Norman Rush - Mortals

He wanted to part the traffic with his hands, with a sweeping motion of his hands, irrationally. It was taking too long. Finally the flow of traffic did abate a little, but still he stood there. He then stepped off, and plunged through. What had finally made him move was a seizure of vivid, unasked-for images from his early life, images linked with succulence and moisture, himself standing in some garden after a rain and staring at nasturtiums with leaves as big as soup plates, and then once standing in an East Coast snowscape, listening, after heavy wet snow had fallen, for the rare sound wet snow makes falling in clots into new soft snow beneath. He was parched but not thirsty.

Okay, it was definite. He was going to Kgari Close, and Iris. He could call Curwen to report in, or Iris could, although that would magnify things, which he didn’t want. He disliked lying to Curwen.

Walking was helping. He was deciding something enormous as he walked and he knew that when he got to Iris it would be final.

He was in revolt. It was simple. How it would work was hard to say. No one could know , but he was. He would unmask Morel, one. It would help if when he got home he took off these shorts and this shirt and these socks. In Africa we’re all in costume, look at us, he thought.

This felt right. It was strange. Things he had had to put up with in the past without understanding why felt better now, in retrospect, certain painful things. He could feel a sort of, what, concordance, taking place inside him. I am rising, he thought.

He had a faint ringing in his ears, he noticed, now that he was in the quieter streets near his house. And then that passed. He felt clear.

But when he got home and let himself in he found the house empty. There was no one on hand, anywhere. And there was no note evident saying where Iris was. No note meant he could assume she had been expecting him home at his usual ETA. He could hunt up Dimakatso and ask if she knew anything, of course. But he wouldn’t. He was aware that Dimakatso had a tendency to decamp and attend to her own business whenever the coast was clear, which was just about what anybody in her situation would do, because the struggle for personal free time was a universal, besides which she was a hard worker when she worked. One part of why he didn’t like the idea of bothering her in her quarters was that he had guilt feelings over how modest the accommodations provided her were, not that there was anything that could be done about it. The other part of his reluctance came from not wanting to advertise that he had no idea where his wife might be, the implications of which, the man-in-the-street implications of which, he had no interest in unleashing. Also Dimakatso had been clearing her throat obtrusively lately. She smoked dagga for her chronic upper respiratory complaints. Often when she came in after lunch her eyes would be like rubies or little taillights, and he didn’t relish impinging on Dimakatso while she was at it, smoking away, in her cloud of unknowing.

He went through the pantry and into the garage. The VW was there, so Iris had walked wherever she’d gone. They were in walking distance of ninety percent of everything of interest, and she believed in walking, so she could be roughly anywhere.

The house felt dead without Iris, dead and clean and cold. There was a saucer with two cherry pits in it. The house felt like the Mary Celeste , except that Iris would be found. He remembered that he needed to call Curwen immediately.

He got through to the school and worked everything out smoothly but talking too fast. Mild food poisoning had been a good excuse. Curwen himself had had a touch of it recently.

He could use the time to his advantage. Unease about Iris was putting Boyle and all his works in perspective, a little.

It was conceivable that Iris was having another go at lunch with Lor. He had urged her to give it a third try. She needed friends. He took off his shirt and his shorts, his costume. He sat down on the living room sofa in his underwear, kneesocks, and shoes. Iris liked to tease him about his attachment to his classic undershirts because, as she pointed out correctly, they were bare under the armpits so that you sweated directly into your shirt but they covered up areas where you hardly sweated at all, and raised your body temperature to boot. He couldn’t help it. He was used to them, and both his father and his stepfather had worn them. And he could get very decent classic undershirts easily, too, because they were still popular in South Africa with the time-lagged Boers. He couldn’t sit there for more than a minute because Dimakatso was going to turn up at some point.

He proceeded to wash up. He put on a fresh shirt and bush shorts. It was seeming less likely to him that Iris had gone again to lunch with Lor. Their second lunch had been more of the same, the usual. Iris had repeated samples of the conversation to him, in Lor’s voice: It’s really so frightening nowadays in Joburg, especially Hillbrow, where we always stay … Because of the unemployed people everywhere living in alleys and on stoops and in every foyer, everywhere, running after you and forcing these unnecessary services on you, running along to open any door you approach, even automatic doors, standing there with their arm extended, ushering you into places of business they have nothing whatever to do with … Or if you parallel-park you’re directed by people using big arm movements as though without them doing that you might crash into something despite the fact you have oceans of room … And the high-rises with laundry fluttering from every balcony … And all the squatters taking over and all the buildings to let or for sale … And the begging, so constant …

He went into the breezeway and contemplated his yard. For two days Rex’s most recent letter, a jumbo with many closely written pages, had been left out, naked, on top of the credenza in the breezeway, out of its envelope, like bait or like the trap itself. He was ignoring it. It was right behind him.

Something moved along the shrubbery at the left-hand edge of his field of view. It was Fikile, early again. He was early today because on other days recently he had been late. Apparently he could offset his late arrivals by coming absurdly early on other days. Of course there was no need for watchguarding during the middle of the day. And there was doubly no need for it when he overlapped with the yardman, who came three days a week though not today. Ray suspected that Iris had said yes to this arrangement, it would be like her. If those oscillations kept on, Ray would say something.

Ray wasn’t interested in any more exposure to his brother. He had made it explicit that he had no desire to follow every kink and dogleg in Rex’s travesty of a career. The thick letter represented another unwanted task. He had too many tasks as it was. Iris presented him with more tasks than she knew. He was conscientious, and out of love and conscience he took as tasks many things, wishful things, things she might waft at him completely innocently. When she said Why is the French noun for war feminine and why is the French for vagina masculine, it wasn’t as though he physically had to go and jerk somebody’s hem at the Alliance Française or hunt around in his reference books, no. But he loved her and anything he could satisfy her on right off the bat became a kind of ghost task for him whether she meant it to be or not.

Ray hefted the letter, not looking at it.

These letters were getting longer because Iris was encouraging it, and encouraging it, it had to be, by being forthcoming about herself and her problems, a.k.a. their problems, their his-and-hers problems. He had no idea what she was writing to Rex, beyond what he could infer from what Rex wrote back. What she was writing to Rex was not something he was going to obsess on. He should remember that there were harmless models for what she was probably doing here. Rex was providing a gay ear. There was nothing dangerous about that. So many major women were linked to gay men as confidants that in a way Iris was only joining a procession. Iris was major. She didn’t know it, but Ray did. Of course, in this case the bastard listening to her was his own queer brother, his enemy. Rex was spying on him through Iris. Revenge was going on.