Norman Rush - Mortals

The sound of breaking glass resumed. This time it was clear that they were hearing a deliberate, punctuated process.

Morel said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? In westerns when the Indians or outlaws are coming and you’re holed up in a cabin …”

“You knock out the windows so you can shoot freely, right. I’m way ahead of you.”

The glass-breaking came to an end. Others were acting. We’re too passive, Ray thought. He had to refine his tasks, reduce them to the essential two or three. And then he had to find a way to complete them. One was his shoes, he had to get his shoes, or some shoes. Two was Strange News , which he had to get hold of and not let go of again. And the third task was to be sure, be sure , Morel survived the storm that was rolling in. It was obvious. If anything happened to Morel it would be Ray’s fault. Iris would spend the rest of her life counting the ways her husband had been responsible directly and otherwise for the rising new love of her life’s death, an impossibility that would lead to hell. There would always be the suspicion that he had eased Morel’s way into death. His strength had to go into protecting his rival, the victor, like it or not.

Morel looked depressed.

Ray said, “If anything happens to me I want to be cremated. I just realized I don’t think I ever discussed it with Iris. I think it was just assumed. But let me get on the record with you anyway.”

“You may get your wish,” Morel said. A strong odor of smoke was in the air, stronger than the occasional smoke from cooking fires they were used to, and with a chemical taint to it.

They both laughed.

The smell of burning passed. They had nothing to say to one another. Sounds of groups of men, heavily shod men, running, occupied them. But that too came to an end. There was more waiting to do.

A metallic crackling commenced. There were two episodes and then a continuing, spaced-out manifestation. It was the first gunfire. It was faint and sporadic but there was no question what it was. It was originating at a good distance, from the north, in the direction of the pan. It occurred to Ray that the ridge constituting the high side of the pan would provide a logical parapet for an attacking force to make use of. The elevation would be favorable and they would have superior fire zones.

Morel heard it and fell silent. He had been talking, lecturing really, mainly to himself. Ray resented having been told that he was the one who never seemed to shut up. Morel had been droning on about a writing project he had put off completing, which he now regretted, because, as Ray understood it, he had been planning to popularize a term for religious belief, immaterialism, that he had come up with and liked. Before that there had been a muttered discourse about how various false narratives, most of them religious in nature, had been to blame for the confluence of events, however he had put it, that had led to their being in the present fix. He’s a bigger pedant than I am, Ray thought. Iris was going to be in for some surprises. Ray had pretended to be an interested hearer out of pity for the man. It was necessary for Morel to be doing something. He had a low tolerance for inaction, obviously. It had sent Morel into the monologue that was just mercifully coming to an end. They had to be quiet now. They had to concentrate, to follow, to scry out as much as they could of what was happening outside, because sooner or later it was going to come inside and get them. It was that simple.

Ray was thinking ahead. He said, “Do you know where they put my boots?”

“How would I know that?”

“Just asking in case you noticed anything about them when you were out.”

“I have no idea where they put them. I didn’t see them.”

“I have to get them.”

“I completely understand.”

“I have another couple of pair in the Land Cruiser. Did you see where they parked my Land Cruiser, blue Land Cruiser?”

“I didn’t. I was looking for my Land Rover and didn’t see that anywhere. But I think they have all the vehicles on the far side of the main building. That’s my guess. That’s gunfire we hear.”

“Small-arms fire, yes.”

“You know what a gunshot sounds like to me? Like what a bar of metal snapping in two would sound like, if such a thing could happen.”

“Well, that’s suggestive. Of course different guns make different sounds.”

“Can you tell things like the caliber of the weapons being fired, that kind of thing?”

“In a limited way. I’m not a weapons expert.” A subtle shift was taking place. Morel was showing an unsolicited deference to Ray, based no doubt on his perception of him as an expert in peculiar matters like the present one, bloodshed. He wanted to tell him how misplaced his notion was. But he couldn’t. What was the point in scaring him? Ray had gone out of his way to have nothing but the most minimal contact with weapons instruction. He had gotten the initial introduction and then he had evaded the subject, except for two mandated refresher courses there had been no way to avoid. The agency was organized guile, not organized gunplay, in his parsing of it, his own individual parsing of it. His practice in the agency had been founded on outsmarting, outthinking, on intellection. He had been so fastidious, so wonderfully fastidious. A bolt of ennui struck him. He was weary of himself.

“We have to get out there,” Morel said.

Oh, just step out into bloody confusion and then get shot, Ray thought. He said, “We need to think about that. We have a couple of ways we can go. We can get poised to jump on whoever comes to the door and overpower him. We might want to attract attention by yelling when the fighting gets closer, if it does.”

Morel was enthusiastic about that. “I like the idea of shouting. We could take turns. We could shout Kea tsala, I mean ditsala …”

Ray said, “No, that means we’re each other’s friends, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Oh, you’re right. No it would be Kea lona ditsala.”

“That’s it. That might be good to shout. A good thing about it is that it wouldn’t offend anybody, whichever side heard it.” He had to come up with some semblance of a plan of action, even if it was for the sole purpose of calming Morel down while events unfolded into some more readable shape.

“But let’s consider the opposite possibility. Stop walking around so much. We need to conserve our energy. And here’s the opposite possibility.

“We have no idea who’s going to win this thing. So the opposite strategy would be to keep our mouths absolutely shut. In other words, we sit tight and silent and then make a move when it’s all over, when we think it is. For example, maybe we can go back to figuring out how we can rip our way through the roof up there, the thatch, once we think it’s safe to appear in public. We could take turns being each other’s footstools so we could get up high enough to claw away up there. You could be the footstool first.”

What he was doing was wrong. He was yielding to the impulse to tease Morel, a little. But in fact he was just doing his best to suggest calming options, and the teasing was incidental. He did think that with some currently unimaginable exertions they might get through the chicken wire and the other impedimenta and then finally through the thatch, their fingers bloody shreds at the end of the procedure.

Ray said, “So there are different ways to go. It would help if we could get some room service. I’m starving.”

“Let me give you some advice,” Morel said, suddenly authoritative.

“Go on.”