Norman Rush - Mating

She would have to talk to the mother committee, of course. But I knew it was set. He was going away from Tsau with Scientiae Athena, otherwise known as me. I would restore him. And that would restore me.

The next day, strangely enough, facilitating rumors were percolating around. There was something about complications and the need for x-rays. And people had heard something suggesting that I was in trouble with Immigration and had to go to explain my long stay in Tsau and correct everything.

A Sabbatical

There was a hint of valedictory sentiment in the air during our departure, which was a little odd since this was only supposed to be a sabbatical. I was full of emotion the circumstances forbade me to express. There was a crowd at the airstrip to see us off, which included Dorcas and the batlodi, who were very contained about whatever they were feeling. They had been the objects of a special mollification process: word had been passed that a primary reason for our trip to Gabs was to deliver a packet of depositions on Hector’s disappearance to the Criminal Investigation Division, at long last.

Getting Nelson to agree to the excursion had been no problem at all. I’d deemphasized the medical side of it, although I did mention that the nurse was recommending it, which was true. I had a rather grudging referral note from her. In fact it would make sense for me to show my face at Immigration. I suggested that he had some business pending with different ministries. He agreed. I brought certain folders to him that he specified and he began stirring through them, but not in his usual way. He was so desultory that it was painful to see it.

On the plane it was bliss, a thunderstorm we had to pass straight through notwithstanding. I copied my indifference to the buffeting storm from Nelson. Apparently I was being a fool, because when the pilot left the control cabin and came back past us to leave, his face was chlorotic. Being with Nelson then was like being with a distracted older brother. There had been no real sex since Tikwe, and this felt almost like a kinship prohibition to me now. I began to be generally hopeful. In the plane I confessed I’d left most of his emperor of ice cream wardrobe, his vanilla vests, tops, and pants, behind, except of course for what he was wearing. Everything else was his regular gear. He smiled about it, but in fact it wouldn’t take me long to find there was some slyness afoot, because he’d packed his own supply of white raiment without telling me about it.

With us on the plane was another medical evacuee, an Indian shop-owner who’d been on holiday at Island Safari Lodge in Maun. He’d been bitten by a hippo, or rather the aluminum skiff he’d been cruising in had, and he’d been injured. He was met by a throng of family and friends, the matrons wearing the most unflattering garment ever to befall the female midriff. There was no one to meet us, which should have been a relief. I’d worked hard for it to be that way. But at the same time I felt a tremor of disgust with the world that somehow the fate of this man, my beloved man, hadn’t come to somebody’s attention in Gabs, because something was seriously wrong with him and he was important.

Time Is an Ape

I thought I should give silence and sequestration and nonconfrontation at least a week. That is, I created a vacation from everything for us.

There was only nominal pressure from Nelson for me to try to line up something for us in his old haunts in the Old Naledi squatter settlement. We spent one night in the President Hotel and by checkout time the next day I had a leave house for us for a month or maybe more. It was a big, lavish, newish walled layout assigned to the American embassy’s admin officer, who was away on a short course in Mauritius with his family. There was a cook and a yardman. The swimming pool was empty in deference to the drought, which had been ferocious in Gaborone. Tsau seemed succulent, almost, compared to Gabs. I mentioned to someone from Meteorology how well Tsau had done with rainfall, and he seemed dubious. He quoted me the figures from Maun, which were much lower. The implication was that I was telling him fairytales. Everyone around the embassy was extremely glad to see me. I had apparently done a superb job of ingratiating myself earlier on. Helpfulness toward me reigned. Of course a part of it was that the embassy wanted to get au courant with the mysterious Denoon’s activities. But they were proper. They knew all about the privacy agreements he’d extracted from the Ministry of Local Government and Lands. But the embassy was indirectly providing our housing, after all, so it was not untoward for people like the pol-econ officer or the USAID director to drift by. The yardman turned them away, according to our instructions. Nelson wasn’t ready to see anyone yet.

I did errands that week — shopping, going to Immigration to cement relations — at a run. I ran because I was so unsure about Nelson. I was perpetually afraid I’d come back and find him gone, recovered in my absence and gone. He was essentially doing nothing that I could see. People who wanted to see him he referred to as the curious. He got up late. He walked around the garden. He ate small meals. He bathed or showered a couple of times a day. He napped. He would listen to music if I suggested it and set up the stereo and chose something. The only basic change was that he was reading again, which was the good news. The bad news was that he would only read one book, the Tao Te Ching, which he had brought with him, that book and only that book. I had begun to hate Lao Tzu. It was impossible to get a discussion going, however tangential, relating to the Tao. I gathered that the whole thing was too sacred, too central to what was distracting him. We slept in a vast bed. He went to sleep every night at eight o’clock. Sex was not rearing its lovely head.

I wanted to supply just a little in the way of delicacies available only in the capital, but Nelson was showing a marked preference for the food of the people: bogobe, other porridges, maas, all the staples of our existence at Tsau. He never told me to stop getting the Wensleydale cheese or the occasional cup of crème fraîche, but he took only token tastes, mostly, then asked for his porridge and maybe a piece of fruit. I wasn’t made to feel guilty about my European eating propensities. I could do what I liked. I was eating a little too much at first because I felt I ought to finish up what he was declining to more than taste.

That week yielded exactly one unsolicited comment or statement from him, although he continued answering everything that was put to him. That one unsolicited comment was, I think, Time is an ape. I think this is what he said. I asked him to repeat it and he just said Never mind. I would have pursued it except that I’d sworn off all pressure for the week, just to see if he might slide back toward normalcy.

After the embassy nurse came over I was depressed, as depressed as I’d been. She took him into the bedroom and I could hear the repartee. It sounded completely normal. It would, naturally, since it was just Q and A. I had told her point-blank that I wanted something from her that would let me refer him to a psychiatrist somewhere. At least I wanted her to see if she could get Nelson designated a stop on the circuit the embassy medical officer in Pretoria made from time to time. She came out effusing about him, apparently not only because he was healing so wonderfully but because he was himself such a wonderful person. He had been using a knobkerrie as a crutch, and he could stop that anytime he wanted. She would schedule him for x-rays but only because I seemed so determined on it. She wished she could find more Americans his age with his blood pressure. Psychologically this was just a man who was relaxing in order to heal. He was fine. His reflexes were like an adolescent’s. All this was conveyed to me with an unsuppressible, wistful, jealous but still Christian look that said what a lucky dog I was to have this man. She went on to show me that she fully empathized with how it must have been for me when he was missing. She was about forty. She was unmarried. By the time she was leaving she was more concerned about me than about Nelson, with my incomprehensible fixations and misinterpretations, as she obviously saw them. I wondered that she didn’t find it odd that Nelson never joined us but stayed sitting on the bed where he’d been left, thinking about something or other, deeply. She gave me an over-the-counter sleeping pill that was risible. I did confirm that the only psychiatrist in Botswana was still the Italian in Lobatse, with this addendum: he was a Yugoslav, who mainly spoke Italian. Her look confirmed everything I had already concluded re hopelessness in that direction. After she left I felt like killing myself for not mentioning that the only thing Nelson had volunteered all week was the sentence Time is an ape, and how would she like that in a boyfriend? Why could I not bring myself to say the words nervous breakdown?