Norman Rush - Mortals

He said, “Before I forget, we can get fennel now. They have fennel at Notwane Gardens.”

“I lost you. We can get what?”

He raised his voice. “Fennel. Fennel.” This was not what he wanted, to be shouting fennel to his darling girl. And she was a girl. He was forty-eight.

“Well, eat some,” she said.

His hunger was coming back.

“Are you eating okay, not too much meat and potatoes without end? And you’re keeping up with the garlic capsules. If you don’t take anything else, take those. Let me see if I can put Ellen on for just a sec. I think she’s still asleep. Let me check. She sleeps more than the baby.”

He waited.

She returned. She said, “Still out. Which gives me a chance to tell you something else I don’t want her to hear. Her friends around here. They’re mostly arts and crafts, and some who consider themselves artists. There’s a little antiques store and art gallery enclave where they all love her. She buys so much crap, is why, crap of theirs. I won’t ever complain about the embassynians again, I promise. We went to a couple of openings and at one of them I got into an argument in a flash with a woman who got a certain disappointed expression on her face when we were introduced and she understood that I was using my husband’s last name. This was a big disappointment to her since I was Ellen’s sister, Ellen being a paragon of freeness, being unmarried and having this baby and all. This woman’s given last name was Johnson, paternal last name. So I merely observed that she was choosing to privilege, that’s a very popular term with them, privilege, the name of a male, her biological father, over the name of her presumably beloved chosen husband, accident over choice. And of course her dumb name also incorporated somebody being the son of some ancient John. It was hardly as though she had dumped all her nomenclature in favor of something completely invented, like Dora Violin Moon-leaf or something. By the way, all the people in this milieu have the most blinding white teeth. Everyone over a certain income is getting bonding and capping like crazy. Even my sister bleaches her teeth at night, every night. Even in the hospital. So that was round one. Round two was an artist whose work was on display under gigantic lenses . In the catalog she was described as a micromuralist, which does not mean that she was a very-small-in-stature muralist. I pray God Ellen can’t hear this. No this was a person, you will not believe this, who inscribed little primitive scenes on pebbles and in a couple of instances on actual lima beans , dried limas. And I couldn’t help but wonder out loud why anyone would say mural in connection with these little … scratchments on pebbles. I wanted to know what they had in common with murals, with big, broadly executed, jammed, huge wall pictures. Now if the artist had carved a tiny figure with its back to us at the bottom edge of these scratchments, as though the figure were looking at the image, there might have been a case. I didn’t make a big scene. I just asked one or two people, but it got around. They make you want to act philistine.

“I’m going on like this not because it’s interesting but because I can’t let you go. You’ll be gone when I stop telling you things. So I’m telling you everything I can think of.”

“I love it,” he said.

“I love you, Ray, meboy. Oh do I. I miss you. How’s your penis? How’s your trusty penis?”

“My rusty penis? That it is.”

“You heard me.”

“I think this is phone sex.”

“I know. We’d better stop. It isn’t fair to Ellen. What if she heard? Okay, so what else can I tell you. Well. Thinking. Even around here there are homeless. And another thing you see is people laying out displays of belongings, clothing and personal items, on the sidewalk. It has to be done quick, before the cops come. And this is not a poor neighborhood, either.

“And I have to tell you that Davis was right about something else in this country. It’s not his idea but it’s true. He gave me an article about the exteriorization of the self. It’s pretty self-explanatory. You see it everywhere. People advertise what they are, young people especially, by sign-age, essentially. People advertise what they are, their affiliations. They wear tee shirts with messages instead of plain, like we wore. They wear violent personal ornaments and tattoos. The idea is that when people dressed more or less all the same, within the same middle-class spectrum, you demonstrated who you were in the things you revealed when you talked to people, what you read, what you knew. Now nobody knows anything different than the next guy. It’s all music and media boilerplate on the inside. So therefore why not get wondrously overmuscled or put metal studs in your eyelids? This I’ve seen. This article calls it a panic over differentiation. And it’s true. Well.

“I love you I love you. And speaking of Davis, Ray, could you do me a favor and call him?”

Now this. Ray had been about to take a surreptitious bite of steak. He put his fork down.

“Call him?”

“Yes, would you?”

“Call him and say what?”

“I’m about to tell you. Call him and say I don’t think I’m going to get much homework done on this trip.”

“What kind of homework are you talking about?”

“Well, a journal I was supposed to keep. And also a book I’m supposed to read when I have a free moment, Homo Hierarchicus , by an anthropologist. It’s something you might be interested in, but it has absolutely nothing to do with me. It’s about the caste system in India.”

“Couldn’t you send him a card? I’m sure he’d love to hear from you, not me. Or you could call him.”

“A card takes too long and I don’t want him to think I’m doing something I’m not doing. And I feel awkward calling. I don’t think this rises to the importance of a phone call, and I don’t want to spend the money for that when you can just give him a ring. This is already costing a fortune, this trip. I don’t like to think about it.”

“I will, then. Tomorrow.”

“Ray, it’s only partly that I have no time, to tell you the truth. When I start writing in my journal it turns into reams of hysterical stuff I already know and don’t want to think about, mainly regarding my mother and also Ellen, who has a sneaky side to her personality. And I write about you. I write things about you you wouldn’t mind reading. But I just don’t want to be doing this now. My job is to keep my act together. I have to cope. But I said I would do this stuff and now I’m not going to.”

She was in anxiety. Why was Morel back in this conversation, he wanted to know. It was bitter. It was bitter.

He didn’t want to talk anymore. She disliked the silence he was making. He could sense it.

She said, “What about the CODESA talks, Ray? Where the ANC walked out? Is this very bad news?”

He was a little startled. He said, “No it’s only going to be temporary. Don’t worry about it.” But he felt it was odd that she had brought it up. It just happened recently. She wasn’t getting the New York Times , there in Florida. It was big news in Botswana and the Republic, of course, but it was odd that she had heard about it, or was it? Of course she was always nervous about the chance that things would go badly in South Africa and that danger and disruption would come back across the border to Botswana. He didn’t like what he was suspecting, which was that she had in fact just been in touch with Morel and that everything she had said in that connection had been a deception, which would explain asking him to do something that was, in the circumstances, going to be unpleasant for him, calling a man she knew he had negative feelings about, contriving to show, by that, how minor a presence Morel was for both of them, how unthreatening Ray ought to find him, to desensitize, to desensitize. His thoughts were racing. He hated this.