Norman Rush - Mortals

He expected to feel fine soon, very soon.

Keletso was asleep, which was good because he disapproved of Ray reading himself to sleep with the aid of a flashlight, because it was wasteful of batteries. He had never said anything directly, but Ray could tell how Keletso felt. There were plenty of batteries left anyway, and if not there should be batteries available in Nokaneng in whatever travesty of a general store they would find there. They would make it to Nokaneng easily tomorrow. Alternatively it was possible that the light from Ray’s reading activities made it hard for Keletso to fall asleep, not that there was the least evidence of that. Africans seemed very adapted to total darkness. In the villages you could find them sitting around having discussions in total darkness. Maybe their eyes were better. His eyes were still good. He was going to be forty-nine and his eyes were still good, knock wood. But there was no wood to knock. Forty-nine is not fifty, he thought. His eyes were better than Iris’s. She owned reading glasses but she was, he would say, a little furtive about using them, like someone in politics. Her eyes were beautiful things. When they got to Nokaneng he would begin to machinate to send Keletso home, out of this, out of the fire. He had to.

Tonight he had the back seat. For reading it was workable, but it was shallower and not as comfortable as the front seat. He had learned on this excursion that he could fall asleep in a propped-up position and stay asleep for as long as a couple of hours before cramping made him change his position. Also he had learned how inextricably connected, for him, reading and falling asleep had become. It was alarming. It had crept up on him and established itself and he had never noticed it because in his life, his normal life, there was always a surplus of reading matter. And now his ability to fall asleep for the immediate future reposed on his brother’s what, his bits and pieces, his ejecta, his literary essence supposedly, his literary effrontery, his posturings. It didn’t matter. He had sworn he would read through his brother’s corpus, this ragbag pretending to be a florilegium, whatever it was. He could be fair, but he knew what he was going to find, to wit, the debris of Rex’s ambition to be the gay Mencken, one, or two, the gay La Rochefoucauld, or both.

He could begin anywhere. He could skip around from flotsam to jetsam. He had before him pages and pages of isolate phrases, sentences, paragraphs, each entry numbered, the numerals in ink, in differing hands, it looked like. There was plenty of white space. He had a twinge briefly relating to the fear that unless he rationed his reading, this collection wasn’t going to last him all that long. He was in a ridiculous position. The numbering of the different entries was not consecutive, which you would think meant that ultimately they would have to be reorganized consecutively, but according to what Rex had told Iris, no, the numbers were what, decorative. Iris had irritated him by referring to his brother’s slumgullion as a poem, some postmodern equivalent of the classic epic poems, some conceit like that which it would be no trouble to disprove. Strange News was something, but it was not going to be Milton.

STRANGE NEWS, or BRIGHT CITIES DARKEN

He began with the face page.

12. Cries and Chants for Sale, with Indications of Their Possible Purchasers, in Some Cases

Arm the Homeless!

What do we want?

We don’t know!

When do we want it?

Now! (for the younger set)

All Together Now: Every Man for Himself! (Libertarians)

Power to the Feeble! (Left)

Reason’s Greetings! (atheists, holiday card)

There was a note in the margin, in pencil, in his brother’s microscopic penmanship, which gave him a stab. Def.: the Homeless — Roofless Cosmopolitans , Rex had written.

Ray saw that he was going to have to endure Rex’s penchant for antic capitalization.

8. Types

Fair-haired boy: a gonnabe

118. Proof of God’s Love

Proof God loves us is that he makes us deaf to the vile, wracking snores we emit that so torment those who choose to sleep beside us.

That was odd, a synchronicity, given the sleeping situation he was stuck with. Synchronicity was boring. Keletso had an intermittent tendency to light snoring, to which Ray felt he had adapted pretty well, without complaining. He could sink directly back into sleep most of the time. It was part of life in the Kalahari. But what is life? he asked himself, taking a sheet of typescript at random from deeper in the stack of pages. I don’t like this, he thought, seeing what he had come up with. Strange News was turning into the I Ching on him. He resented it.

359. Life Is …

Life is a sentence of corporeal punishment. Or, Life is corporeal punishment. Life, passages of Sturm interrupted by sequences of Drang. From puberty to senility life is continuous foreplay interrupted with declining frequency by actual sex.

So what he had before him was Rex’s desperate attempts to achieve wit, and then what, then use it as a hammer to smash the stale cake of custom plus the frozen lake within and all of that, all of that wrongness, Wrongness. But Rex was not the soul of wit. Twice he had gotten his column suspended because his bons mots had given offense to women, in one case when he’d referred to them as the leaky darlings , which alluded tastelessly to the fact that they menstruate and are sentimental and prone to weeping, and then in another case when he’d called them the Cleft Sex. He was reckless. Rex had been writing for gay publications, and Ray could see that he’d been attempting to carry off a sort of parody of old-hat gay attitudes toward women, but he’d misjudged his readers and the power the new literalism had over them. In the same spirit he had defined men as the Apposite Sex, but he hadn’t gotten in hot water over that. Probably people had just found it baffling and gone quickly past.

I am not your editor, Ray wanted to say. But that was going to be the plot. He was designated to boil this froth down into a bouillon cube of near greatness, even if there was only enough for a chapbook of the best thrusts and gems, to be given away, distributed somehow to some population he had no idea how to identify or reach. But he had to, because Rex wasn’t well. There was strange news coming, bad news, and there was nothing he could do about it. This was what he could do. This was his fate, part of it. It was hard to credit.

An unwelcome sound came from the front seat, followed by a few low-spoken unintelligible words of, conceivably, apology. Barely audible mutterings could be called mutterances, why not? Suppose I had turned my mind to producing glittering nothings like Rex’s, what would I have? he thought.

He plucked out another sheet at random and there was more synchronicity for him, annoyingly. Entry 308 was death-related. Or more precisely, it was life-residue-related. He ought to stop the random selection business for a while. He was toying with some imaginary thing. It wasn’t good.

308. In Memoriam: A Report

I have to speak at her memorial service and what kills me is I can’t mention the one thing about her that was genuinely remarkable. I went with her for about six months in the seventies and after that I didn’t see her for years, so it’s not that I know that much about her. But I’m a celebrity so they want me, so I don’t mind. I understand it. But what I’ve never told anybody and what was really the only interesting thing I know about her is this. She had a weird talent. You’re lying down with her watching television and you have one of those moments when your color set goes black and white for no reason. This was before cable so you have no one to call up about it. You fiddle with the set every way you can but nothing corrects it. You even twiddle the little hidden knobs on the back. But this is what she would do. We discovered it by accident. The first time it was more an expression of exasperation than anything else. But this is what she could do. She could spread her legs and buck her pelvis hard at the thing. She would pull up her nightgown and do it, and by the way she had no panties on. But when she gives a couple of hard bumps or grinds, whichever, the color comes back. She did this at least four times. There must have been a rational explanation but we never figured out what it was. Somehow maybe it was some delicate condition in the wiring in her building. But just pounding on the wall behind the set did nothing. We laughed hysterically. I don’t know what I’m going to say about her unless I make something up.