Norman Rush - Mortals

There you have nothing, he thought. He went back to working consecutively through the manuscript and immediately couldn’t believe his luck. There was an inclusion, something from Iris stuck in with his brother’s flotsam, something with her writing on it. This was Iris. This was the kind of thing she did.

It was a Xerox of a Peace Corps document headed INTERRACIAL EXPERIENCE ASSESSMENT FORM. Across the top of it Iris had written Do you know what you have to go through in order to get into the Peace Corps and get sent to an African country? Somebody at the embassy got hold of this and is passing it around. I love you, Ray. Iris .

You used to, he thought.

Interracial Experience Assessment Form —Page One

1. Recall your first significant interaction with a Black person. Describe the situation and your feelings at the time.

Answer: My first significant interaction with a Black person was when I was five and ran away from home with a friend my age and we went to the dock area, the harbor area, and a Negro dockworker gave us some of his lunch and called the police. My feelings were as follows. I felt relieved yet betrayed.

2. What was the strongest fear you developed as a child about interactions with Black persons? Estimate how strong that fear is today.

Answer: You might fall in love with a Negro and have children that would have a miserable life because neither race would accept them.

That fear is much less strong since we began doing all the questionnaires and games, by far.

At the bottom she had written Sorry I only have page one. Love again, Iris . He touched her name in both the places she had signed it.

Sleep was being coy. A lot of what he had to read he was finding vaguely agitating. To convert Strange News into a pillow book he was going to have to separate out and consolidate the longer paragraphic entries, which tended to consist of various micronarratives, subanecdotal most of them, illustrating some hilarious defect or other in the mental landscapes of everyone in the world except the author-observer. It took narrative to put Ray to sleep. Narrative was the syrup. It wasn’t the sheer dynamics of reading that did it. Poems, even, needed some narrative weight to work. The Conversation entries were dubious, from the narrative standpoint, judging by what he was finding in them so far.

19. Conversation

Two guys had been drinking together.

The slightly older of the two said, “My friend, I will confess something to you. My old friend, I find my children boring.”

“Me too.”

“So if we find our children boring, who is to blame, is it the peer culture, is it—”

“Nononono. I wasn’t saying my children are boring. I was agreeing with you about your children.”

“I see,” the older guy said.

Ray thought, Here is the problem: This is not a joke: It’s on the verge of being a joke but it doesn’t arrive. Rex had something, but he wanted to be more, to be brilliant. There was a roster of the brilliant and there was a roster of the nonbrilliant and there was one for the formerly considered brilliant. Every serious writer considered any appellation other than brilliant an insult. If the word appeared, glittering, somewhere in a review, then any objections the review contained surrounding the word were nullified. They turned to mist. A brilliant failure was just fine. He was prepared to salute anything brilliant he found in Strange News . He meant it. He would be happy about it. This was Rex’s attempt at a monument and he was willing to help, more willing than he had been. His feelings were changing. How serious the core of Strange News was remained a question, but that was all right. He pitied serious writers. The best that ninety-nine percent of them could hope for was a glancing appearance in a survey course at lengthening intervals. Even Milton was dropping to survey status more and more, even at the graduate level. It was true. And the next step down would be the collateral reading in a survey course, the books only the strivers got around to. I was a striver, a Striver, he thought. And then it would be down to a footnote in a title in the collateral list. And then what, some academic trivia game. And then nothing. It was possible for a writer’s creation to be of academic interest solely for whatever influences could be seen in it of prior writers, more brilliant writers. That was life, the literary life.

114. Untitled

X decided to stay home and pass the time by counting his feet.

Shall we watch TV?

X said, “That’s what it’s for.”

X said, “I really think people watch television

because there’s too much to read.”

Where are you going?

“Out this door,” X said.

It was clear that a penstroke had converted an original J to X. J would be Rex’s Joel, these were echoes of Joel.

Not all were cases of camouflage, only some.

His brother was sick. He could be dying. He could be dead. Ray couldn’t bear it. He would work with the fact that Strange News was a mélange, workroom scraps, with lame political shots and shafts that would get dated. Rex’s trust in a campaign of bons mots against the world’s evil was touching. He believed more in the power of the word than Ray did. Rex had no idea how solid the machine in the basement was. He was an innocent. Literature is humanity talking to itself, Ray thought. Rex thought it was more. Ridicule changed nothing. If its targets even noticed it, all it did was madden them. Ray had the beginnings of a fair collection of narrative-like entries to use for soporific purposes.

There were little lists of enemies in different spheres of the arts that were going to be difficult for Ray to edit because so many of the names were unfamiliar to him. He had to be careful. Some categories could be combined, he supposed, like the Wisdom of the Mob and the Wisdom of the People entries. The Mob wasn’t the Mafia. The Overheards could remain, or most of them could.

408. Overheard I

At a party one time I asked who a familiar-looking ancient guy was. He could hardly stand up. X couldn’t remember his name but said he was a Yale Younger Poet.

X said The best way to keep a secret is not to tell it to anyone.

This is true. A woman I know went to a psychotherapist and was upset when the diagnosis she got was that basically she was too greedy.

I feel so good after a high-fat meal I could run around the block and beat the shit out of somebody, unfortunately.

Man and wife were buying sundries in a job-lot discount emporium. The woman filled her basket and took it to the counter to pay for her choices. Her husband, who was handling tools in the hardware section, suddenly ran up and added a hammer to her purchases. “We have a hammer,” she said. “So, I’m getting another one. It’s cheap.” “Why would we need two hammers?” “ I’m getting this . We need it in case two people have to hammer at the same time.”

Hey how about air burial for pilots and stewardesses and plane passengers who die in flight.

It was more fun than eating on the roof.

My penis is sensitive lately.

Well I should hope.

His problem is he can’t tell his anus from the Mammoth Cave or some other tourist attraction like that.

Ray realized that he was encountering very little gay matter in Strange News . Has it been sanitized? he wondered. Because it would be logical to have something so central represented, if this was Rex’s true monument. Anything he could learn on the subject from Rex would be fine with him. But maybe there was nothing to learn and it was what it was and that was it. Something else was hanging over his efforts. He might as well acknowledge it. It was possible he was searching for something directed openly to him, some statement or apology or he didn’t know what, something.