Norman Rush - Mortals

He began to groan.

Morel said, “She said you had to know. It wasn’t painful for him at the end. I’m really sorry.”

Ray wanted to press his forehead hard against the wall. He thought it would help. He was sure it would.

He got on all fours and set his head against the wall. He groaned more. He released low, grinding groans.

Morel was distressed and came closer.

“When I get my bag back, I’ll give you something,” Morel said.

Ray slipped down and lay on his side.

“You must have been close,” Morel said.

“ No , no we were not. There’s no point talking about it. I knew it was going to happen. In fact I think I knew it already had happened. I really did. There were signs.”

“Your wife thought it was important for you to know.”

“My wife. Of course she would. She probably would have liked me to go for the funeral. She could have gone herself. I don’t care what she does. That isn’t what I mean. Look, she was closer to Rex than I was. She liked him. He was a queer duck. He wrote some stuff I have to get back from these cocksuckers. It’s too complicated to explain. How is my mother doing? Did Iris mention her?”

“Only that there was a ceremony, large thing, in San Francisco for him and that she wasn’t there, your mother wasn’t. That’s all I know. Iris has material to show you about this event. It was big. He was apparently a local celebrity.”

Ray folded the pallet over because the cold was strong and he was beginning to shake and he didn’t want Morel to know, if he could help it. He was shaking. It was strange, he thought, that he had no impulse to weep. Of course, he was dehydrated, hugely. He wasn’t sure if the system that made tears was the same one that made saliva, which he had next to nothing of. He was shaking embarrassingly.

He said, “Don’t worry. I’m all right. Nobody worry. I’m going to write his Life and I’ll be in it as shit, a villain, so don’t worry. I’m tired. Right now I am. My role as a shit will be there.

“But watch out. Any Life I want to write I will. I spare no one. You don’t understand. I spare no one.”

Morel put his hand on him, then he was feeling his face, and then his wrist, trying to take his pulse, Ray supposed.

“You mean you’re going to write his obituary.”

“Nah nah no , you don’t understand no. Watch out. I …”

Morel was at the shed door, kicking and shouting, butting the door with his fists and knees. It had to be with his knees, because they had taken his boots. He was going to fuck his knee up, with this.

He was keeping up the ruckus for what seemed a remarkably long time. It came to nothing.

Morel gave up finally and came back to him.

“You’re still shaking,” Morel said.

“I know.”

“Look, it’s freezing. So this is what we need to do. We’ve got to pile these extra things on us. We fold you into one and I get next to you. We have one under us and one over us, or two over us, and we use body heat, trap it.”

“I think this is psychological,” Ray said. He was ashamed of his trembling voice.

Morel said, “It doesn’t matter if it is. It wears you out. We have to control it. I don’t love this idea, but we are going to be buddies tonight. No, wait a minute and listen. I am getting in with you. If you stop shaking, I’m gone. I can’t check you out in the dark. I should check you out. I don’t know if this is malaria …”

“It’s psychological,” Ray said.

“Yeah but I would like to look at you for bites, lesions. I can’t. You’re taking your chloroquine?”

“Well, I was.”

“When did you take your last tablet? Try to remember. It’s very important.”

“I don’t know when it was. A while, is all I know.”

“Well do you have any prominent bites on you, things that itch, anything like that?”

“You know, you get bitten constantly around here. But everything itches anyway. I’ve got cuts.”

Morel was hauling things around. And then he was flat against him, his front against Ray’s back, holding him still as he finished arranging things.

Ray was being pushed into a corner and held there. That was his life.

He thought he should bid goodbye to his brother. He whispered what he wanted to say until Morel asked him what he was saying.

He went silent. He thought, My dear Rex, silly fucking poefter goodbye you poefter: We missed the boat.

He meant everything. But he was shaking even more.

He continued, out loud, We missed the boat and you are going away, goodbye mon semblable mon frère goodbye: Something you wanted to hear is what I want to say, you were smarter … I hated that, but you were.

It was difficult. Morel was saying Hey, hey, calm down, hey, hey.

Ray whispered into the pallet, Goodbye, we are all turning into ghosts bit by bit anyway … you were smart, a smart person, and you could write, and that is the truth.

There was something he wanted to promise but couldn’t, because of life, the way life is. What he wanted to say was I will tell you this, your life will be famous . He couldn’t quite. He was in captivity. He didn’t know what was going to happen. How could he?

I will help your ghost, he thought.

“I will make you live,” he said aloud, alarming Morel.

They were in a corner. Folded over, the edges of the two pallets covering them barely made a closure that would keep the bitter cold out. And then there was a third pallet laid on top of the other two. And the point was to move around as little as possible so as not to disarrange all this delicate architecture Morel had organized because then the cold would come in like a knife and wake them up. It was the coldest night he remembered, by far. There had been a shift in the weather. The skies change, but not ourselves, was a quotation from somebody on the subject of not expecting too much out of sheer traveling to exotic places, like Africa, the Kalahari.

Ray was on the inside, toward the fold. It was Morel’s job to keep the lips of the pallets together if he could.

They had evaded calling each other by their first names. That wouldn’t do. That needed to be settled in the morning. The idea of having to call Morel Davis was intolerable. The vivid fact that Morel had so far never just spontaneously called him Ray was a further burning indicator of the guilt he was bearing inside himself like a nasty jewel. It was there, like the jewel between the eyes of the nasty monstrous frog idol in adventure stories. He was going to pry it out. He had to because it was all he could see when he looked at the man. He would do it.

If anybody had to get up to pee during the night the whole house of cards would fall apart and they would have to start over. He rarely needed to get up at night to pee. And of course just now he was so dehydrated there would be no question of who would be to blame for wrecking things, if anyone did. My prostate is fine, he thought. That was a plus about him he wondered if Iris appreciated. Would she miss it in him if she got with someone who had to pop up to go to the toilet two, three times a night? Would she think back, Ah, those were the nights? Nights she could sleep like God, who could presumably sleep at will. Benign prostate hyperplasia was what most men his age had, if he was correct, or possibly it wasn’t most, but it was many. He could ask the doctor. He could ask Davis. In any case he didn’t have it, thank God.

Definite warmth was slowly materializing.

There was a falling asleep trick he just remembered. He didn’t know where he had picked it up. He hadn’t thought of it for years. It was possible that it was something he knew from training, or from beloved Marion Resnick. The idea was to take the sparks and lines and curlicues and all the other bright fragments in the eidetic display that shows up behind your eyelids every night, eidetic debris it had been described as, and catch the bits and pieces and through willpower force them into a solid coherent shape like a triangle or an oblong or a circle. He remembered doing it successfully. It was a strain to do it and it no doubt worked because the peculiar effort took your mind off the crimes and failings that rose up gnashing their teeth when it was time to rest so that you could continue your crimes when the sun came up the next day.