Mortals (53 page)

Ray thought, Rex sees himself as Mencken, the gay Mencken, and also as the gay Tocqueville, apparently … and what he doesn’t realize is that what he’s doing is exactly the same thing the trend analysts that Marion made fun of think they’re doing … This is thin stuff: I could do it.

This was Iris’s next assignment:

Ray detected a carelessness or coarsening of his brother’s handwriting in this specimen.

The next selection seemed to be about the same vintage as the one before it, at least in terms of the peculiarities in Rex’s handwriting. But there was something else about it worth noting. It seemed oddly or badly organized, for Rex.

There was more, which Ray was going to skip because it would be similarly annoying. He would read a little more of this rant and then go on to the last assignment.

Ray thought, Man how he hates America! There were apparently no redeeming features! What had America done to deserve his hatred, other than destroy the gay-hating Nazis and the Russians who until recent years had thrown gays into prison? And hadn’t it been the great god of Russian literature Gorky who’d said homosexuality was a product of fascism? Rex hated America, but how could he explain a guy running for the presidency and pledging to legalize homosexuals in the military? Of course Bush was going to crush him, but still.

He didn’t want to read more. He wanted Iris to prance into the room naked. She might.

This last item he was supposed to read was startling. It wasn’t clear what it was. Was it a dedication?

Partly it was. It was a series of statements printed in turquoise ink, waveringly, drunkenly lettered, on a sheet of vellum. There was no heading.

Please
, Ray thought. This man was supposed to be the nemesis of the cliché.

The thing was signed ungracefully, atypically, which reminded him of something odd in his own history. His signature had been rather stiff and careful up to the time of their father’s death. And then he had begun signing his name more loosely and in fact in a form very much like their father’s. He hadn’t thought much about it.

Well, he was surprised. Unless this was a draft of something better, he was very surprised. But it seemed not to be a draft. It seemed to be a demonstration of Rex’s gnomic and aphoristic aspirations going mad on the page. They were feeble.

Ray felt he was on the point of being dragged into collaborating with someone seeking the lowest form of literary immortality as established and pioneered by the annoying James Joyce, who thought it would be
such a good idea to create puzzle palaces for thousands of specialists to wander around in forever, using his genius to fabricate and drop clues and conundrums, or conundra, that would turn the body of his work into an everlasting object of academic interest and industry. That had been Joyce’s crap idea of immortality, endless lines of clerks, really,
clerks
fondling his clues and getting tenure out of doing it, hives of clerks working to reconstruct the so playful so antic so smart mind of James Joyce. There was enough natural mystery to go around and enough social mystery as well, and mystery was his enemy. Of course
Dubliners
was great, and
Portrait
was, unless the concluding sentence was a trick and joke intended to let you know you had identified with a protagonist who was in fact an intellectual peacock and a fool, but his great work had been prior to all the puzzlemaking, for which fuck him.

He sat there.

Iris was in the doorway, naked, virtually, with a gauzy green stole around her neck and hanging down over her breasts and leaving her beautiful lower self exposed, to his joy. But she looked unhappy.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is, don’t you see the decline I see?”

“Yes, his penmanship, unless he was just in a hurry to throw together this preface or whatever it is.”

“But Ray, not only in his handwriting. There’s a loss of clarity.”

“You could be right.”

“I am and you know I am.”

She was back at the luggage again, bent over delightfully to him and then squatting, searching for something, more evidence. She had it. She presented him with a snapshot, a Polaroid, of Rex. It was dated February 1990 and it didn’t tell him anything. It was his fat brother, unsmiling, wearing a beret.

“This doesn’t add anything,” he said. He studied the photograph.

“There’s something pitiful, Ray.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t like his teeth. He always had to be begged to smile when anyone was trying to take pictures.”

Ray was having a definite event. It was inward but it was also visual and felt like an image coming forward through his head and through his eyes and out vaguely, out into the air between his eyes and the photo of Rex. It was the image of a minor character from his boyhood, Crawford, a contractor their father had hired to build an addition to their house and who had become a recurrent presence with them over the years, when something
needed to be done or redone. His father had made him redo a flooring project. Was Crawford his first name or his second name? Ray couldn’t remember. Rex looked like the dark, heavy Crawford, the heavy but preening Crawford. This could be a picture of Crawford. Ray had always been uncomfortable around Crawford, for no reason that he could remember, for no reason that he would have been able to name at the time. Crawford had never been a handsome dog, and in his forties, whatever charm he’d had was gone, or almost, although he strutted around like a peacock. He had gone around with the collar of his windbreaker permanently turned up, a sure sign of vanity in that period of time. Ray felt peculiar and light. His brother was a cuckoo, or cuckoo’s egg. He was sure of it. He couldn’t tell this to Iris. He had no proof at all.

“You’re pale,” Iris said.

He didn’t answer. Someday he would talk to Iris about this, but not now. He couldn’t. She would think he was trying to slide around and away from what he knew she was going to come out with now, her conclusion. It was remarkable. He wondered if he had known this about Rex but without letting himself know it, a kind of thing that could happen. It was true. It was absolutely the case. He must have known, without knowing what he knew. He felt so peculiar.

“You’re pale,” Iris said again.

“No I’m not,” he said.

“You are. You think what I think. I think your brother is ill, Ray. That’s what’s happening.”

“HIV, you think.”

“It’s the first thing you think of.”

“Well, in the Polaroid he’s still pretty heavy …”

“No he’s much heavier in some earlier ones I have, much.”

“Well.”

“It can affect the nervous system. I think that must be the explanation. I mean, God help him. I think it is the explanation.”

“Well, we don’t really know, do we?” This was terrible, all of it. She could be right. Or she could be wrong.

“Something is required,” she said.

He knew it.

R
ay and Iris were there early. Ray doubted that much of a crowd would turn up for the celebrated couple, the Denoons. Tricks had been played, not by the agency so far as he knew, but by others, the government. There had been last-minute cancellations of the venue and even, briefly, a false venue and date carried on Radio Botswana. It wasn’t impossible that the agency had been involved. These two would be certifiable radicals in Boyle’s view. All Ray knew was that he hadn’t heard anything. And while he was thinking about the matter, he decided to make an inward pledge never to engage in petty obstruction campaigns in the future, in his onward life. He knew how to evade getting involved in certain categories of business, as things stood, and he would just add another category to the list. That’s that, he thought.

He was very eager to have a look at Denoon and his wife in the flesh. They had an interesting history, not only in Botswana. And of course Iris knew something about them, enough to make her adore them. They were social heroes, both of them.

Iris was very fixed up. He wondered if she expected Morel to attend. There was nothing he could do.

The venue was a classroom normally used for nurse training, one of two modules in a flimsy annex to the administrative block at the Princess Marina Hospital. They were in a long, narrow, windowless room with pea-green walls. There were seats, student desk-armchairs, for sixty. As was standard for government space, the room was scrupulously clean, the floors were gleaming, the blackboards scrubbed, a scent of lemon soap was in the air. On the wall above the blackboard were two framed portraits, the obligatory photograph of the current president, Masire,
and beside it, to the right of it, interestingly enough, an unofficial portrait, obviously cut out of a magazine, of the deceased founder of the country, its first president, Sir Seretse Khama. Masire’s photo was hanging crookedly, but not Khama’s. It could mean something. When Masire’s likeness had appeared on the currency there had been a shortlived movement to turn in the new bills for the older ones bearing Khama’s likeness. He himself had overheard a woman on line ahead of him at Barclays explaining to the teller that she preferred the old pula because the new pula carried the picture of a jackal and she would not be happy to have such pictures in her purse. It had had to do with tribal feeling, Masire not being a Mongwato. It was a typically Tswana sort of protest, in its mildness. It was what he was used to. Now everything was changing around him, for the worse, for the worse, and he was to blame, he was to blame, not for all of it, for some of it, he was. Woe, he thought. He controlled himself.

The room was lit by a train of large hanging lamps containing very dim lightbulbs, inverted milkglass pyramids serving incidentally as receptacles for the remains of dead insects. The pyramids were open at the top and each one held a black load taking up, he estimated, about a fifth of the lamp interior. It was remarkable. The character of the light delivered was affected. It was remarkable, like everything.

They had their choice of seats. There were a few attendees, women, Indian and Batswana, in the back rows. Iris wanted to sit at the front so she could see everything, which was fine because the room would fill, if it filled, from the back forward, and they would have some time to talk freely. He had something to tell her that he was trying not to think about.