Norman Rush - Mortals

“Maybe it was hell. Maybe the woman was right. But no, if you couldn’t hear the screams of the damned, it wasn’t.”

“Maybe it was out of earshot.”

“Well it’s definitely here someplace. I think it moves around, though.”

“Anyway, that was all. My sister questioned the woman gingerly, or shouldn’t that be gingerlily, just enough to confirm that this was actually what the woman believed. Yep, she was just being informative. It was just something she thought Ellen might want to make a note of.”

Ray said, “There are certain interesting syndromes in which people are completely normal in their belief structures except for one narrow little niche, where they believe something odd. If you believe that a member of your family has been replaced by an exact double, you have Capgrass syndrome. People who have it are normal in every other way. I forget what they call it when you think you have somebody else’s internal organs.”

“This isn’t really funny,” Iris said. “Well, it is, but it’s part of a very sad picture. She’s tried everything. She advertised in the New York Review of Books .”

“I know. You wrote the ad.”

“I edited it. She wrote it. Ai! Something bit me. If you keep your arms moving it seems to help.

“I forget why she didn’t marry the advertising guy she was living with. The one after the shirt model. I know what happened there. A certain percentage of guys she goes with decide they’re gay, which has to be tough. But she lived with the advertising guy for quite a while, it seems like.”

“He was a drunk, she stuck with him for too long. He was tremendously goodlooking, like she is, she attracts people physically on her level. And very goodlooking men are a dubious proposition most of the time. That’s what she attracts.”

“She didn’t have your luck.”

“Why bother? You know you’re a handsome dog.”

“So you say. Except that the other day you said I look like Woodrow Wilson.”

“Please let me finish about my sister and then we have to go in. I mean, I love this feeling of parting the night as you go, but another something just got me on the neck.”

“We like to do this,” he said.

“We like to do this.”

Then they were silent again. Cars passed by, not many, two sedans and a bakkie.

He said, finally, “Anyway you don’t need all this propaganda, which is what it is, for abandoning me when your sister gives birth. Okay if you want to shatter our Guinness Book of Records record for people not being separated, married couples, okay, then go. I’m only kidding. It’s okay if you go, of course. You don’t need me to say that anyway, you know it. Except that these things have a way of dragging on. Don’t they?” He thought, Every arrow being fired on the planet is curving up and over and into my heart, Boyle, her sister’s needs, my brother’s what, his bile … but what was it she said the other day about some woman?… ah yes, she said I feel sorry for anyone so self-pitying. He thought, her pity covers the earth, like Sherwin-Williams paint. It might not be necessary for her to go, something might happen, God forbid, how vile am I, how stupid. He didn’t want her to go, and if she went it would mean she was blind to what was going on with him, which of course was the condition he was trying to keep going, never to be pitiful to her. She was saying something he was missing.

“… definitively pregnant and the way it happened is not what you think, not what you assume. Not coldblooded, in other words. Not asking an old male friend and not going to a sperm bank.

“What she did is go from a high-achieving hopeless alcoholic to an underachieving very bright but hapless …”

“May I just guess, very goodlooking also, just by chance?”

“Yes, very nicelooking …”

“Not goodlooking, nicelooking in this case …”

“Well goodlooking if you will. A hapless man and a very bright man, but goodlooking. That seems to be a constant. Anyway, Frank is very bright, a very good writer, no a very good mind . He’s fortyish. He works in a bookstore. He’s a very good writer, but he has an imprimatur problem, as Ellen put it. He’s published a few things in small-circulation magazines, but the main thing he’s been working on is an encyclopedic thing about American intellectual life that everyone who’s seen it says is brilliant and radical but needs to be revised, as in seriously cut. And he agrees with them. But when he starts to revise he also sees things he needs to add, new developments in the culture that just make his thesis even stronger. Also he’s what used to be called an independent scholar. At one time they were respected things to be. But he has no academic affiliation whatever. He has a B.A. in modern European history from prehistoric times, but that’s all.”

Ray thought, This could be me … this poor fuck could be me … the reverse, I mean.

“Frank is also shy. She met him in the bookstore he works in when she was hunting for something in the children’s section. He was very knowledgeable, and they got to talking, and that’s how it started. It became a platonic friendship, strictly, in which she got interested in taking him under her wing and getting him marketed, or rather first she wanted to get him to break off from his magnum opus at least for a while and write some pieces that could get published and generate some interest in him as an intellectual persona. He was going to waste, she thought. And there was still time. Obviously she was transposing herself going to waste, into his situation, something like that.”

“So you’re telling me this wasn’t love. And of course the question you want to ask is why this investment if love wasn’t involved. Why not put this time into those things she was doing you told me about. Going to meetings of the War Resisters League? Esperanto? Amnesty International?”

“Well, that’s a good question, but nobody is just one thing. She never went to Esperanto, she just asked my opinion about it and I told her. Try to be fair.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, she read through his immense manuscript. It was erudite and complicated and utterly brilliant. But it was hopelessly complex. It had numbered paragraphs and instead of notes it had sections in a minute typeface that represented expansions of the main argument. And she objected to that and he said it was a terrific way to condense things and he had gotten it from a book by Nikolai Bukharin, not that he was a communist, he Frank. It was just that this was the way things had to be done. So this is a hapless person, hapless in every way. Here’s another example. He went down to Washington to use the Library of Congress and borrowed a friend’s apartment to stay in while the friend was out of the country. Now Frank is someone who’s very distressed about the homeless. On the way to the Library of Congress he passes a blind homeless person begging and Frank reaches into the pocket and drags up all the change he has in it and dumps it in the guy’s cup, then goes a block and realizes that he put the apartment key — he only had the one key — into the beggar’s cup along with the change. What should he do? He sidles back to the blind man and hovers there and sees that his key is right there in the cup. So he tells this man what he’s done, nicely, but gets no reaction because this poor fellow is deaf as well as blind. So he decides to reach in and subtly pluck out his key. Unfortunately for him the beggar wasn’t mute because he screamed out that he was being robbed and he screamed and screamed. A crowd of other homeless people — he described it as a lynch mob — gathered. There were no police in sight and he was being converged on by frightening people and he had his hand in this man’s cup. So, there are no police, and he’s being converged on by something he described as the Elizabethan underworld, giants, dwarfs, ragged people waving crutches and so on, so he runs away. He ran off. Now, and here’s the most pitiful part, he realized he has no means of getting in touch with his absent host, knows no one in the building, he can’t find the super. So he spends the next two nights sleeping in his car. Or three nights. I don’t know.”