Norman Rush - Mortals

All he could do was doctor this chowder he had been given. A certain amount of shuffling was required. For example All Power to the Country Clubs! should go into the Cries and Chants for Sale section, and maybe Put Paid to Poverty! which he had apparently thought of as something appropriate to the British Labour Party. If the gay aspect had been left out by Rex himself, the reason might have been to make Ray love him as a soul, if he thought Ray held that against him. Ray was tired. Nobody likes to say goodbye, he thought. His eyes were burning. Tears rushed from my eyes , Keletso had said in some connection. That’s what he needed. There was a jingle going through his mind, ending mea culpa youa culpa din dan don, which was from “Frère Jacques,” the din dan don, if he was right. People separated from their siblings in childhood moved heaven and earth to find them, these days, to get back in touch. He knew he had been singing a deformed “Frère Jacques” to himself as mental background music. What could he do? He was far from sleep. Now his brother was trying to kill him with love, with guilt, with proof he should have appreciated him. Too much is enough, he thought. He would be able to sleep nevertheless. The span of time he could sleep soundly in untoward positions was lengthening. But sleep had to come knocking. We can be wrong, he thought. We can be wrong about anybody, he thought. His eyes were tearing, a little. It was the Titles sections that hurt the most, stung hardest, because presumably they stood for ideas for potential books, articles a healthy person might have attempted. The Importance of Being Important, The Future Assembles, All I Can Tell You Is This, The Urbane Guerrilla: Etiquette for Revolutionaries , and another similar one, Out to Luncheon: Notes Toward a More Elegant Mode of Disparagement … The Bungless Cask … Fumes from a Vial of Wrath … Flea Circus Rebellion . Rex tried things. He wasn’t afraid not to be great. I have to honor that, Ray thought. Pity was attacking him, threatening to fill him up. He was fatigued. There were animal eyes out in the darkness that flashed when he swept the flashlight beam around. They were low to the ground so were, presumably, attached to bush babies or some small and similarly unthreatening species. Ray pulled out a few narrative entries to read.

803. Friends

Two friends who worked in different departments of a Catholic orphanage met to talk. The kindergarten director had recently begun working additionally part-time in a different institution, a state mental health facility, one evening a week, teaching crafts to adolescent patients. She wondered if her friend might be interested in joining her.

Sylvia, the art therapist, said, “You know, I might. It would be easy for me. You know what we did today, for example? I brought in shoe polish …”

“What kind of a project can you do with shoe polish?”

“I brought in shoe polish and they played odds and evens and the winner got to polish my boots.”

He thought he could go to sleep.

He slept.

When the explosion occurred, it made Ray wonder if somehow the future was an already existing thing. Because he felt he’d known for twenty or thirty minutes before the blast that it or something like it was about to happen. Keletso was unhappy. They had to pull over and see what could be seen, and Keletso was showing his unhappiness at having to do that. But they had to.

Ray got out. He climbed onto the cab roof and stood up on it carefully, his feet placed precisely over the reinforcing rods whose locations he had early on ascertained by probing the fabric lining the cab ceiling with his forefinger. He was determined to return this particular piece of government property in unchanged condition. That was important to him. He didn’t know why, unless it was because doing the small things right when the central thing he was supposed to be doing was so undefined, undefined but hazardous and probably stupid, seemed essential.

Using his binoculars, he studied the terrain to the north. It was high noon. The heat was insane, as usual. The horizon appeared to be writhing. He grimaced violently, to dislodge the little scabs in the corners of his mouth, which Keletso, who was watching him closely and with apprehension, mistook for an expression of fear. He shook his head to reassure Keletso, but clearly he was failing in that. He couldn’t do everything.

There had been a significant explosion in the vicinity and it had produced a ball of inky smoke, which was now dissolving. The site was reachable, not distant, not more than three or four kilometers to the north. They were aimed east. Everything to the south and west was dead flat. To the north he could distinguish a succession of very modest ridges, three of them, bare along the crests, thick brush packing the intervals between them. There had to be a settlement or more likely a cattle post just beyond the horizon ridge. More smoke was rising, from several sources. The explosion had been unusual, manifesting more like a gigantic insuck of breath than like an outward push of air. He could make out a palm tree, just the top of it, in the smoky area, and as he studied it he thought he saw flames in the … not leaves and not spikes and not fangs, no, in the fronds, fronds, bright flame. The palm tree meant water. It would be a cattle post. He had to get over there, and now he was sorry he’d gotten rid of the mouth scabs, because now there were visible traces of blood where the scabs had been, no doubt making him look like a vampire just when he wanted to make a good impression. He knew what he needed, exactly what he needed, and didn’t have. He needed a styptic pencil. He doubted they were even manufactured anymore. The ridges he would have to cross were reddish, gravelly-looking, with some glinting element here and there, probably mica. He had to get over there. He climbed down from the cab roof.

He readied himself to go alone cross-country. There would be a spur road into the post, a track at least, but he was hardly going to boldly drive up as big as life. He would have to go in subtly and alone, and that would mean leaving Keletso behind, with the vehicle, like it or not.

He had on a longsleeved denim shirt, which he buttoned to the neck. There was no time to enjoy the amazing colors this landscape displayed, the mustard-yellow southern reaches, flat as a lake … one of Rex’s similes. He realized that he had two new central priorities in his activity here. One was to see that Keletso came to no harm. He had to get him out of this. And the other was to see that Strange News survived and got back into safe hands. He was going to do what he could for this what, concretion, of his brother, do it not because it was a great manifestation in itself. To his shame, he was relieved at how minor the sensibility gesturing in Strange News was. It was minor, but it was not nothing, and it was Rex and it was true that certain bits and pieces of Rex’s collation were sticking like burrs in his consciousness, some because they were striking but obscure, The Tree with Square Leaves , some for no particular reason, like The Bloom Too Ponderous for Its Stalk , some of Rex’s odd titles for unwritten works. Ray drove the cuffs of his jeans deep inside the tops of his boots. He applied sunblock lavishly to his face and neck. He put on a broad-brimmed canvas hunter’s hat and fastened the chin strap tightly against his jaw. Keletso handed him a pair of work gloves. Ray had to be wary of ticks and any other upward-leaping insects that might be lying in wait.

There were thousands of species of uncataloged insects in the Kalahari, he’d heard. What some of them might be capable of was a matter of conjecture. He got out his darkest sunglasses. Keletso sprayed insecticide from a canister over Ray’s pants legs. Then there was nothing to do but get going. He had already impressed on Keletso that Strange News was to be safekept, as Keletso had put it when they’d talked about it. Ray was ready. The drill for snakes he had down pretty well. It was time to go.