Norman Rush - Mating

There was a formula, I pointed out, to the way he had resolved his difficulties with his enemy peers. I asked him if he was aware what it was. He thought. He had no idea. I delineated it. I said Routinely after you got revenge you undid renewed persecution against you by becoming the leader of your tormentors, at least until you moved. I count several times that you turned your former enemies into a club with you as president and got the club involved in time-consuming activities you could partake in glancingly, as a supervisor, such as building grandiose earthworks in vacant lots in preparation for mud war attacks from boys in other neighborhoods that rarely eventuated. There are patterns in all our lives, I said. Saying this may have contributed to a decline in his preoccupation with telling me about his boyhood, or it may have been genuine evolution in our relationship. Something helped.

The day I left Kang I got up at five, dressed quietly, and was slipping out of the mission courtyard when the entire sisterbody waylaid me with godspeed and bags of hardboiled eggs and other treats. I was gracious even though I had trouble figuring out quickly where to put the additional provisions they were forcing on me. I had everything planned down to the last ounce. My two donkeys were already loaded to the point of being in danger of tipping over. This is pure cavil. But actually I did feel slight irritation at their interposing themselves between me and one of the great unalloyed solitary joys of life — being up at first light and setting out on empty roads to go someplace difficult and significant. I think this is best enjoyed alone but I don’t know why I say that. It was a nice bon voyage despite its being imposed on me.

In the outskirts of Kang something happened that I took as a reminder not to interpret experiential oddities too quickly. I was approaching the path leading to the primary school, and I stopped to watch the children running to class, a stream of them, and I thought Oh god! No! because as they passed I was seeing a stream of little hunchbacks, every one of them hunchbacked. I thought So many hunchbacks in one little spot in the Kalahari! What a commentary! Why was this never reported? How can this be? But then I watched as one little girl’s hump disappeared. A tin bowl appeared at her feet and one of her schoolmates kicked it in my direction. In Kang it was the custom to carry your mealie bowl to school on your back with your jersey pulled tight over it to hold it in place, that was all. So with that I set off into the unknown, telling myself to remember that there is less to the mysterious than meets the eye. Because of what was to come, this was salutary. I used it as a talisman in the desert more than once.

Lions

The first day went perfectly. The heat was moderate. There were clouds in the afternoon. My donkeys looked like galleons, with all the extra feed and reserve water I had felt compelled to bring in case we struck some burned-over tract that extended farther than it should or we missed a water point. They had names. The bigger and older one was Baph, short for Baphomey. The Herero guy who sold me the animals had been unable to explain the provenance or meaning of the name. Denoon later had a freakish reaction to it which I never fully understood. Baphomey may have been a corruption of baphoumedi, which means roughly a group of rash people, or it may have been a corruption of bapola, a verb meaning to stretch out and peg down a hide. Neither association was too comforting. The younger donkey was Mmo, for mmoduhadi or sluggard. That was clear enough. I thought of the donkeys as the boys, my boys.

The grass thinned and gave way to patches of hardpan and bare sand. The trees began to be fewer. I passed my last attended cattle at ten and by midafternoon I had seen my last stray cow. The boys seemed fairly catholic about the available kinds of grasses, which was a relief. Toward evening I found my first water point exactly where it was supposed to be, although I had to do more digging in the bed of the sand river than I’d expected. I finally got visible seepage in the trough I’d dug. We stopped there. I tethered my animals and uncorked my pop-up alpine tent and zipped myself into it. I made a meal out of the hardboiled eggs, which was a mistake. I have no idea what I thought about that day. I think I was subsisting mentally on the singing feeling you get from beginning a great action. I was even too tired to write anything. I sank like a stone into sleep.

At two a.m. I awoke, my mind on fire with the question of lions. I knew I was supposedly safe, myself, in my tent, because there were no cases on record of lions actually forcing their way into a closed one. Also the game migrations were over with, which were what drew lions, and the migration routes in any case went in a curve deep to the west and north of my itinerary. But of course now in the small hours I was asking myself how much of everything you’re told in Africa is folklore. I might be safe, but what about my boys? In Gaborone there was a public attraction, a lion park socalled, and what the tourists came to watch was fresh donkey meat being flung over a chainlink fence to a couple of lions at feeding time. Was the lion-tent copula a piece of folklore? and were lions really so strictly nocturnal in their hunting? There was a man in Gaborone I had had drinks with, the lion man. He was one of my sources. He was one of the people who had been reassuring. But he himself had started out as a student of lions and had been turned into an obsessive on the subject. He was a bar character you bought drinks for. I remembered his descriptions of lions bringing down gigantic Cape buffalo: one would swallow the buffalo’s snout, suffocating it, while other lions tore at the buffalo’s legs. The lion man never wanted to see another lion. It was pointless, but I spent a good part of the rest of the night listening.

A Brief Mania

The next day I got up tired and swearing that from then on every night I would do the prudent thing of building either a perimeter fire or at least a large campfire and staking the boys next to it. I was annoyed at myself for gorging on eggs and naturally getting constipated. So it was onward.

It was a long time before Denoon really took my vocational crisis for anything like the real thing. The world was my oyster if only I got organized, was his initial thrust. Why couldn’t I write about travel, for example. I loved travel. Need Travel Constipate? could be a selling article in something. All this was in the context of his proposal that I should found a magazine called True Travel analogous to True Crime or True Detective. I should found a travel magazine that would tell the absolute truth, for a change, which would lead to more people staying home, a consummation devoutly to be wished, according to him. Tourism corrupts, was his tune. I would be perfect for True Travel because according to Denoon I had never been in a country I really liked. America the Beautiful included.

Of course I proposed my share of alternative careers for him. One of us would be depressed and the other would say Well, you could always do such and such, and it would be off to the races. This began as a benign device for getting out of moments of discouragement. It evolved. The concept was that the one who noticed the other was depressed was thereby authorized to select a new vocation the depressed person would be forced to follow thenceforward, and in the pursuit of which depression would perforce not be logical. This jeu maintained its facetious character, but there came a time when I began to resent it as a concealed way of short-circuiting my episode of depression, because he preferred me to be merry, naturally. Finally, when I’d had many more vocations imposed on me than I was ever likely to be able to impose on him, it was enough and I made us discuss it, with the interesting result that he realized our jeu was probably vaguely filial to a species of game he’d enticed his unfortunate younger brother into playing when they were on boring car trips as children. He would get his little brother to agree that each of them would have the right to pick out, from the array of housing they would pass as they drove, the house that the other would have to live in for the rest of his life. The idea was to saddle the other with the worst-looking, worst-circumstanced hovel they saw on that particular trip. But of course Denoon, being older, had more patience and knew his younger brother would choose precipitately, and that by biding his time he, Denoon, would find something infinitely more humiliating for his brother than his brother would for him. He always won. He found houses on eroding cliffs and frightening little houses in cemeteries, for example. Denoon always won, but he also won the more important metagame, which was to get his brother to play another time, and another. Nelson wasn’t proud of this. Looking it in the face even interested him. Through talking about it he remembered a parallel game he had gotten his brother to play, out of his brother’s desire to be in his zone. Peter was four years younger. This was not a car game, because it involved recourse to lists and books. You’re really good for me, Denoon would say when we got into these purlieus. You amaze me. Nelson would propose to Peter that they each have the power to name the other’s firstborns, always assumed to be male, interestingly. During these accounts I felt fortunate having no siblings. I was seeing something foreign. The name would have to be documentable, either by appearing in the sorts of lists of names that are appended to big dictionaries — which Peter was more or less restricted to by reason of youth and lack of imagination — or by appearing in some other printed text. Again he could count on his brother’s being premature and going with something like Percy, something that sounded unmanly, which in the early games Denoon might counter with something like Uriel, thusly bringing bodily wastes associatively into the picture. So Denoon would win and his brother in frustration would scream that all right then he was taking back Percy and somehow was going to make Nelson call his son Shitler. Denoon was always on the lookout for humiliating names. In the last game in the series, Denoon’s greatest triumph, his brother was forced to accept naming his firstborn Dong, as in Dong Kingman, the painter, dong of course being slang in those days for penis. The protocol in these games and the bait that kept getting Peter to play was that each new game would allow the players to wipe out the results of the last preceding game in the genre. I was seeing a true vortex of oppression. When they played cowboys, for instance, Denoon would inveigle his brother into calling himself something like Roy Mucus, Sheriff of Scrotum County, when these words meant nothing to Peter. The games could go on for days. Where were your parents during all this? I wanted to know. They were otherwise beset, he said: beset is Afrikaans for occupied, and you see it on the restroom doors on South African Airways planes.