Norman Rush - Subtle Bodies

She was leaning down and feeling along the floor near the bed. She found her boots. She threw first one and then the other at him, not hard, at his knees. He had almost no reaction.

“Please come back to bed,” she said, raising her voice. He sighed and obeyed. He wanted her to finish her presentation so that the sermonizing on the radio could end forever.

Nina took his hand. “There’s not much more to tell. The deal over his invention was on and then it was off. There was constant negotiation going on. The invention was never patented because that would show the thing existed. The deal looked like it was off, I guess, when Iva was after Joris. But who knows? And then it was on again and then suddenly Douglas was dead, out of it, unable to go out and promote himself and this new institute, so now there’s this public relations spectacular. Which is really all it is, but you’d figured that out. So now tell me what you think.”

“I don’t know if it’s true,” Ned said.

“Neither do I, but it’s what I’ve been told and it’s credible to me.”

Ned covered his face with the blanket briefly. He lowered it and said, “I think I’m not going to have an opinion on this. It’s a pretty good example of a fait accompli. We were talking about that the other day. If Douglas came up with something you can use to defend the better countries against the worse countries, fine. We can never make it up to the Jews, anyway, Americans can’t. It goes back to the beginning, beginnings. Benjamin Franklin wanted to deny Jews citizenship. Roosevelt’s policymaker on Jewish refugees from Germany was a horrible anti-Semite. So you might say, Well, his invention is defensive except when it isn’t. That’s true. I’m making the decision to be okay with it if it’s half defensive, half something dark. Nobody will leave the Israelis alone. It’s a fight in the Convergence. It’s the Palestinians we’re supposed to be for, first of all, but the Palestinians won’t leave the Israelis alone and remember how everybody at the Labor Center was outraged when the Israelis started putting up their great walls because they were tired of being blown up in their cafés? Everybody said it was an outrage but voilà the bombings stopped. The Palestinians had grievances in spades but they fought back like … like monsters. I know it’s not simple, but that’s all I have to say.”

He could tell that there was something else she wanted to say to him.

“Do you remember the first joke you made to me when we were dating, or not even dating, when we were still in the taste-exchanging phase and you asked me what kind of movies I liked and I don’t remember what I said. And then you asked what kind I didn’t like and I said, westerns, violence, and suspense, and you said, Does that mean you don’t want to go with me to see Kill the Horse Slowly ?”

He said, “I’m not sleeping in my underwear no matter what you say.” He got out of bed, went to the chest of drawers, opened it, and took out a pair of pajamas and held them up for her to see.

He said, “These may be Douglas’s pajamas but I don’t care. Tonight I’m wearing them.”

She said, “Ned, you’re funny.”

“I once was.”

Ned couldn’t sleep. Nina’s penlight was under her pillow. He extracted it with care, managing not to disturb her. There were the papers Jacques had handed Nina earlier. They were on the floor next to the bed. Thinking about the old days was difficult, tonight. It was like looking at events through a dark mist. I hear as through a wall, poorly, one of them had said once. Certain times had been amusing. Like Douglas’s impromptu heckling of the Venceremos Brigade reunions in Washington Square Park. Douglas thought Castro was a clown and he referred to Cuba as the Brave Little Police State. Ned remembered it all, Douglas shouting Páredon! , the cry the Cuban rebels used in their salad days when they were sending their enemies to the firing squad. And of course by the seventies the volunteer sugar-cane-cutter brigadiers had forgotten what the word means and just took Douglas as encouraging them when in fact he was both reminding them of something shameful and insinuating subtly that they themselves could go to the wall, for all he cared. Douglas’s mind had been a dungheap of the left’s past transgressions, which had gone well with his occasional appearances as the conscience of the left, or one of them, anyway.

Jacques was obviously trying to help him. And obviously Nina had let Jacques know about his trouble with the encomium for tomorrow. It wasn’t Jacques’s fault that he got his information from a stream, the internet, that ran alongside a membrane that only let bits of it through into the mainstream media flow. There was truth on both sides of the membrane.

Jacques had done some work on the internet, for him. Jacques was all right. He had printed out a poem, “Men on Earth,” by Robert Desnos. Nina would know who Robert Desnos was. He read the poem.

Men on Earth

There were four of us at a table

Drinking red wine and singing

When we felt like it .

A wallflower fades in a garden gone to seed

The memory of a dress at the bend of an avenue

Venetian blinds beating against a sash .

The first man says: “The world is wide and the wine is fine

Wide is my heart and fine my blood

Why are my hands and my heart so empty?”

A summer evening the chant of rowers on a river

The reflection of huge poplars

And the foghorn from a tug requesting passage .

The second man says: “I discovered a fountain

The water was fresh and sweet-smelling

I no longer know where it is and all four of us are dying.”

How beautiful are the streams in small towns

On an April morning

When they carry rainbows along

The third man says: “We were born a short time ago

And already we have more than a few memories

Though I want to forget them.”

A stairway full of shadow

A door left ajar

A woman surprised naked .

The fourth man says: “What memories?

This moment we are camped

And my friends we are going to leave one another.”

Night falls on a crossroad

The first light in the fields

The odor of burning grass .

We left each other, all four of us

Which one was I and what did I say?

It was a long time ago .

The glistening rump of a horse

The cry of a bird in the night

The rippling of water under a bridge .

One of the four is dead

This was a poem he wasn’t going to finish. He dropped the pages.

Nina woke up and saw that Ned was getting dressed. She watched. It would be more accurate to say that he was getting dressed and re-dressed. She didn’t know if it was a mania, exactly, but he was in some state completely new to her regarding the way he looked. He had collected and laid out different elements to choose from for the outfit he was going to present himself in today. It was very strange. He had assembled a collection of shirts gotten presumably from Joris and Elliot, maybe some of Douglas’s, from Iva — Gruen’s shirts wouldn’t fit Ned — and one shirt that he needn’t have bothered with, a pale floral print. He must have been out scouring the world for shirts since sunrise.

The radio was on, low. She concentrated. It was the local news.