Norman Rush - Mating

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.