Norman Rush - Mortals

“I know, I know. You forgot to say my supposed beauty, the way you usually do, by the way. Okay, no more.”

“You know we have this difficulty,” she said, still smiling.

“We do. I look like a movie star and you don’t and never did. Okay. That’s all on this subject. I’m sorry.”

They sighed heavily in unison, and with the same impulse, they joined in pulling the sheet up to their shoulders.

Ray began again. “We were living in North Oakland and my father wanted to move the family to Piedmont so he could be nearer his store. Where we were was still very white middle class but the writing was on the wall. Blacks were well established on the east side of East Fourteenth Street by then and a certain amount of panic selling was under way in the better neighborhoods. Probably he was just being prudent in wanting to move, but there was a problem. My mother was tepid to lukewarm about moving but Rex was absolutely determined against it, so when she saw how upset the idea made Rex she turned against it in solidarity with him, still wishywashily, though. My position was that I was happy to move.

“Our house on Kingsland was really a peach. A building contractor had built it for himself, so it was only the best. It was a big mock Tudor, parquet hardwood floors upstairs and downstairs, hilltop site. The house was on a very sizable triangular lot surrounded by a retaining wall. This was late fifties. Rex was in junior high and I was in high school. The house sat up very high and you looked east at Skyline Drive and then the hills that hadn’t been built on yet. There was a lot of open space in reach and a few vacant lots right in the neighborhood where kids could build forts and play nasty if they so chose.”

“What about friends, did you both have friends around there?”

“Rex did. My social life was based around school by that time. But yes, in fact he had a particular friend, as it developed. His friend Michael. He did not want to leave Michael behind.

“So there we were. Now let me see if I can remember exactly how this got started …

“We each had our own room, did I mention that? We were opposite each other on the second floor. My room you could walk into anytime. Rex was totally secretive and kept his room locked. He started out only keeping it locked when he was in it, and that was accepted. And then he had to have the right to keep it locked when he wasn’t in it and my mother would have to petition him to go in there for any reason. There was a battle royal before that was agreed to and he had to agree to let her look in from time to time, escorted by him, to see that he was keeping his room in order, before it was settled. But he got his way. Naturally I thought he was being ridiculous, but I was probably annoyed at the perquisites he was working out for himself that I was forbidden to have, just because of the way things had come about. I was hardly going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me copying his demands. I was the older one, after all.

“His secrecy annoyed me.

“I’m not sure of the exact order these next two items occurred in. First I should say that we were excessively frugal as a family, or we were supposed to be. My mother was the enforcer. Don’t use too much soap when you do the dishes … return the milk carton to the refrigerator immediately after you pour your milk … and so on. We got screamed at if we left the milk on the counter for ten seconds or if we drank our milk before we put the carton back. Always do that first. Don’t ruin things. Someone set a pot from the stove down on some new Formica and it left a semicircular scorch mark. She would have little seizures of agony every time she looked at it, for years. No one ever admitted doing it. In any case. Two things happened in some order or other. I was accused by my mother of using too much heavy duty aluminum foil when I wrapped leftovers up to store in the refrigerator. We were really kitchen slaves. I got good at it, or rather I got fast at it, so I could get out of there. She had just opened a new box of this foil and she discovered that some untoward amount of it was gone, so since I was the one who put things away most of the time I must be the guilty party. I said I was innocent, but no, I was slapdash, I rushed through things, I was guilty. I had to be. Now shortly after this, something strange was going on in Rex’s room. I was hearing sounds of strange typing. Very slow typing, you know, hunt and peck. Late at night, this was. And the typing had a banging quality, tinny.

“I figured there had to be a connection between the typing and the missing foil. I decided to find out what Rex was up to, and, to make a long story short, I went up on the roof when he was away and hung over the edge so I could look in his window, albeit upside down, and see what there was to see. And this was what he was doing. We had this old Remington that he’d appropriated and he had set the thing to stencil mode and he was typing out some imperishable text, obviously that was the point, on some of the aluminum foil he’d pinched. I couldn’t read it. But I did notice one other thing before my head filled up with blood, and that was a long, metal, screwtop canister photographers use, I guess about eighteen inches long. It was on his bed. Don’t ask me how I knew, but I knew it went with the imperishable text and that he was making a time capsule.

“So I was in possession of an interesting piece of information. What did I do with it?

“In my defense, remember that I was ticked off over the missing aluminum foil business.

“I decided I had to know what the subject of his document was.

“I couldn’t get into his room. Also I was bound by a certain protocol toward him that he had bullied the family into generating. I was never to touch him. Never ever to lay a hand on him for any reason. There had been some physical conflict between us, provoked by him, and of course I was in the wrong, being the older and bigger and wiser party, so we had all agreed I was never to touch him. Of course in a less well-regulated family I could have taken him by the throat and made him tell me what he was doing.”

Iris said, “You mean you were so certain that what he was doing was injurious to you or so nefarious in some way that you had to find out what it was. You couldn’t just let him go on with it, do whatever he was going to do with it, and forget about it. You couldn’t.”

“I don’t know why I couldn’t. I was convinced it was threatening.”

“This is vintage you. You become immovable. You’re still like that when you’re convinced for no reason that you’re right. The other night when I nudged you when you were snoring and …”

“I wasn’t, though.”

“May I finish? You were . You woke me up with it. I nudged you and you woke up furious and denied it and said … are you still denying this? I was under the impression you’d dropped this absurd … I can only call it a canard and I’m getting furious by the way all over again if this is still your position, that I had dreamed you were snoring? You meant it. You don’t take it back, right?”

“Iris, you won’t like to hear this but it is logically possible it happened that way. It is something that has happened before in human history, a person dreaming another person snored. Also the period when I was snoring is over with.”

“Oh, good point.”

“Look, you agree I ended that period of snoring.”

“Well, until then, you had. But all right, you ridiculous person.”

“I’m losing the thread. Okay. Lalala. Okay, so I had to find out what in hell this thing he was creating was.

“First I asked him. I wouldn’t say I menaced him, but I caught him on the stairs and blocked his way down. I was going to make him tell me. He got enraged. I didn’t tell him I’d actually peered into his room. I said I’d figured it out purely by the sounds coming from his room that he was typing something unusual and that he’d better tell me. Something for school, he said. I told him he was lying when he couldn’t say what, exactly, his school project was. It got extremely tense.