Norman Rush - Mortals

They were still treating him acceptably, he would say. They had given him a plastic water bottle, half full, and a Cadbury chocolate bar, hazelnut, the jumbo.

He wanted to wash up. Tomorrow he would see if they’d allow it. He wanted his toothbrush. He would ask about that tomorrow, too. He’d try to present his requests all at the same time. It was a good idea to group his requests together, to avoid bothering them repeatedly.

He wanted his belt back, which they had taken. But that was delicate. There was a hyperthin carbon steel saw blade sewn into it. They were unlikely to discover it. But he didn’t want them handling his belt unnecessarily. He truly needed his belt. His jeans were loose about the waist. He was losing weight. He would have to improvise something. He had known they would take his belt. It was standard procedure.

He was in his stocking feet. They had taken his boots. It was the laces, primarily, that they wanted him not to have. They could have unlaced his boots, or de-laced them, but it was easier for them to simply take them. Well, they were busy.

He had made one pleasing discovery. If he pressed hard enough against the closure line of the massive double doors to the shed he could create a slit of a view. There was a deadbolt lock on the doors, but there was enough play in the wood and the hinges and enough slippage along the bolt to allow him to see … another wall, the wall of another building a couple hundred feet away, a pinkish wall.

It was almost night. He hated it to be night so soon after he’d been liberated from his blindfold. He would be in pure and total darkness until morning came. But there was nothing he could do. And logic told him that the blindfold would be back.

Night had come. He was tired of listening for anything that might tell him something. There were voices but they were too far away. Nothing was happening. Vehicles were coming and going. A generator had been started up and was chuffing along.

He had eaten half of his chocolate bar. He had a back tooth that was sensitive to sweets. Rinsing his mouth out sparingly hadn’t helped. He had scrubbed his teeth with the tail of his shirt. That was the best he could do. At last his sensitive tooth was quieting down.

He was facing a trial, tonight. It was minor, but it was real to him. He was lying down, his arms folded on his chest, considering how he could slide toward sleep with nothing to read. What he had for a pillow book was Strange News , if he could get it back from these villains. It was somewhere here on the grounds of this madhouse. He almost felt like escaping for the sole purpose of getting hold of it and a flashlight. And having them, he would be willing to creep back into his cell and not complain for a while. Of course if he asked outright, they would be more convinced than ever that his brother’s manuscript was sinister.

Tomorrow it would be combat. He had to sleep.

He had to conquer his thirst by not thinking about it. He was thirsty. He wanted to save most of his water for the morning.

He was a husband. Every path he took swung around and led to her and so to guilt and worry and wakefulness. Every path did.

It wasn’t the agency, his life in the agency, that filled him with agitation. He had conducted that life in a certain way that fell short of being shameful. Regret was one thing and shame was another. If everyone in the agency had conducted himself as delicately, as carefully, as he had … then the agency would have been an innocent ineffective waste of the taxpayers’ money. Unless he was overly flattering himself, that was true. He had lived a Kantian life in the agency, for the most part, unless he was flattering himself again. There were certain parish priests in the Roman church who winked at everything and did palpable good while the mother church rolled on telling poor devils never to use condoms on pain of hell.

That wasn’t exactly the analogy he wanted. There were better ones. But the fact remained that he could think about it without falling into shame and despair, and he would think about it, later. There would probably be time.

No, it was Iris he had to keep his mind away from, his failure with her, the great failure of his life.

He needed the right mental games. Earlier he had tried one game and it had failed him.

He had played Backwardation for a while. Backwardation he owed to his brother, whose ability to pronounce words in reverse had shown up at an absurdly early age, during his prodigy phase. It had been pretty remarkable and Rex had flaunted it, with the help of their parents, of course. And of course Rex had been challenging about it to his older brother, and as his older brother, Ray had been unable to elude the challenge. There had been various ways to lose to Rex, having to do with the length of words as well as the rapidity with which they were successfully reversed.

They had been out walking in the neighborhood when Rex had begun reading street signs backward, just like that, in his piping little voice. At first it had only been street names and the names of landmarks and points of interest. Nedlit Krap, he remembered, Tilden Park, had been a very early success of Rex’s. But then there had been Llihtoof Draveluob and on and on.

So he had played Backwardation briefly earlier, giving it up for a couple of reasons. He had seemed to be unable to keep the place names he was backwarding, African place names being the category he had chosen for himself, unable to keep them from getting closer and closer to home, to Gaborone, to his neighborhood, their street, their neighbors, and ultimately to Siri Hcnif herself, the evol of his efil. He would try something else.

One thing he could do was settle the question of what the best food, the best taste, was, the best-tasting food, in the world.

He thought about it and decided that the answer was bacon, crisp, hickory-smoked. That was if only one single food could be chosen. But if foods could be combined, then it would have to be ripe avocado slices on freshly baked whole wheat bread, with olive oil, with shreds of red onion, and with fresh-ground pepper and sea salt. Which would be very good with the crisp bacon on it. And this was a mistake. He was salivating. And it wasn’t a game.

But there could be a game connected to food. One had just suggested itself. The game would be to convert great literary names into main dishes. Salmon Rushdie would be an example. And there was Rice Edgar Burroughs.

There could be Bacon Francis, of course.

Nothing was coming. Rex would be an ace at this. The problem was that this was not a game they would ever play. Rex was dead. He knew it. And if he was, it was too much.

There could be Oats Joyce Carol or it could be simply Joyce Carol Oats.

Some people, like Rex, were very good at games, and other people were not. He was not, himself, very good at games. He was very good at a game no one knew he was playing, or almost no one, only the people who paid him. So there was that.

Ermine Melville was a possible, if people ate that animal. Probably in the Middle Ages they had. In the Dark Ages they ate anything.

Lamb Charles and Dorothy was too easy.

Another possible would be Edgar Allan Po Boy, after the New Orleans sandwich made with oysters and something else and with hot sauce. They were supposedly delicious.

He had run out of anything presentable. He was going to reject Edgar Allan Poi and Sole Bellow and Spuds Terkel and Graham Greens.

He thought of what he should do next. It was an exercise and not a game, but it would work. It was something Iris had come up with. The point of the exercise was to recapture the feeling of utter fatigue and physical constriction that passengers suffered on endless nonstop transatlantic flights like the one from New York to Johannesburg, seventeen hours with one brief refueling moment at Ilha do Sal. They had taken that flight together how many times? And the trick was to remember the yearning and envy everyone felt toward the flight crew, whose members could take shifts napping full length on foam rubber pallets in a special compartment. And then the trick was to identify your own present ability to be lying flat in the bed you were tossing and turning in with what it would have felt like to be permitted to lie flat sometime during the last three or four hours of that flight. All paths led to his girlfriend.