Norman Rush - Mortals

o hell o hell you look so well I’d like to touch

your Annabel

o brother snake I am awake

Ah me and my I like to die he hit my eye go home

ye fly

Thy alabaster cities gleam from

she to shining she

This was his worst effort. Thy should be thine. The glints from the dim past were boring. As a child he had thought someone saying He hit my fist with his eye was funny. He had known what he was writing as he was writing. The Bic was wrong. With the Bic he had to bear down too much. A pencil required less pressure and the results had been better, although still stupid. He got up to go.

Lately his appetite was problematic. His clothes were fitting more loosely. Keletso didn’t like it and was being maternal. Keletso wanted him to eat what he had just been handed. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was a mass. He probed it and concluded that it was a concoction of two kinds of dried fruit, apricot and pear, boiled soft. He was supposed to eat it with some of the warm box milk. He couldn’t.

Keletso was eating his own portion demonstratively. Ray was touched. It was possible that he could eat some, a little. They sat in the solid heat.

It was definite that government presence in the region was withdrawing, ceasing to be, where it had existed at all, in widely separated nodes, hamlets strung along the main north-south route. They were finding government offices closed, with no explanations for the closures posted. Government vehicle traffic was down to almost nothing. They were still seeing the occasional Wildlife officer. The last one they had seen had told them that the two fishing camps between Sepopa and the Caprivi Strip, on the western edge of the Okavango, had been closed, mysteriously.

Keletso was waving a shaker of cinnamon at him. He accepted it. Keletso wanted him to sprinkle cinnamon on his compote.

It was Ray’s turn to hold the umbrella support, but Keletso was refusing to relinquish it to him and at the same time making head motions indicating that it was more important for Ray to concentrate on eating. So he ate.

Keletso said, “Rra, someway you must phone up your wife, isn’t it?”

Ah, Ray thought. This was bold of Keletso. He was picking up that their radiophone contacts with Gaborone had stopped, just about. Clearly it worried him. They had gone four days without being able to find a link. Keletso was beginning to appreciate the strangeness of the zone they were in. So far Keletso hadn’t asked for any messages to be passed along when they had managed to make calls. He mailed something once. He was a bachelor.

Ray said, “You’re not married, yourself, rra, you told me.”

“Not as yet.”

“So, still, do you have any need to send word to anyone, when we phone next? Do you, rra?”

“Yah, well, no.”

“I apologize for not asking.”

“It is fine because in any case we must be returning back soon.”

Ray nodded vaguely. Keletso wanted to be reassured that this was going to end soon. Ray couldn’t help him. He didn’t know when it would end. He was waiting for a sign. But it was definitely time to get back, from any standpoint. He had had a nocturnal emission, for one thing. He thought, No it’s nomads with gonads, what we are.

Keletso said, “Rra, I must find a wife yet. I am searching even now.” He swept his hand around broadly.

The man was in his forties and seeking his true love. Ray hoped he found her soon and that no one would take her away once he had. Constant Pain would be a good title for something.

“Because, rra, you can see, else we cannot be at ease. So I must seek. She can be hereabout. It is no matata if she can be from the bush and be pleasing to me, I can take her. You see, a wife is like some rose flower. And as well the Bible commands us to marry. So we must search about.”

Ray made a show of looking around, and they laughed together.

“Have you some children, then?” Keletso asked.

“No, none. We were unable to.”

“Ah, shame.”

“Yes.”

“Rra, if you can pray, God can aid you. Even as you are older than some fathers. If you pray you can go back and see your wife and she can say, Ehe I have fallen pregnant whilst you were off.”

“That would be truly amazing.”

“It can only be if you pray.”

“I understand you.”

“I can tell you from the Bible that many an old man, monna mogolo, is made to be a father, by God, nonetheless.”

“Yes,” Ray said. He had eaten everything.

Nothing prepares you for life as a human, Ray thought, and when Keletso looked questioningly at him he knew he had uttered his thought-gem aloud, which was not good and was a thing that was happening too much in the last day or so. He was declaring his vacuity. With his thought-gems he was like the drunk at the last embassy party who had taken him aside to say, portentously, Life is sincere.

“Sorry,” Ray said.

He needed to watch it. He was shooting his mind off. Yesterday it had been necessary to attempt an explanation for exclaiming It’s Edward Young, for Christ’s sake . In his head he had been unaccountably attributing the line O my coevals to Milton and it had been a relief to suddenly have it right again. At times Keletso was seeming a touch afraid of him. He couldn’t have that.

The day was the mixture as before, cruelly bright and hot. Earlier Keletso had pointed out two or three rogue thunderheads off to the northeast, but now the sky was unembellished. They were six hours west of Nokaneng, and that was as far west as he wanted to be. Dust, blowing, was an increasing problem, away from the delta. It would look better if they could return eastward without retracing their route, to enable him to stare at fresh territory in accordance with his supposed mission, so he had decided that they should leave the track they had been following and transit six kilometers of open bush with the aim of reaching a grade four veterinary road indicated on their sector map. So far the map had been reasonably reliable. The area to be crossed was hardpan, very level, treeless for the most part. They should be fine. So far, aside from having to circumnavigate a single long low dune, they were proceeding uneventfully.

Ray tried to doze, succeeding fitfully for a while until a change in the light registered through the blankness he was cultivating. The air was gray and seething. They had entered a phenomenon, a storm of flies, not just a cloud of them following the vehicle but a dense swarm extending out indefinitely on all sides. It was appalling, which was the right word, since it was a pall of flies, in fact. Iris liked the Exaltation of Larks game and was good at it. A pall of funeral directors would be a candidate for the game and so would a pox of whores or rash of whores or rash of dermatologists, but what constructs that she had come up with could he remember? He remembered some of his, a skeleton crew of coroners, a surplus of misers, a dearth of nonentities, but he didn’t want his, he wanted hers. He wanted her. She was fun, his wife.

Keletso was being stalwart but it was clear he was unnerved. He was sweating and murmuring. The explanation for the flies had to be something arising from rainfall, sudden heavy rainfall. The locality they were in had received a drenching. They had passed abruptly from furnace to steambath conditions. The windows were fogging. One of Keletso’s thunderheads had obviously delivered, and the sudden moisture had either drawn or hatched, if that was possible, this abomination. He had never read about it, but there had to be a connection.

There seemed to be two kinds of flies involved in the spectacle, big clumsy ones interested in banging against the vehicle, and smaller and faster glittering ones not. To the right was a long object on the ground not immediately recognizable as the carcass it must be because it was clad in a seamless, glinting, writhing coat of flies. This would not be the place to die.