Norman Rush - Mortals

“It was nothing,” Morel said.

“It was.”

“I don’t feel like telling you, to tell you the truth.”

“Okay don’t.”

Morel was not going to be able to not tell him. He wouldn’t want Ray alienated at this point. Ray was exploiting that. Drop it, Ray told himself.

Morel said, “All right. I was thinking of someone. I was imagining someone. I was drawing strength from … from the image. It’s something you can do, one can.”

“Ah,” Ray said. He knew that this was where he should stop interrogating. It was ridiculous. They both had their hands in the crack still. He should stop interrogating. Because, without being told, he knew who it was Morel had been holding in front of his mind. It was Iris. And Ray didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t want to know that. But he also felt he had to know, right or wrong, because it was possible he was wrong, as always. We can always be wrong, he thought. He felt a proprietary rage. Morel hadn’t known Iris long enough to what, appropriate her this way. It was vicious.

“Do you mind telling me who it is?”

“Yes I do mind.”

“Would it be someone I know?”

“God damn it! Could you possibly shut up until we get this done?”

He doesn’t want to deny it, or to have to say it, Ray thought. He resented the situation and blamed Morel for creating it. He was hating him. His little murmuring act had been provocative. It had to have been deliberate. Maybe it was a genuine reaction to the extremis they were in. Or maybe it had been reflexive, like the matador pointing out the woman in the stands he was going to present the bull’s ear to, or like a knight tucking his earl’s wife’s underpants into his armor, under his breastplate, before going off to some feat of arms.

Morel had a grim look. He had extracted his bloody fingers from the crack and was repositioning himself, getting on his back with both feet against the wedge. Ray withdrew his fingers too. Morel was tireless. Now he was working his chewed-up fingers around the lip of the flooring, getting purchase for his new approach to kicking the wedge over and out. He was still muttering to himself.

Ray thought, Call up your own image of Iris. It could be when she had been looking for him, with anxiety. It could be a moment from their great hours on Orcas Island. They had been following a trail in the woods and she had been ahead, eager to get to the view or whatever they were searching for. He had stepped into the underbrush to urinate, without alerting her. And then she had looked around and seen the trail empty and she had come back, calling his name. He had that moment, the note in her voice, if he wanted it.

It was time to finish. Ray duplicated Morel’s position, with some difficulty. He was able to get only one hand around the edge of the flooring. It would have to do.

“Push,” Morel said.

Ray felt serious movement occurring. They were winning. They both groaned. Light was coming in, and air. They could have stopped and left the wedge tilting, which would be less likely to attract the attention of passersby, but they couldn’t. They had to completely dislodge it. And then they had done it. Their feet were in the open air. They drew them back.

Ray got on his knees and bent forward, his face in the gap, breathing in heavily. He could see that there was an impact crater just outside, by the wall.

He had to contain himself. He wanted to get out. He had to keep himself from acting stupidly. But the prospect of getting out was creating a fire in him to physically do that, get out, be out, dance around, be in the open. But there were decisions to be made, such as who should go first. It would have to be him. He didn’t know why, but he would think of why. He was on fire to be outside.

It had been hard work. Bare feet hadn’t made anything easier. Our feet are delicate, he thought.

Something was wrong with Morel. He was lying flat, his arms crossed over his eyes. Ray was afraid for him.

“I’m all right,” Morel announced.

“Are you sure you are? You don’t look great.”

“I’m getting my breath. We got that thing out. Maybe we shouldn’t have shoved it all the way out, but it’s too late. It’s out.”

“You rest,” Ray said. Morel had a right to rest. He had done more. And he was the one who had made them do it at all. Morel’s short leg was trembling, only the short leg.

“I think I should go out first,” Ray said.

“Why you?”

“Because, well, I’m limber …” What he meant was that he was a lot narrower, thinner. Either one of them could get through the hole, but it would be less work for Ray. Morel could see that. And there was the question of Morel’s leg problem. His leg was trembling. Ray didn’t want to be explicit.

Morel said, “First we just look out, get our heads out. You can do it first. Then you duck back and I’ll look. Then we decide how it looks. We decide whether one of us should go or whether we should both go, one after the other, at the same time. You see what I’m trying to avoid, which is, one of us gets out there and God knows what happens, something happens, I’m still in here and have to scramble after you. I’m making this up as I go along, you may have noticed. And Jesus, look at our hands. I’ve got to get some hydrogen peroxide someplace.”

Ray was calming down. They needed to act while the firing was in recess, which it seemed to be, unless, of course, it would be better to go out when there was more confusion, more firing, more distraction.

Morel sat up. “You go,” he said.

“Go? You mean …”

“I mean put your head out.”

Lying on his belly, Ray shrugged his way into the gap. It was tight, not more than eight or nine inches high and about four feet in length.

It was painfully bright out. He would adjust. It was sometime in the hot afternoon. What he could see wasn’t telling him much. He was being careful. He was only visible to his enemies from the bridge of his nose on up, assuming they were interested.

What he had achieved was a prospect of the western end of the back wall of the main hotel building. It was unevenly pink and it was crenellated along the top. There were aprons of broken glass on the ground outside every window on the ground floor. The open ground that he could see between the shed and the hotel was cratered in three places, not counting the crater immediately to his right. His eyes were clearly not what they had once been, evidently, although possibly his nutrition lately was partly to blame, that and being kept hooded and in the dark so much. He certainly hoped so. Morel’s eyesight was undoubtedly better than his. Morel was tugging at Ray’s heel.

Ray had to digest everything he could see. Furniture and planking and sheets of metal had been pushed together variously to make barricades in the first-floor windows. There were lines of bullet holes, arabesques, in the upper wall.

The view to the west wasn’t alarming. Black bursts of chemical-smelling smoke were washing through the scene. The fire generating the smoke was on the other side of the hotel, possibly in the courtyard, used as a parking area, that occupied the space between the west and east wings of the U-shaped building. Their shed faced the outside of the bottom of the U, the rear side of the hotel. Nothing he was seeing was immediately alarming. The smoke from the fire, which was at a safe distance from them, seemed to be lessening. There was shooting going on behind him. The loudest fire was proceeding from the west wing of the hotel, overlooking the zoo and, farther out, the pan, if his interpretation of the soundscape was correct. Somebody’s labor had come to nothing. He was looking along the path at clotheslines bearing laundry very much the worse for war, would be one way to put it. The bed linen hung there was blackened and here and there listlessly burning. He was seeing no activity in any of the windows, no activity generally. This front was dormant.