Norman Rush - Mortals

Quartus and his beast were consulting in murmurs. They could do their worst, even kill him if they wanted to. He was even curious to see how far they were going to go. It was a feature of the situation, was all. He was ready to fight them, and to fight them adequately he had to look ten steps ahead, at death, and not be afraid.

Out of nowhere came thoughts of his mother, overwhelming him. It was a deluge. He didn’t often think about his mother. They kept in touch in a nominal way, with Iris doing most of that. It could be that all the death business was making him regress. But there was something else, an insight utterly new to him. It was that the secret key to his mother’s whole mode with Rex had been her fear that Rex was a potential suicide. Iris had described his mother as stupid but not shallow, which was about right. So all his mother’s favoritism might have come out of, had come out of, an apprehension about something that happened with gay adolescent boys at a rate far above the average. She had sensed something in Rex, an inclination. It would have been instinctual with her. She had sensed it in him when he was little. Dealing with Rex had been a campaign to keep him willing to carry on living, however annoyingly he needed to conduct his life in order to enjoy the process. And of course now, with the virus, it was conceivable that he would take his life, or had, probably had, fulfilling her fear, her intuition. He was dead, his brother was, his little brother.

Ray was struck from behind, on the top of the head. It was bad.

And then he was struck again, on the back of his neck, on the skin. He had been hit by a fist armed with rings. They had made him bleed. He had been struck with that intent. It didn’t take much of a cut to produce enough blood to be alarming. Blood was sliding down his spine. Breaking his skin had been the point, to establish that they were willing to do that to him. They had multiplied his problems, too. Now he would have to worry about infection, take that worry back to his cell with him. They knew that. He had to try to keep his neck immobile or as close to immobile as he could, so that the clotting would start. This last blow had been a demonstration. He knew what it was about. It was to create intimacy. His wound had lips. He was supposed now to be really afraid. They would see. They would see.

He would take the initiative. If they wanted to talk about Strange News he would lead the way. Quartus had moved the card table closer, Ray had heard him doing it. There was a way to quell, to overcome, a feeling of impending faintness that he had learned in an agency workshop, if he remembered correctly. But he couldn’t remember the particular move, the trick, no, only that he had been taught one. He could hear Quartus preparing, pulling pages out and talking to himself, reminding himself of questions he had. So far, only Quartus’s assistant had physically abused him. They were preserving a distinction. It was fine to think of Quartus’s assistant as his beast, his creature, his beast. But the true beast was Quartus, who was about to destroy something he needed to think about, his mother and his brother, his new thought, the light it shed. He couldn’t do it there and then. He had to get the interrogation over with so he could think.

He said, “You think Strange News is something it isn’t. Because, look, it isn’t anything. It’s literary, you could think of it as a codex …” Ray knew immediately that he had chosen the wrong word, the wrong word.

“A codex,” Quartus said, weightily, and spat, on the floor, doubtlessly, a good sign confirming that keeping the room neat and clean for extended use was not a concern, which in turn meant that this would be over sooner rather than later, if he was correct and not grasping at straws. He was outsmarting himself. He had wanted to attack the question of what Strange News was without using the term postmodern, and he had chosen a bad alternate route. Obviously what Quartus had heard in codex was code .

Ray said, “No, look, a codex is just a certain kind of manuscript volume with certain materials in it in a disorganized state, materials we may not immediately understand, exactly … for example, there are a couple of them left by Leonardo da Vinci full of stuff that’s still mysterious to us. That’s all I meant. By codex.” There is such a thing as too much education, Ray thought.

Ray continued, “I want you to understand what this is, meneer.” It was dubious, calling Quartus by his own term of mock respect. He felt a little insane doing it. But he had to call him something.

“What this is is a work of art, by my brother …”

“And where is the name of the author, then …”

“It doesn’t have a standard title page. It’s just a manuscript. But his name is Rex Finch.”

“I don’t see it here. Very strange.”

“Take my word for it. And it’s a work of literary art and that’s all it is …” Quartus laughed nastily. “Em … so what does he mean by patriotute ? What is that?”

“Well, someone who … well it could mean someone who sells himself to the nation, or it could be someone who sells the nation itself, I suppose. It isn’t exactly clear. There are a number of coinages of his in there. Pollutician is another one. Mostly they’re clear enough.”

“And why is it given number four hundred, meneer, that number?”

“No idea.”

“And here, this little story, what does it mean, about the chap who is a blood giver, blood donor as you term it, but then here he says he’s through with it because he’s afraid his blood might go to someone who voted for your President Reagan, since there is no way to prevent that? What sort of story is that, meneer? A man who hates your greatest president in this century, isn’t it? I tell you I pray God will send South Africa such a man.”

“Well, that story is about someone with strong feelings against our former president, obviously. My guess is it’s probably a true story, something my brother heard somebody say.”

How he could be having what resembled a regular conversation on a political topic with someone who was torturing him was a question of its own. Reagan, the amazing Reagan, had acquired a universal cult following. The left reviled him, but the great mass of everything to the right of the narrow left loved and adored him, why? Was it because he was a mirror figure unaccountably raised to power and getting away with it, an amiable man with about five simple beliefs … astrology, the Second Coming, America Columbia the Gem of the Ocean the Greatest Country in History, succeeding in business being proof positive of virtue and genius, what else? Oh, never changing his mind … And he was always optimistic. Nothing got him down. He had luck, geopolitically. The Russians had imploded, or started to, during his tenure. People worshiped good luck.

Quartus said, “So what is this, number twenty-five, A specimen of surprise is to discover on your wife’s buttocks handwriting in ballpoint pen in letters of a minute size?” Ray had detected embarrassment in Quartus’s reading of the entry.

Ray didn’t know what to say, other than, “I don’t know. It’s an image, something that seemed funny to him …”

The blood drying on his back was making it itch. Stuck away somewhere among the things Iris had packed for him was an aluminum backscratcher with a collapsible handle, a Japanese novelty, something he could count on to be there as unfailingly as his nail clippers and his chloroquine. She loved him. She was wonderful with splinters. What would he do? His bleeding reminded him of something, Iris when she’d cut the palm of her hand slightly in the kitchen and had come to him holding her palm out and saying, Hey I’m getting stigmata … It must be our relationship . There had been a storm of clues about trouble coming and he had just stood there in it.