Norman Rush - Mortals

“You’ve reached a conclusion on me, I see. Based on what?”

“We don’t need to go into it. I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Oh yes we do. You think you have the truth, some kind of truth about me. Go ahead.”

“I know what you are. What you do.”

“Oh and what am I?”

“I don’t need to tell you what you are. You know what you are.”

“You think you know more than you do.” Ray warned himself to slow down. He was talking too fast, agitated. He was on war footing. This was war.

“What do you think I am?”

“I know. Trust me.”

“So Iris told you something.”

“No, not a word. She didn’t have to. What a laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think nobody knows who you work for. It’s a laugh. I was hardly off the plane and I knew.”

“She told you.”

“You’d like to think that. Wake up. Everybody knows who Boyle is, the consular officer you can never get hold of. That woman who works for him does everything in the office.”

This was bad. It was impossible for Ray, the idea of presenting the complete picture of what he was and what he was doing and what he had done, justifying himself. It was the wrong moment. He had to get out of this. He was on the wrong tack. And now he had to deal with the new question of whether, in addition to everything else that had to be settled, whether Iris had revealed what he did. They had an iron agreement about that. Whatever happened, it was supposed to be honored.

“Iris never said anything. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“ There was nothing to tell me . I told her what I knew. What was being said. It was common knowledge. She wouldn’t even confirm it. She talked around it.”

“But finally she did confirm it to you.”

“All right, after I hounded her. But she only confirmed it after she was convinced I knew.”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this. She knows there are specially, specially approved doctors to go to if anybody connected to the agency needs to see somebody. There’s one in Pretoria. She shouldn’t have done it. She broke an oath.”

“You seem unable to grasp that I knew already. She couldn’t keep denying it without being in an unproductive position. I knew …”

“You didn’t know. You couldn’t prove it. You thought you knew.”

“Have it your way. I thought I knew, okay, and I was right . I was right, wasn’t I? And it was material to her situation.”

“To her depression.”

“Yes.”

“To her unhappiness.”

Ray thought, I have to get off this route, give it up. He was outsmarting himself. He could see this leading into the story of his life, the justification for each step he had taken, the justification for the whole edifice he had created, something he was hardly in the right position to undertake since he was leaving the whole thing, he was gone, he was out of it. And he knew what Morel’s picture of the agency was going to be, the cartoon it was bound to be. And in a way he agreed with most of it, even though it was the sixties refusing to die that lay at the root of it, the sixties cartoons forever.

Maybe what Iris wanted was the sixties, which she would get redivivus in Morel. What could he do? He was inhabiting a stupid paradox. He was through with the agency, for his own reasons and for other reasons that owed something to certain ideas of the sixties, to be entirely fair about it, but he was on the exit ramp. La guerre est finie, with the Russians, was one of the reasons, a large reason and one he was not about to go into with Morel, agreeing yes this and that and the agency, Guatemala, Indonesia, terrible, mistaken, bad, but did Morel know why the Taiwanese happened not to have the atom bomb to play around with? It would be ignominious. He was not going to declare himself a turning worm as a basis for the next level of discussion here.

Under the right circumstances he would be happy to discuss the generic question of lives getting stuck and set in certain patterns. It was too large a subject right now. Somehow powerful personalities, hysterics among them, got to determine whole trains of events that innocent, less powerful personalities got caught up in. Who were these strong personalities and why were they so prevalent? Morel was a strong personality choosing to operate in a forceful way in narrower and narrower ponds, the United States, Cambridge, and now in the still, small pool Botswana constituted, the pond Ray had been happy enough in until this giant toad had flopped into it waving and croaking. We would all like to be great, if at all possible, Ray thought.

Morel was waiting for him to say the next thing. Time was passing.

If she wanted the sixties she was going to get the sixties in spades, so to speak, with Morel. The sixties annoyed him. The sixties said that if you knocked down certain well-meaning but imperfect institutions you would get something altogether more beautiful and wonderful flowering up to replace them. People never appreciated how touch and go it had been with the Russians at certain points, the ongoing possibility of a sociopath asshole getting into control of the magnificent death technologies science had created and that the Russians had brilliantly stolen.

“Well, let’s leave what I do for a living out of this, if we can. Let’s say you’re right and let’s set it aside. For the sake of the argument, let’s do that.”

“I loathe what you do,” Morel said. Ray was taken aback. Morel had presented his feeling very evenly, as a statement, not a cry or shout.

“Okay, I understand. Maybe that can be on the record and we can get on with this. I … look. I agree with a lot of what I assume you think. You might be surprised at how much we agree on. But there is no way I can get this into the right perspective for you.”

“I loathe that word.”

“What word? Perspective? Then how about how about there’s no way I can enter all the germane facts into the discussion. You loathe everything.”

Why was Morel being so absolute on this? Ray thought he knew why. He was suddenly seeing more deeply into the surroundings of his downfall. He thought, How better than perfect could it be for a seducer if by seducing the fair maiden he was saving her from association with an enemy of the good? Of course that was assuming that Morel was the seducer, something he had no evidence on as yet. He had his ideas and that was all he had.

There was no time for a seminar on the proper attitude to take toward the triumph of the pretty good over the utterly abominable that was roughly a fair summary of the Cold War, roughly but of course incompletely. He granted that. And Morel couldn’t help it that he hated imperial America. That was a truth about America that had to be lived with, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

His cover had been a laugh, clearly. The idea that the suspicion might be out circulating was not something alien to him. But it had been comfortable keeping the possibility there in a pallid way, not in boldface.

He was making life difficult for himself by carrying on two dialogues at the same time, one with Morel and one with himself. He had to concentrate, to get away from the extraneous. There were certain words he needed Morel to say and he was going to extract them. He was close to getting them. When he got them he would be able to breathe normally.

Ray said, “Okay, you have your own opinion of me and of my relationship, such as it is, to the truth. I don’t have the time to prove to you how misguided you are. But maybe someday.

“So. So, pushing the reset button, let’s agree that you have a shall we say certain relationship to the truth that’s superior to mine. Truth blows away the night and fog and makes you free. Everybody says so.