Norman Rush - Mortals

Definitely they were rougher, hustling him along, two of them, than before. Everything is a signal, he thought.

Crossing the open ground back to his cell was hard, at the faster pace being forced on him. He wasn’t being allowed to place his feet tentatively enough to knock rocks and pebbles and other impedimenta out of the way. He needed his shoes back. He was in stocking feet and the soles of his socks had turned planklike with sweat and filth, which was some help. But he wanted his shoes. And he wanted his wristwatch and he wanted to know how he looked, as a subject of abuse. He was curious. His beard was coming in. He wanted a mirror. He needed a haircut. He needed Iris, his barber. He was going to have to go to barbers, regular barbers, after she went away. She was going to. He knew everything that was going to happen.

“How do I look?” he asked stupidly, as he was thrown into his cell. He did the drill, stood with his back to the door while they took his hood off and then left, leaving him standing there locked in, with more to say.

“Okay,” he shouted after them.

He needed help. He collapsed onto his pallet and all his injuries began pulsing in unison. He felt like an ad, a display.

The whiteness in his head was back. He was yielding to it. He couldn’t help it. But tomorrow would come and he was not through singing.

Night came and went. It was very cold. He was given food and water the next day, but that was the limit of the attention his captors paid to him, and then it was night again. He slept well in spite of the cold and spent the day following in a condition of anticipation that proved to be pointless. Again he was fed. But no one came for him. He wondered whether he was being deliberately ignored, whether that was part of the protocol, or if it was the press of other business that was the explanation. In any case he was weathering it. He was learning that he didn’t need to attack each onset of dead time with games or exercises or purposive thinking. He could enter the absences and stay in them with everything shut down, the associative thought-chains fading out. It was unusual to not be thinking and to be aware of it, thinking about it at the same time. If he was correct, this condition was a prize that mystics labored to grasp. There was nothing blissful about it, at least not in the scraps and fragments of the state he had attained to so far. He could do without it.

Night came again.

He came out of sleep raggedly, resisting coming out. The eruption of noise and light, whatever it had been, was already over. It had been brief. There had been flailing shafts of light, a crashing sound, unlocking and slamming and relocking of the shed doors. Now there was nothing evident. He had been dreaming and then his dream had been wrecked around him and he was out of it, in the black present.

He felt he should be afraid, but he had no energy for it. He should be afraid because there was a change. He was no longer alone in his prison room. Someone was breathing heavily and brokenly muttering and beginning to move around.

Ray waited to do something. He thought that probably he should get into a fighting crouch, but it was all he could do to sustain the sitting position he had achieved, his back to the rough wall. The darkness was seamless and absolute.

There were different possibilities. This could be part of the torture. A madman could have been dumped in on him. That kind of thing was done. It could be someone who would keep him awake. That was torture and more than torture in the shape he was in. It could be an animal. It wasn’t an animal. It could be someone injured in some way he would be unable to do anything about, who would keep him awake.

He was going to say something as soon as he could penetrate what the new arrival was doing. He was doing something. He was apparently crawling around the edges of the room, feeling out the space. That was not an unintelligent thing to do. He had no idea how much the new arrival had been able to notice when he was hurled into the room. Not much, he would bet. It would be better for Ray to say something to this person before, in his explorations, the man stumbled across him.

He was going to say something first. That would be best. And instead of the plain Dumela greeting he would use the more honorific Dumela morena, Good day sir, why not? And then it would be O tswa kae, to find out where his new mate came from, was journeying from, and then finally O mang, Who are you? And he would watch his delivery, keeping it soft and nonbelligerent. His enunciation was going to be strange because his lips had swollen up and his mouth was so dry.

“Dumela morena,” he said, partly for practice. He had tried to keep it pleasant.

His words produced a charged stillness.

And then he was leapt on crushingly. Large strong hands found his throat and gripped it.

He grappled with his attacker, struggling to get a purchase anywhere on his head, his nose, ears. By the feel of his hair he was an African and he had been eating onions, something that gave Ray a twinge of hunger, oddly.

A voice he knew growled, “O mang?” But with the pressure on his throat he couldn’t reply, but he knew who it was. He did. He would be all right.

It was Morel . Somehow it was Morel.

Feelings of relief and hatred confused together swept hotly through him. He fought to get the breath to speak.

“It’s me,” he managed to say, trying to sound like himself.

Morel let him go.

“This is you, Finch. This is you. I found you,” Morel said. It was Morel’s strong voice but higher than usual, lifted into a higher register by fatigue and fear. Fear was there. Ray heard male elation and triumph in Morel’s voice. He had done something.

“Is Iris all right?” Ray asked urgently.

“I can’t believe this. Yes, Iris. No she’s fine, except over you. No she got frantic about you. Nothing coming in, no news. You know. Ah God. That’s why I came. No she was threatening to come up to look for you herself and I stopped her. She was going to come. So I stopped her, I came. It was the only way I could do it. She was raising hell at the embassy and getting nothing, getting the runaround worse than you can imagine. You don’t know. She gets insane. You don’t know.

“Ah man, this is you, but man, you smell . I smell blood. Have you got a torch, a match, any light so I can take a look? I don’t have my bag. They took it.”

Ray was amazed. Morel was not acknowledging the secret. That was interesting.

Ray laughed. “They’ve been hitting me. I’ve been hit. That’s all. I think I’m okay. There’s no light, nothing for light, sorry. My head hurts. I’ve got a scalp wound but it’s scabbing up okay, I think. I clot fast.”

“Sit still,” Morel said. He was talking unusually rapidly, for him, skating over the one thing, the one thing. He lightly touched his palm to the back of Ray’s head. He blew his breath out in a meaningful way.

“What?” Ray asked.

“I don’t like it, man. Did you lose consciousness at any point? Think if you did. Shit, I need light to see this. We’ve got to get you cleaned up. You better get flat, stay flat until I can look at you. What the fuck is this place?

“I’ll get a torch from these bastards. I’m a doctor.”

“So how will you get them to give you a torch?”

“I’ll yell, I’ll kick the fucking doors …”

“Believe me, don’t. They won’t even come. Conserve your strength. It gets light in the morning, not bright clear but enough, you know. You can see. It’s like twilight but you can see …

“Listen to me, the best thing is if you can rest. They get started early around here. I don’t know what they have on the schedule for you, but they start early.