Norman Rush - Mortals

Quartus and his hitting-beast were consulting in murmurs. Ray interrupted them. He needed to speak rapidly. “I’ll tell you something you’re right about, if you let me.

“And it’s this. You’re right there’s a puzzle in this manuscript. In a way it’s a bigger puzzle to me than it is to you, and you can believe that or not. My brother … somewhere in these lines is his soul as he wanted me to see it. That’s what I think. So very good, ask me questions. Maybe it will help. Because the truth is I treated my brother badly. I was unfair. I was ignorant.”

“You are talking shit. I have no time for this.”

“Do you have a brother?”

“What business is it of yours?”

“Why do I have the feeling you do? I think you come from a very large family. I just think that.”

“It is no business of yours.” The man was roaring.

“I hear you,” Ray said.

“This is shit you are talking,” Quartus said, but Ray thought he was detecting a hairline crack in the man’s vehemence, a wavering, as though he might be considering letting Ray go on wandering in this area on the chance it would lead to something productive.

“I was not the friend my brother needed. That may be the message in these pages, I don’t know. Maybe you can help me.” Ray felt himself edging into a certain state. He was a little aside from himself. He was a companion to his speaking self, for the moment. He sounded unafraid to himself, strong, even.

“Also I believe he’s dead. There it is. Here we are. Oh and by the way, yes he is what you would call a poefter, my brother. Yes indeed. But he’s dead. Or so I believe. No, he is.”

The beast was objecting to the turn things were being allowed to take. He was grumbling and hissing. “He must shut it,” he was saying repeatedly.

Ray said, “And he was no fool, my brother Rex.” He wanted them to know that. He wanted it said.

“I’ll tell you how he made his living. Listen to this. He thought of things. He sold ideas. How many people can do that and live on it? He’s a clever bugger. Or he was, rather. Why don’t I just stay with the past tense, since he’s dead?

“For example, did you ever see, in the early eighties, about, a comedy series The Triumphs of Inspector Lestrade , on television? Granada television, British, but it was shown all over the Commonwealth, like Mr. Bean was, which I know they had on in South Africa. Lestrade was my brother’s idea. He sold it to the producers.”

A snort of disgust from Quartus or the other was his only reply. Ray didn’t care. Rex deserved credit. The concept, built on reversals, was clever. In the series the thickheaded Inspector Lestrade of the Doyle stories was instead a brilliant Scotland Yard detective perennially harassed by a bumbling, intruding, fantastical screwball Sherlock Holmes, a formerly celebrated consultant to Scotland Yard who had gone off the rails through cocaine abuse. That was the nut of it. Lestrade had provided a steady trickle of money to Rex, culminating in a really handsome lump-sum payment during the ultimately abortive run-up to a feature film version of the property. Ray had never wanted to know the details. He had avoided paying close attention to his brother’s coups and deals, out of envy, pure and simple. And he had erected an unjust caricature of his brother as someone who scanned the world for literary cultural figures people got pleasure out of and turned them into figures of fun. He had seen him as a specialist in mockery, a mercenary specialist in mockery, but where had that come from? There was only Lestrade , as an exhibit. And Rex thought of things and gave them away, too, he should remember. For example he had given away gratis the idea for a short subject consisting of three or four minutes of banal family drama and twenty minutes of credits, a thing that had been a hit for somebody in art house cinemas during the period when movies of sleeping people, Warhol movies, had been in vogue. The film had won a prize, in those stupid days when prizes were awarded for flies crawling up walls. He wanted to tell his brother something. He was sorry for certain things. People had apparently found the movie with tedious credits hilarious. And Lestrade looked like becoming a permanent cult item. His brother’s name was there forever in the credits, which was immortality of a sort, more than he himself would ever have. Rex had probably been looking for a reaction from him, anything, and he hadn’t given one. He was sorry.

He said, “It’s a parody of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It makes an idiot out of Sherlock Holmes. You can rent it.”

It was oddly interesting to return to Lestrade , which, of course, had been a delayed attack on his own personal boyhood cult of Sherlock Holmes. He had wanted to be Sherlock Holmes.

Quartus said, “That’s enough.”

“This is interesting. You watch television. Of course you do. It’s on videocassette. Maybe you’ve seen it.

“By the way, the whole thing was an attack on me. Because Holmes was a hero of mine. I was bookish. I read all the Holmes stories over and over and forward and backward, really. When I’d read them all I was very depressed that there weren’t any more of them. Anyway, my brother made Holmes an idiot, in this series. And he made the true hero gay, by the way, a poefter, to you. Ah well …”

He was struck on the neck. It was pro forma.

He hadn’t thought about his Sherlock Holmes phase in years. It had been important. He had saved money in his adolescence to buy a book of pastiches of the Holmes stories, a limited edition, by a man named August Derleth. They had supposedly been the best of the pastiches produced by fans of Holmes who wanted more. But they had been inadequate. Reading them had made him feel worse.

“This is real,” he said. They wouldn’t get it.

Another hit to the neck came, more a swipe than a hit.

He was having insights, ridiculously. He understood something that had been pestering him. He had made a deduction. Recently he had developed a slight mania to have something in his right hand to grasp, like a tube of Chap Stick or a pen cap. It was the recurrence of a mild grasping mania that had surfaced earlier in his life during periods of stress, although mania was too strong a term for it. Out in the Kalahari it had resurfaced and it had only defined itself as a problem when he had to take over the driving, because he needed the use of both hands, obviously. He had never inquired into it, this tic. It had been transient enough that he had never bothered to ponder where it came from. He was feeling the need just then, even. It was present. But now he understood why.

“You know what,” he heard himself saying, stupidly.

He ignored a shouted question about Toromole, another one. Because what he was onto was much more interesting. It was as though lights on the bottom of a swimming pool had been switched on, showing various bodies in the depths, some moving, some not. It was as though the light pouring up was hot and was showing or melting little frozen scenes from his early life, his early boring life. He wanted to look at these things but stay safely above them. Scenes starring himself were lighting up, saying Hi. This was nothing Quartus could understand. He felt like calling him Watson, but he wouldn’t. It would be funny to address Quartus as My Dear Fellow, except that it wouldn’t, it would only mystify him more.

There was another slap. Quartus said something unclear. Ray’s ears were ringing. They were interrupting his thoughts.

Now the gripping-tic could go away. It might. He knew where it came from. In his boyhood he had owned and loved a little lead toy, a rocket ship, blue and white, with minute pulley wheels set between the top fins so that Buck Rogers could be sped along a taut length of string to get him to wherever he and Wilma and Doctor Huer had to be. He had loved Buck Rogers. And he had loved the goddamned rocket ship, and somehow clutching it had gotten associated over time with falling easily asleep. It had been an intermittent practice but it had persisted as he what, adolesced, persisted longer than it should have because it was so inconspicuous a thing to do. It was his version of a teddy bear. He had pretty much forgotten about all this. He had hung on to the rocket ship and how peculiar was that considering that millions of grown Greek men never leave home without their worry beads, which in his humble opinion was not so far out of the rocket ship bailiwick?