Norman Rush - Mating

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.