Mating

by Norman Rush

Nothing was wrong with Nelson, who was in transcendent mental health. And he, Pereira, was going to find some brochures to lend us, because Mr. Denoon was very very interested in a very fine school of Hinduism in fact created by a woman, the Marathi saint Muktabai. In all the country of Botswana there were many Hindus, but all were ignorant, to his knowledge, of the very fine bhakti school. All the great persons of bhakti were women, or many of them.

  Pereira looked sternly at me. I am lacking a wife, he said. And I tell you if this man came to say This woman right here you should marry, I would go straight to her.

  He was hoping to find time to see Nelson again.

  War

  I gave peace a chance for one more day. War was coming.

  There were just a few foreglints of the dies irae. One was I lost patience over his attitude to meals. He had some inchoate idea that meals should be aleatory: there should be an array larger than would be usual of different things to choose from, with an emphasis on cold cooked grains, and one should eat homeostatically each time—a little of this, none of that, a little of this, and so on. Congratulations, I said, you have just invented the cafeteria.

  I made myself get ten hours sleep the night before the war.

  When I got up, I reassessed. It had to be. He was minimally more talkative, but it was still basically only responsively. He hadn’t made one phonecall. He’d talked vaguely about needing to go to a couple of the ministries but hadn’t taken any steps in preparation.

  I fixed myself up more than usual. Breakfast was in silence. I needed protein for what I had to do, and ate eggs and cold sirloin tips.

  He was hyperclean and splendid in his white raiment.

  I was having my period, a heavy one. I’d stopped taking my pills for a while, why not?

  I said You know we have to discuss things. I led him to a round metal table under a big acacia. We sat facing each other across it, in flareback wicker chairs.

  First I got his agreement not to leave the table for at least one hour no matter what I said, how offended he might get. And that if he left for the toilet or a nosebleed he would come back. He was agreeable.

  Is this roughly the picture of what happened to you?: you were en route to Tikwe and not paying attention and you rode under a tree and either one or two boomslangs dropped down on your mount.

  Two, he said.

  You were in black cotton soil, and so when the horse reared up and slipped you went half under him, which is when you broke your arm and ankle. And then the horse struggled up, with a snake still biting into its neck, but it had a broken leg and fell again.

  Fortunately you were wearing your canteen—unfortunately in that you cracked some ribs landing on it.

  You passed out. But later you came to.

  You were unconscious long enough to get a bad burn on one side of your face and neck.

  I got upset as I spelled all this out. I had notes on a pad on a clipboard.

  You dragged yourself fifty feet to a termite mound that was under and half around a small tree. You saw your horse lashing around and making terrible sounds. You managed to kill it after this. You were in pain. The termite mound was like a recliner, a sloping shape.

  At this point he volunteered to narrate, if I would turn the recorder off. This was new and, it seemed to me, positive. He wanted the tape recorder off because it would make him feel he had to go too fast.

  I said Go day by day as much as you can.

  He would try, but I had to remember it was all a continuum to him.

  He put his palms flat on the table as he began, and he told the whole story with his eyes closed. I felt he was rising from some inner depth to do this, that it was painful. At points I could tell he was pressing his hands down hard. I myself was pressing my fists in against dysmenorrhea now and then. It was extremely peculiar. I felt linked to him, as though together we constituted some sort of mechanism.

  He went slowly. I am condensing. He said the first scene he has clearly is in twilight, when he first smelled and then saw black-backed jackals converging on his horse. What he got to watch was this beast being torn to pieces. It was like hell. He has fragmentary recollections of having dragged himself back and forth from the horse earlier to get his food pack, in terror of the boomslangs, which had vanished by then, apparently. He was certain the jackals would come after him once they were through with the horse unless he did something.

  At first the jackals ignored him, but then two of them came straying over. He had the conviction that terror, his terror, would doom him and that the first thing he would have to do was make himself into a nonreacting entity: that is, stop thinking and make himself as much like the ground or the trees as he could. He had to stop sending out waves of fear and supplication. It was a process of deidentification, he called it. It soothed him to have this task.

  He found it hard to talk about how he got into this deidentified condition. It was a formula, a certain order of images he made himself experience. It was an inner contortion. It had to do with making himself not feel the passage of time. In any case the jackals left him alone.

  I pointed out that another explanation was that the jackals—there were only four of them—had gorged themselves and that also he wasn’t quite yet their favorite food, carrion.

  I could be right, he granted. But he did feel he had gotten into some genuine state. And after the jackals left he continued experimenting with it, thinking that lions might be next, probably would be next.

  I was in his mind. He was determined not to die, because of me.

  He had set his arm and had tried to set his ankle break. In neither case had the skin been broken.

  He had the full canteen. He would limit himself to three mouthfuls of water a day. He had retrieved one of the two food parcels he had brought before the jackals came and ate the other along with the horse. He had mistakenly used up one trip to the horse for the purpose of gathering anything he could use for shielding against the sun. He’d gotten more than he could use. My tent was unworkable and he had torn the canvas off it to use for protection. He couldn’t explain to me why it was unworkable, and I concluded finally that in his pain and panic he’d given up too soon on it.

  His supply of food consisted of scones, dried pears, biltong, some mongongo nuts, and one orange. The idea, of course, was to husband this, something made easier by his discovery that when he went into what he was calling his interval state, when he was willing himself to be deidentified, he would lose both hunger and pain.

  Then he went for a highly summary and bland account of the next eight days. He rested, he slept, he practiced his interval state, he was lucky, the Herero found him. He had had dreams he could tell me about.

  I knew I was being maneuvered. There was more to be gotten at. But I let him think I was accepting the diversion of talking about dreams.

  It was transparently a diversion away from the experience or visions or messages other people had alluded to his having talked sketchily about, that is, away from the very things that had made his misadventure so momentous.

  He remembered two vivid dreams, both about the earth in the future. In one of them mankind has spread throughout the galaxy, and the earth has been converted into a mortuary planet. Various features of the old, inhabited earth have been sold to members of the galactic elite as personal family monuments. The Eiffel Tower is one, Niagara Falls is another. The remnant population of the earth is totally employed in monument-tending. In the other dream the earth seems to be given over totally to art. He dreamed he was having lunch next to a gigantic fountain while metal sculptures slid across the sky overhead on cables, their arms or wings spread. But he did see these as purely literary dreams with nothing noetic about them, didn’t he? Certainly, he said.

  Finally we went back to the chronology. Along about the fourth day there was a new dimension to his interval state.

  It may have been a hallucination, he said. You’ll think so.

  It was a sinking inward and experiencing the body as
a polity, was the way he put it after a lot of groping for words. He experienced the body as a confederation of systems that were in their own ways conscious or sentient, sentient being the better word for it. Anyway, it was a set of systems the mind could enter into a relationship with, an indescribable relationship, but friendly.

  My position was that this was not, strictly speaking, a hallucination at all. It was more an inner dramatization of something that he already intellectually understood to be the case in a primal way—e.g., cells signal back and forth, certain organs could be looked at as city-states. In short, the idea that the body is a hierarchy of systems is something that got dramatized dot dot dot.

  Ah, but not a hierarchy, he said. Not a hierarchy. Don’t make me say things I didn’t say.

  I had to watch my limits. When I asked So did you enter into shall we say a new or friendlier relationship with these elements? all I got was a shrug and a longish look of disapproval.

  In a moment he was benign again. I was free to have any interpretation I liked on anything he said. He wasn’t placing a great deal of stress on anything.

  What other revelations were there? I asked.

  He was silent. I thought this might be as much as he was going to say.

  He wanted to tell me something before we went on. He would make it brief. If he were a writer this would be a short story he might write. You have a husband and wife. They are like night and day in terms of health.

  I was hearing a fable.

  The husband never gets sick and the wife is permanently ailing. You read the story and you observe that the husband never complains and the wife is always complaining.

  He has nothing to complain about, with his good health, I said. Or are you trying to get at a chicken and egg proposition?

  Listen to the story. The husband praises things, appreciates things, says so all the time. He might go so far as to praise his tools, his saw, say, his log-lifter. They live in the country. His wife is mired in not liking much of anything, aside from her ailments. He’s like the Basarwa are, apologizing to the animals they kill and praising the totem of the genus, thanking it.

  I let him take his time. I had wanted him to talk, and now he was.

  The husband goes out of his way to try to demonstrate to his wife that she lacks a certain thing, which you could call gratitude. He has a philosophy of gratitude of a certain explicit or even crude sort, which he rightly or wrongly thinks may be at the heart of the difference between them, his better luck. But a thing about his philosophy of gratitude is that it has to be spontaneous, or come spontaneously, to work. It can’t be a rote thing like saying grace. He feels all he can do is exemplify what he feels, because, and this may be irrational, he feels that if he instructs her or catechizes her into it, not only will it not work for her but he himself might then lose the benefits of his attitude to the world. By the way, both of them are atheists, so this is not about religion. But how this story ends is a problem. One way it could end would be his telling her, and her laughing. And then they both begin to decline.

  I said Well, didn’t you say they were both elderly to begin with?

  Maybe I implied it. But in my mind, in my story, they are.

  A fable, I thought. No, a parable, god help me.

  But I am very good with dreams and parables.

  I said So the husband says goodbye to a hardy old age. I don’t know what to say, really, except that I think this is your way of telling me not to ask you about things you feel prohibited from telling me for cosmic reasons of some kind, to which I say what you once said to me and made my hair stand on end with: Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. That was you, wasn’t it, from Bertrand Russell? I loved it. Thought looks into the face of hell and is not afraid. Loyalty to this is why you stipulated that they’re atheists, and why you wince when I use the word revelations, I guess. I think this story is silliness. If only the wife is smart enough to read his body language and copy him they can live another what? nineteen months beyond their allotted span, or something? I am sorry, but this is just plain Don’t bother me, in spades, and I hate it, hate it, hate it, reject it. I don’t care.

  I said I can’t help reading between every line, can I?

  So there are certain private magnificent things you could tell me, but if I were perfect I wouldn’t make you tell me. Because of the consequences, and so on. But I’m not perfect. Tell me this: will you be punished by some vaguely female force or image or power if you tell me everything? I’m just guessing here, but tell me. And don’t think I don’t love you for telling me this story, which is an act of friendship as well as being whatever else it is.

  Go back a step, I said. Try and see this just as documentation for someone you love.

  He really groaned.

  I said Tell me the worst thing you’re not supposed to tell me, as I construct it, because something might happen we both would hate.

  With his eyes closed, he said Consciousness is bliss.

  I said This is something you know and feel? As opposed to something you were told or got as a message?

  Again he groaned and said Yes, yes.

  Was this literary or was it real? It seemed real. All my questions à la Then how are you ever going to get anything done? seemed callow, or worse.

  Here was my beloved envelope looking into his palms. Why was parsing all this up to me? which it was.

  I knew suddenly what he was really like: he was like a fortune-telling machine you put money into for each message or prophecy you got, the head being behind glass, encased.

  This is something you feel even as we speak, I assume. Say those words again.

  I will.

  But he was pale and looked almost disgusted. This was the most excruciating part of the morning. He looked exsanguinated. I was being driven into seborrheic hyperactivity. I touched my nose and it felt anointed. A desperate protojoke tried to emerge premised on how difficult it would be for me to be led around by the nose, it was so shiny. Meanwhile the revenge of the womb was ongoing.

  It was violative, but I had to make him say more. The gist of what I got out was that over the days, he had been allowed to have this experience of consciousness as bliss and finally to keep it, protract it, take it away with him as part of him in his reconstituted state. This element of allowance or permission was what bothered me the most, since it implied personal agency on the part of some undisclosed party. And I was right. He had had a vague sense of a presence always near, mostly behind him, and he would say female, if he had to assign that kind of quality to it. The word ethereal evidently caused him so much pain that I felt I had to apologize.

  I wanted to know if this consciousness change was part of any other, larger conclusions about the secret of the universe or of nature or if it had anything to do with his conceit—I let myself use that word—about the confederal nature of the body.

  No, there was no doctrine coming out of this. Every part of what had happened to him was separate.

  I asked Might there be a connection, though, that you just haven’t forged or come upon yet?

  The Smile.

  I tried to slip in an insinuation or two about Taoism. The Smile again. Taoism was a nondoctrine, not to put too fine a point on it. He had always been a sort of Taoist, he said. I was making a mistake in trying to reduce any of this to some established schema. He could see where I was going, and it was a waste of time. I of course was thinking that his mother’s Mary fixation, osmosed to him as a child, was seeping up in all this in the guise of the hovering eternal feminine I had made him, by bitchlike persistence, disclose and talk about however minimally.

  I was going to have to let us stop. But first I took him back over this bliss-consciousness development. He was halting and recursive. It was impossible to formulate it further for me. It was an overwhelming feeling when it was at its strongest. It was on the order of sexual pleasure and had to be controlled, actually—kept down. He claimed he was holding it down, keeping it at a subdued
level even at that moment. One of his tasks was to learn how best to do this—in fact, it was one of his main tasks.

  An image came to me from a philosophical discussion about torture we’d had a year or so before, something practiced by the Manchus in which an incision is made in the victim’s stomach and a piece of the intestine is nailed to a tree and the victim is lashed and made to circle the tree, unwinding his entrails as he goes. I was being the Manchu.

  I produced a kind of last straw for both of us for that session by asking if I could watch him while he relaxed his control and let himself feel this new state of being he had discovered. I knew it was invasive when I said it, but I was desperate to get to some kind of conclusion I could penetrate. I felt slightly sordid and took it back right away, seeing the expression on his face.

  When I asked him—looking for a little forgiveness—if he didn’t think he would feel better once all this was out, external, he said no.

  It was time to stop. I got up. He had just lately given up the knobkerrie he’d been using as a crutch. He asked me to get it for him.

  He suggested we not eat lunch together, if I didn’t mind. He would prefer to eat separately. I was hurt, but I was also convinced by his manner that his motivation, whatever it was, was not punitive, not in the least.

  Satanic Miracle

  After lunch he was willing to resume, but sitting side by side in our wicker chairs rather than facing. I’d moved the table away. We were in the same spot, al fresco. It was hot and bright. He apparently felt strongly about our continuing our conversation there, where it had begun, instead of indoors. I was for indoors for reasons of privacy. Because of the drought there was a ban on using hosepipes for garden watering, so the yardman was ubiquitous with his watering cans throughout the grounds. His English was rudimentary, though. An odd thing was that he professed to not be able to understand my quite good Setswana except with difficulty, whereas anything Nelson said, however murmurous, he got right away.

  Nelson took the helm more that afternoon. I let him. There were long gaps, when he was doing the narrating, that I could use to reprise the questions I was asking and reasking myself, the main one being what was I going to do with him? Where had his comic side gone? was another. And why was everything between us so asymmetrical—my having urinary frequency versus his never having to pee, his appetite being tiny and precise, mine being pretty much out of control. And what exactly would he be to Tsau if he went back in his present mode? This was a very interesting question. What exactly was I supposed to do now? Should I stay with him and pray for a remission? Should I give him an ultimatum and somehow get him back to the States the same way I got him out of Tsau, even though it seemed everybody was certifying him as more lucid than thou? Should I marry him as he was, sweet, and take some kind of pleasure in his wifely qualities and satisfaction in my association with his past glorious works and the future glory of what Tsau would be seen as when it was thrown open to the world? Should I kill myself, seek professional help for myself, give him another six months of my nets and snares and shock therapy, stay with him on the assumption this was a maneuver of some kind on his part and that he’d turn to me some night with a smile and lucidly explain why all this had been necessary? Which? What? I grasped an unfortunate truth: his willingness to be a father was operating on me, confusing me, weakening me. He was appealing to my maternalism on two levels. He needed to be taken care of, self-evidently. And there was also the real thing: I could be the mother of the children of this brilliant, unique man. And then I would always have them, whatever else happened.