Norman Rush - Mortals

But someone else was coughing, having a coughing fit right along with him. Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust, he thought. Whoever was coughing had a condition. He thought it must be Quartus. For a moment they were animals together in a similar affliction.

“Who do you think I am, then?” Quartus asked, when the fit had passed.

It might be time for my little program, Ray thought.

He said, “Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce, And dost not know the Garment from the Man.” That was Blake, a little blast of Blake for his tormentor, and not bad if he did say so himself. Not knowing the garment from the man was good. That was what he was going to get, Quartus, if he kept this up, English Literature. Now Quartus was going on again about telling the truth.

“The truth is bald, and cold,” Ray said. It was from Emily Dickinson.

Quartus didn’t like it. Ray could hear him getting out of his chair and coming forward in order to deliver a personal piece of punishment. It was possible Quartus had taken the mention of baldness in a personally irrational way, which meant that he needed to scrutinize his quotations a little better before using them. His punishment was a little more smoke sent his way and Quartus pouring water into a glass and sipping so he could hear.

Unasked, Ray summarized everything rapidly, who he was, his seconding from teaching to this mission for the ministry’s search for new school sites, his marriage, his wife who would be frantic if this continued much longer, his absolute ignorance about who Quartus was and what was going on. And he added something new as to how very advisable it would be for him to be let go because the American embassy would shortly be involved, and that would be unpleasant for everybody detaining him. That was it. That was the fiction he was going to stick with no matter what. He was tiring and he needed to get it out and get it clear before fatigue weakened him and he began deviating, altering things. He had done it for his own benefit. That was it.

Quartus sighed hugely. He continued sipping voluptuously.

Ray was singing mentally Let me call you Satan , to the tune of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” It was for amusement. Interrogation, with its calculated halts and longueurs, was so … boring. He wanted to say something funny to Quartus. He had an idea.

He said, solemnly, “I know that I shall meet my fate … Somewhere among these clods below.” It was funny to him. It wouldn’t be to Quartus, though. He wanted to make Quartus laugh, if he could.

His thinking was interrupted by a blow to the right side of his neck. He had been struck from behind, with the side of the hand this time, a medium-hard blow but essentially a nothing, a kiss, as these things went. But they were escalating.

Ray said, “Stop hitting me for a second and I’ll tell you something you might want to know.”

“What would that be? And you must speak louder, meneer, because of the hood. What will you be telling me?”

Ray said, “Okay, first uncover my mouth. Tie this thing above my mouth. I can’t get enough air to speak properly. And you can’t really hear me.” He felt it was worth a try.

They surprised him. The drawstring tie was undone and the hem of the hood was brought up and the hood retied above his mouth. There was bunched fabric against his nostrils, but still it was better. He could get a decent volume of air through his mouth. He swilled air, getting ready. He wanted to bait Quartus. He wanted to blast Quartus with something classic. Speak, English! he thought. He wanted it to be Milton but it couldn’t be because he was coming up dry. Something pithy was needed. He only had a minute and Milton wasn’t pithy. But it came to him that “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” might do.

He began, loud. “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones …” The blow he had been inviting came, stopping him. Again it was a side-of-the-hand blow. He felt like asking to be hit on the left side of his neck the next time around, for balance.

“He is saying poetry to us. He is a poefter.” That was Quartus’s assistant, obviously. He was exasperated. Poefter was Afrikaans for homosexual. Ray knew that much. Rex was a poefter, in fact.

Quartus hissed angrily at his assistant, who obviously had stepped out of his role.

The Milton had been mildly apposite to Quartus but he should have used Yeats’s “Irish Airman” instead, again, just to get Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love in, for his consideration. He might want to convey something about what, fate, about something like the feeling in the poem about the guy in the hammock hearing the cowbells as the cows came home to roost and thinking he has wasted his life, a poem he wished he knew but didn’t. He felt like teaching Quartus something. It was in his nature. Why not try? He wanted to bait him and teach him at the same time. How productive was that? He was a fool.

Wearily and almost gently Quartus said something about teasing being pointless and about his not enjoying this situation no matter what anyone might think, and then he began screaming at Ray, from a distance of a few inches. It was one more redundant demonstration of florid unpredictability, niceness turning into hell without warning. Never think you know when you can relax, is what it said. He was putting his heart into it.

Briefly Ray lost the power to follow the thread. His lightheadedness was coming and going. It was cumulative, being hit. And he was hungry. The burden of the diatribe was that there would be no further discussion of who Ray was. There was no time for that. It was Strange News they were going to discuss because the truth of Ray’s assignment was buried in those pages. Quartus seemed to have convinced himself that everything in Strange News was somehow coded, that it was a master document, a skeleton key to the uprising, something like a set of instructions. Together they were going to tear it apart, he was saying.

He was sorry for Quartus. How could he conceivably get what Strange News was, lacking any acquaintance with the genre, which, say, Coleridge’s Notebooks would be a reasonable example of, lines like My Bowels shall sound as an Harp interspersed with all sorts of oddments and sentiments like Let us contend like the Olive and the Vine to see which can bring forth the best fruit rather than contending like wild beasts or whatever the negative comparison had been. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t be expected to remember everything. Also it would be a safe bet that Quartus had never bumped into, say, a reproduction of the Mayan Codex, which Strange News with its sequences of enigmatic bits and pieces reminded Ray of, sort of. And then there were the nosegays the French made, bêtisiers? compilations of everyday grotesqueries and stupidities. Intelligent people spent their entire academic careers staring fruitlessly at items like the Mayan Codex.

Iris adored Michael Ventris, or was it the type, the type being any academic lucky enough to decipher a dead language that had resisted the best efforts of generations of other scholars, to the eternal disappointment of their particular wives. He knew he was making assumptions about Quartus’s educational history, the man at best graduating secondary school in some pathetic dorp before his descent into the maelstrom of military life … But he was sure he was right.

“My memory is not what it was, right now,” Ray said, eliciting a sound of disgust from Quartus. I am not making complete sense, Ray thought.

“I’m a teacher,” Ray said. He knew it was disconnected of him. But he was sincere. It felt urgent to keep saying it. Thin places were appearing in his what, his thought-flow, thin places or bleached places. Quartus needed to be careful with him. Quartus knew that. Unconscious he would be useless to Quartus. And they were being careful with him. All hands were aware of that, all hands on deck. They were observing limits. Being white was a significant protection. It was a fact. There was nothing he could do about it. This was a drôle d’interrogation, so far, and a good match to the drôle de reconnaissance he had been conducting in the bush himself, when he had been so rudely interrupted.