Norman Rush - Mortals

He thought, Everything ends … The ferry to Anacortes comes and you have to get on it and go back.

His thirst was better, somehow.

They were back and doing names again. When he denied knowing a name he could expect to be hit on the legs with the knot.

His legs were hurting. He thought he might acknowledge knowing one or two names, just for the respite he might get. He had been asked about Dwight Wemberg and he had denied knowing him. But that now seemed dumb, because their paths could logically have crossed in Gaborone. He would say that he’d been mistaken and that now he remembered.

Quartus was close to him, affecting weariness, pronouncing names directly into his right ear.

“You are giving me aggro again,” Quartus said.

“I’m sorry. I am doing my best.”

“Is it? Then think again, meneer, if you know who it is, Rra Bloke Molefi? He was very big at UBS, Student Representative Council, very big. You teach at UBS.”

“No, well, I did. I haven’t for a while, and the way I knew him was just hearing about him. There was a strike. It had to do with the tuckshop, money missing. I paid no attention to it. I was only there once a week. I am so thirsty.” He hadn’t intended to say that.

It was so boring, the protocols. In a minute Quartus would go and have another of his voluptuous drinking experiences.

Ray had an idea. He said, “Why don’t you hit me yourself, meneer, when I don’t know? Why make your African hit me?”

He heard Quartus asking for the knot and then a painful blow to his knee came and that was the answer to that. He wanted Quartus to have to do the hitting himself.

He would see to it.

“Who is Dwight Wemberg?” Quartus asked coming back, drinking whatever he was drinking, tea, water, Ray wanted cold tea. I want cold tea, he thought.

“I’ll tell you who he is. I just realized who he is. He’s agriculture. He’s a sad case. His wife died while he was out of town and she was buried by the time he got back and now they won’t let him exhume her and take her back to the States. I realized that’s who you meant. I think I met him a few times at embassy parties. That’s all.”

Quartus said nothing. But then in a rush more names were asked and Ray began thinking about names, funny things about names in general. He was going to need a new name himself in the next phase of his life, he realized, if he survived into it, because he was going to have to cut sever and smash any connection to the specious present, what he had been, especially if he was going to write for a living, which he might have to, which he might have to attempt, with God’s help. Names were funny things, like his own name, which was not Finch but Fish or Fisch, in truth, that name glimmering under his public name like a trout in a pool of milk, under a lily pad or something. In the thirties there had been a famous magazine editor with the perfect last name Crowninshield, a name that had struck him at first contact as pretty perfect, Crowninshield. Of course his first name had been Frank, when it could have been what, Beowulf or Manfred. Ah well, he thought.

Yes, he would need a new name because he knew like thunder and lightning what he was going to do in his new life. Pym, from the Poe story of the guy who went down a maelstrom, might be good, because he was going to pitch himself into the ocean of words, stories. He was going to write Lives, like Aubrey’s Brief Lives , not that all lives weren’t brief, anyway. That was the answer to what he was going to do with the stub of his mortal life that was closer to the bone of everything. It was continuous, as a thing to do, with his work in the agency, his Profiles. He could feel and see himself doing it. Of course there was no market for the little perfect compactions, compactions was the word, the rendering of the life you spent so long in living, the deals, strivings, loves, all that, your shots at love.

There was a consultation going on. They were taking their time.

But there would be a market for what he could do. He could compress any life into a jewel. Rex would know where the market for this was, would have, he meant. Of course he knew what Iris would say. She would say, Oh obituaries. But obituaries were the opposite of analytic and the opposite of what he had in mind. And he was not going to limit himself to the dead. He would do anyone he felt like, if he wanted to. Beware me, he thought. He would do the poor as well as the eminent. He would do it. He could. He would find Wemberg and make him a jewel. Aubrey was wonderful but naive, and he, when he did his Lives, would be the opposite of naive. He would do evil subjects, too, which Aubrey as a courtier couldn’t. Quartus would be a good subject. Of course he would need to support himself somehow while he wrote, but that could be arranged, he could always teach in Africa, in a second. He would be the freezing eye of the basilisk. He thought, My eye and hand will be sovereign, beware me.

“Thank you,” he said. He had reached a conclusion about his life, the life to come that he was grateful for. He was grateful to Quartus and his minions. He was reminded of Iris saying to him, When I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you. It had nothing to do with his situation. But he was grateful to Quartus for the thoughts that had been what, knocked loose. I can be anything, he thought. James Joyce wanted to be a tenor. Joyce was a tenor, but he had wanted to be paid for it. He should have tried more. I might sing, he thought.

He was clutching the armrests and a hard hit came to his hands, one two left right, pretty hard. Up to that moment they hadn’t hit his hands. We need our hands, he thought. He also didn’t want to be hit on the head more than he had if he could help it. He was too dry to spit, spit at them. But also it was true he didn’t want the consequences of spitting at anyone. It was like joining the army and saying okay, if I die, then okay, if I die doing the job, the job of being all I can be, killing people. People joining the army were prepared to imagine themselves vaporized, made nothing, and to accept that. But they weren’t embracing the possibility of ending up permanently crippled in a ward someplace, which was of course likelier than getting blown to vapor. Someone should publicize the actual odds.

His thirst was getting dire. If they hurled water at him whatever little he might contrive to catch by having his mouth open would almost be worth it. They knew he was thirsty. There was more water-pouring and lip-smacking water-drinking going on.

He felt like singing something, but he was afraid to. But he might hum. He was achieving something, being obstreperous. He was using up their time. They couldn’t stay in place forever. He was getting across, he hoped, the idea that he was crazy or being made crazy.

He wanted to sing, but first he would hum. It was too bad he didn’t know how the Boer hymn went, “Die Stem.” That would have been good. What he was humming had started out indeterminately but was, he realized, turning into “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”

“He is a moffie.” That was the beast calling him a homosexual by another Boer term.

“Shut that,” Quartus said, but it wasn’t clear to Ray whether it was directed at him or at the beast. He continued to hum.

Quartus was very close to him again, close enough that with a sharp lunge Ray would be able to bang Quartus hard in the face. It would hurt too much because his head was already caged in pain.

Quartus said, very deliberately, “Meneer, this is what you must understand …

“You can stop this humming. Now.

“And you must understand that you will tell us what we need to have you tell us. Ah yes. And if you prefer to tell us tomorrow, in the afternoon tomorrow, that will be fine. Or in the evening, fine as well …”