Norman Rush - Mortals

“Try not to think about food. Don’t articulate what you’re thinking, is what I mean. This sounds stupid but it isn’t. Here is the thing. Don’t name the thing you want or need to yourself.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what I was doing, not speaking of it. Then I lost it.”

“Where do you think the fighting is?”

“You mean the firing. I don’t know if there’s any fighting going on yet.”

“You mean you don’t know who’s firing or do you mean you can’t tell if the guys down here are firing back?”

“Take it easy. I don’t know anything for sure. What I think is that there’s shooting coming from the west rim of the pan, the high rim. That’s the only high ground in the vicinity. It overlooks everything. I’m sure it’s the Kerekang people up there. I don’t hear anything that sounds like local return fire, so far.

“I don’t know what anybody’s doing. But the pan rim is a good defensive position for Kerekang in case koevoet wants to go after them. Koevoet has some truck-mounted machine guns, heavy caliber, would be my guess. But they can’t put vehicles into the pan, so they can’t get close to him. I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to send Bushmen down to blow darts at these bastards. I’m just making that up. I’m doing my best here, with nothing to go on.”

There was a crescendo in the firing.

“I hate war,” Morel said.

“Who doesn’t?” Ray said. Here we go, he thought.

The firing sank away.

Morel said, “War is unnecessary. All the monstrous stuff, weaponry, huge standing armies, all that … There’s a way out of it and the way would be for all the countries of the world to decide to drop the load of competitive armaments by agreeing that there would be one body, the United Nations, and what it would do would be to operate a powerful force that would enforce agreed-on boundaries. That is, everyone’s boundaries would be agreed, imperfect or not, frozen, accepted as final. So nations would go down to what they needed to police themselves inside secure boundaries … so if no country is threatened with any kind of incursion, then that means no need for overseas bases, no arms races, because the justification for those is defense of the realm. I’m not saying you could ever get to the point where this would suddenly blaze up as a good idea to all hands on deck. It’s a thought experiment.”

“Good idea,” Ray said. He was truly astonished. It was hard to credit that he was hearing what he was hearing. What he was hearing was a proposition appropriate for a sophomore symposium somewhere, a colloquium. Morel was a type. He wanted to be fair to the man who was taking his wife away, far away, taking her in his arms and flying away with her and landing in some excellent place. Fear was precipitating him into little lectures, fervent ones. The pitch of his voice was higher. Ray would have to capture all this in words, in the cameo he would do of Morel, assuming they got out. It would be delicate, getting it right, but here was a man in fear of death urgent to register his bright ideas, in case he was going to die suddenly, register them with another potential corpse. The answer to the question What is life? is Life is abnormal psychology , he thought.

Ray was not going to spare himself, either. He was going to encapsulate himself but maybe not in the same book with the other Lives. Mine would be My Life in a Nutshell , which would be appropriate, he thought.

Morel seemed satisfied with having said what he had. No doubt he was rummaging something else up he wanted to be remembered as having thought of. I feel small, Ray thought. It was fairly horrible. This man was overflowing with items like plans for universal peace. There was a kind of idiotic nobility to it. I feel like flotsam, in comparison, Ray thought. And now he wished, for the sake of the sketch he was going to do, that he had paid better attention to a couple of other deliverances Morel had let fall in passing earlier. One had to do with a correct understanding of what the entire human race was basically up to, that understanding being that mankind was engaged not only in internecine conflicts unending but in a general collaborative war against the trees, as he remembered it, mankind as a kind of planetary mange. And the idea of these formulations was to make a light go off in the mind of man that would stop him or her in his or her tracks and lead to huge changes. The other deliverance was lost to him, for the moment. He had to get a pen, somehow, and a tablet, a notebook, anything.

“You think they’re shooting down from the pan?”

“Yes.”

A serious detonation shook the shed, jolting Morel into another presentation. Dust and grit sifted down over them from the ceiling.

Morel said, “I got a look at the pan. It’s like a gigantic pockmark. I read about it before I came up here.”

The detonation was significant and represented a change. Morel wasn’t asking for his opinion. In fact he had no opinion. It was possible that it was a mortar hit. It was possible that through some accident some ammunition or explosives had gone up. It was serious.

Morel continued. “Do you know that there’s some mystery about what causes pans? The geology is mysterious. One theory is that there were natural depressions in the terrain and that there used to be much heavier winds in the area that scooped them out and much heavier rains that filled them up, so that when they dried, these beds of clay and soda were left. But the problem with that theory is that there are no pans in other deserts, only around here.”

Ray was fascinated. This was beyond wanting to deposit his aperçus before misadventure struck. This was sadder, a need to demonstrate that he knew certain things the average man might not.

Morel said, “The pan here isn’t the biggest one in the Kalahari. This is a small one, less than half a kilometer I would say, measured longwise. It’s an oval-shaped thing.”

Morel was speaking more rapidly as he went on. Ray wanted to slow him up a little, not stop him.

Ray said, “The pan used to fill with water every rainy season and stay full most of the year. They say it was beautiful. It was shoulder-to-shoulder marabou storks and fish eagles, Cape vultures, rare birds. That’s why they chose to build this monstrosity out here. Of course then the drought came.”

In Morel’s eagerness to proceed, he interrupted Ray. “Man, you should see it now. I saw it. Christ, it’s an eyesore.

“You wouldn’t go near it. It’s a boneyard. You see cow skeletons stuck halfway in the mud. You see skulls sitting there. The floor of it is checkered and you can tell that what happens is that when you step on these individual slabs they tilt up and dump you into this white mire, muck.

“There are a couple of abandoned trucks in there, just the roofs showing. It’s blinding to look at, it’s so white, pure burning white, white as snow.

“I couldn’t see much, though. That is, I couldn’t look at the thing for very long without my sunglasses. That’s another thing I want back. My bag I have to get first, first thing. People are going to be hurt.”

Morel was neatening himself up, beating dust out of his hair and off his shoulders. Ray was doing the same.

“That last explosion, what was that?” Morel asked.

“That’s what I’m thinking about,” Ray answered. He didn’t want to alarm Morel. And even if somebody was firing a mortar or mortars, they might not have many shells, maybe even only two, even only one.

“Is there anything we could make a white flag out of?” Morel asked.

“Your shorts, perhaps,” Ray said, regretting saying it. Morel looked at him closely.

“That was an attempt at levity. And also a recognition of the fact that my shorts are khaki-colored and in fact the only white sort of thing around is your shorts. I’m not suggesting it’s practical. My socks are white, or they were, it occurs to me. I don’t see how I could give them up. They’re all I’ve got to protect my feet. But none of this amounts to a flaglike item, if you know what I mean. I imagine if we started waving socks and shorts around, people would take it for an insult, and bingo … It was just a thought.”