discouraged either the jackals or the boomslang, which was still dangerously in the vicinity. He had had various insights of a certain grandeur, which he had only been willing to hint at so far to others. There was more and worse. He had put his ear against the tump and heard what the termites say, or heard their songs, which were magnificent. This, for me, was like finding myself wandering around in the Midrash. Dineo had left it out of her account, along with most of the other signs and wonders—she knew me—but I was hearing them elsewhere.
I mentioned a few items that were on my mind, water management being one of them, the question of how he’d survived on so little water. On water, he was gnomic. He had reduced his need, somehow, by becoming like something else, something that needed little or no water, possibly something dead.
I asked Will we discuss these things later in more detail?
The answer was, incredibly, I believe so.
There was an impasse in the making, so I stopped. Regression under stress is hardly unknown, I reminded myself. Then I warned myself to remember that Nelson’s mother’s alltime favorite piece of music, which she’d played endlessly on the piano in his presence, was The Lost Chord.
2. It had been too unnerving to stay all day with Nelson in the infirmary waiting for signs of normalization, so in the spirit of the scientific discovery that smiling when you feel terrible actually makes you feel better, I went back to the shapeup at Sekopololo and took almost any assignments that needed doing. This was my most endless week, in a way. I felt like a machine throughout. I had to supply two statements about the loss of the Enfield, the first being considered not complete enough.
I didn’t like the social mood in Tsau. There was anxiety, and people were short-tempered. I didn’t like the morning levées around Nelson, with people leaving little items for him.
Kakelo was sick of me, because I wanted to know why, if Nelson still needed to be in the infirmary despite his going from strength to strength physically, she wouldn’t consider evacuating him to Lobatse, to the psychiatric wing of the hospital there. She just looked at me. There was an expat Italian at the head of psychiatric services, and he spoke almost no English. She lectured me, not unkindly despite her annoyance. Nelson was doing well. The only reason he was still in the infirmary was because he wished to be there. Whenever he said he wanted to go back to his house he could go. This was true.
Nelson wasn’t reading, which was a sign of something significant, to me if not to Kakelo. I had brought him a sheaf of Economists. Worse than his not reading was that once when he saw me coming he snatched up an Economist to feign reading with. This was like an arrow in my heart. I still see it.
This dialog began with me telling him something that normally would have interested him. The Baherero who had saved him had been en route from a new enterprise based on the growing spring game kills along the cordon fence north of us. The migrating wildebeests were making for their usual watering place at Mopipi at the far end of the Kuki fence, where they were getting the shock of their lives because the lake at Mopipi had been drained off for diamond-washing operations at Orapa. So the animals were turning the corner at the end of the fence and heading for their only other source of water in the region, Lake Ngami, far in the opposite direction, so far in fact that when they arrived there they were so dehydrated and weakened that they could be beaten to death by children with cudgels. It was a massacre. They were dying by the hundreds. The Herero in Gomare had come down to capitalize. They were air-drying and brining the meat in volume, and taking the position—since they were under the same ban on hunting as everyone else—that this was salvage meat derived from animals already dead of exhaustion. This was essentially true. And the game scouts were permitting it. So the Herero were selling and bartering their biltong wherever they could, coming as far south as Tikwe, us, and the rest camps along the trek route. Even though wildebeest requires the most doctoring of any game meat to make it palatable, I thought we should take it. The Herero were not the ones who had drained the lake to wash diamonds with. There was a pittance of zebra and impala biltong available along with the wildebeest, offered as a kind of premium, I gathered.
Having gone over all this for him, I concluded with So that’s how your life got saved—through the commercial impulse. They took their biltong to Tikwe, but there was almost nobody there and whoever was had no money. Too bad there wasn’t a branch of Sekopololo there so they could have struck a deal. So they headed for Tsau and found you. Does this interest you, Nelson? Because it doesn’t seem to.
Certainly.
Certainly was a word totally external to our idioverse. It was from another dimension.
Well, should they be encouraged to come this far next time?
He didn’t know. He thought there seemed to be sufficient meat coming into Tsau already, one way or another.
A gleam came at me out of this. There was something far more deeply interfused, and I thought I knew what it was. I seemed to recall that in the soups he was eating lately he was finishing everything except the bits of meat.
Are you not eating meat, suddenly? I asked him.
He sighed.
I said You like meat. You did like it. Are you now not eating meat?
At length what I got out of him was that he had no general position about eating meat, but he was in a phase where, at each meal, he was in a sort of absolute way following his inclination as of that meal. And so far his inclination had been not to eat meat. He supposed his inclination could change. I felt like saying that as someone likely to be preparing some substantial percentage of his meals in the near future I was curious to know how long this phase might go on. I felt like shouting at him Youth wants to know! which was the name of some educational radio program he’d professed to be a child devotee of.
I asked Do you think you might be depressed?
His answer was no, and I was almost relieved, because if he’d been willing to say yes I would have had to think immediately about where to seek professional help in a universe where there were no decent choices. I knew that the Italian at Lobatse was impossible. And I knew Nelson couldn’t go to South Africa, where there was presumably some ilk of mental health establishment, for ethical-political reasons.
Are you the opposite of depressed?
Closer to that.
None of my timid sorties into irony or the jocular were working. I couldn’t shift him back into his normal historical voice. His convalescence was always in front of me, muting me. Also everyone else was showing so much patience and tenderness toward him that I was afraid of setting myself apart. There was even shrinkage visible in the Raboupi faction: people just outside the core were being more pleasant, showing up in the levées, and so on.
Since he seemed to be saying he was in a protracted high, I pursued the idea of his considering that brain chemistry, the euphoric toxins you get when brain fat breaks down if you fast for long periods, might be something to talk about in an exploratory way.
Here another way of blocking me made its appearance. We were in his cool dim room and he put on his sunglasses. I took this as primarily a defense against any more searching looks from me and as a signboard behind which he could resume what seemed to be his central interest as of then, namely staring into himself. The irony was that he had never been partial to sunglasses and that I’d made a small nuisance of myself theretofore with reminders and urgings to him to take them with him or put them on.
I did get the answer to one burning question. Why are you still in the infirmary? I asked. He was healing like a movie cartoon character, it was so fast. He could get around. There was only a little supportive bandaging on his formerly cracked or broken leg. Was he staying there because he felt he could recover faster there than at home with me?
Well, it was yes and no, which exfoliated into the position that this was probably the best place for him to be thinking about the things that had happened to him. Allegedly, I said to myself, allegedly happened.
You have to come home, I said, you have to be back with me.
I hadn’t had any intention of saying that, but I did.
I said You don’t know how much I have to hold myself in, with you here and me just visiting. You have no idea. When I washed, took care of, your feet the first night I thought of saying Your feet are killing me, which I repressed. That little joke. I was afraid. Don’t you think that’s slightly funny? Your feet are killing me? I was afraid even to say it under my breath. I thought if anyone did anything wrong you might die.
One disconcerting discovery was that apparently he had gotten to like the pajama pants the infirmary supplied him, so much in fact that he had requested that some copies be made for him out of stronger cloth, some heavier white cotton we had. And to wear with these he’d also had made a sort of sleeveless top on the order of a roomy vest, also white. What was going on? I’d brought him a pile of clean laundry, and I realized that the only things he’d chosen to wear were his white tee shirts. This too shall pass, must pass, I told myself.
3. Coming back to the octagon was as arbitrary a decision as lingering at the infirmary had been, so far as I could tell. He hobbled in and sat down.
We went through the preliminaries, or I did, about how it felt to have him back. I had overprepared the event. Our place was pristine. We had fresh bed linen, clean curtains, and the rugs and karosses had been aired and beaten. I had overprepared the event, and myself, in the sense that all this refurbishment had been driven by the anticipation that with his return to the octagon everything would revert to the way it had been before he left for Tikwe. I was emotional. I was compulsively scanning for signs that everything was going to be all right. It was essential that we be back to normal. Anytime I willed myself into thinking of not being with Nelson, all the physical strength went out of me. He seemed to appreciate all my cleaning up, although I thought I saw a quizzical shadow pass slowly over his features when he fingered one of the karosses. Our karosses had shed quite a bit. I hadn’t known you had to beat them a lot more gently than rugs.
I was trying to preempt everything. On his pillow I’d laid out a sleep mask, against the possibility that it might take him a little while to get used to sleeping next to an insomniac again. He looked quizzically at the sleep mask. My policy was to keep everything light, amusing. I said Do you remember the first time you saw me with my sleep mask?
He was making a good faith effort to remember, but it was taking too long. Throughout this whole time I was fighting against images of someone I had known who, post acid, could take ten minutes to roll up a shirtcuff because the aesthetics of the procedure were, in his illuminated state, so exquisite.