Mortals (64 page)
Authors: Norman Rush
There you have nothing, he thought. He went back to working consecutively through the manuscript and immediately couldn’t believe his luck. There was an inclusion, something from Iris stuck in with his brother’s flotsam, something with her writing on it. This was Iris. This was the kind of thing she did.
It was a Xerox of a Peace Corps document headed
INTERRACIAL EXPERIENCE ASSESSMENT FORM
. Across the top of it Iris had written
Do you know what you have to go through in order to get into the Peace Corps and get sent to an African country? Somebody at the embassy got hold of this and is passing it around. I love you, Ray. Iris
.
You used to, he thought.
Interracial Experience Assessment Form
—Page One
1. Recall your first significant interaction with a Black person. Describe the situation and your feelings at the time.
Answer: My first significant interaction with a Black person was when I was five and ran away from home with a friend my age and we went to the dock area, the harbor area, and a Negro dockworker gave us some of his lunch and called the police. My feelings were as follows. I felt relieved yet betrayed.
2. What was the strongest fear you developed as a child about interactions with Black persons? Estimate how strong that fear is today.
Answer: You might fall in love with a Negro and have children that would have a miserable life because neither race would accept them.
That fear is much less strong since we began doing all the questionnaires and games, by far.
At the bottom she had written
Sorry I only have page one. Love again, Iris
. He touched her name in both the places she had signed it.
Sleep was being coy. A lot of what he had to read he was finding vaguely agitating. To convert
Strange News
into a pillow book he was going to have to separate out and consolidate the longer paragraphic entries, which tended to consist of various micronarratives, subanecdotal most of them, illustrating some hilarious defect or other in the mental landscapes of everyone in the world except the author-observer. It took narrative to put Ray to sleep. Narrative was the syrup. It wasn’t the sheer dynamics of reading that did it. Poems, even, needed some narrative weight to work. The Conversation entries were dubious, from the narrative standpoint, judging by what he was finding in them so far.
19. Conversation
Two guys had been drinking together.
The slightly older of the two said, “My friend, I will confess something to you. My old friend, I find my children boring.”
“Me too.”
“So if we find our children boring, who is to blame, is it the peer culture, is it—”
“Nononono. I wasn’t saying
my
children are boring. I was agreeing with you about
your
children.”
“I see,” the older guy said.
Ray thought, Here is the problem: This is not a joke: It’s on the verge of being a joke but it doesn’t arrive. Rex had something, but he wanted to be more, to be brilliant. There was a roster of the brilliant and there was a roster of the nonbrilliant and there was one for the formerly considered brilliant. Every serious writer considered any appellation other than brilliant an insult. If the word appeared, glittering, somewhere in a review, then any objections the review contained surrounding the word were nullified. They turned to mist.
A brilliant failure
was just fine. He was prepared to salute anything brilliant he found in
Strange News
. He meant it. He would be happy about it. This was Rex’s attempt at a monument and he was willing to help, more willing than he had been. His feelings were changing. How serious the core of
Strange News
was remained a question, but that was all right. He pitied serious writers. The best that ninety-nine percent of them could hope for was a glancing appearance in a survey course at lengthening intervals. Even Milton was dropping to survey status more and more, even at the graduate level. It was true. And the next
step down would be the collateral reading in a survey course, the books only the strivers got around to. I was a striver, a Striver, he thought. And then it would be down to a footnote in a title in the collateral list. And then what, some academic trivia game. And then nothing. It was possible for a writer’s creation to be of academic interest
solely
for whatever influences could be seen in it of prior writers, more brilliant writers. That was life, the literary life.
114. Untitled
X decided to stay home and pass the time by counting his feet.
Shall we watch TV?
X said, “That’s what it’s for.”
X said, “I really think people watch television
because there’s too much to read.”
Where are you going?
“Out this door,” X said.
It was clear that a penstroke had converted an original J to X. J would be Rex’s Joel, these were echoes of Joel.
Not all were cases of camouflage, only some.
His brother was sick. He could be dying. He could be dead. Ray couldn’t bear it. He would work with the fact that
Strange News
was a mélange, workroom scraps, with lame political shots and shafts that would get dated. Rex’s trust in a campaign of bons mots against the world’s evil was touching. He believed more in the power of the word than Ray did. Rex had no idea how solid the machine in the basement was. He was an innocent. Literature is humanity talking to itself, Ray thought. Rex thought it was more. Ridicule changed nothing. If its targets even noticed it, all it did was madden them. Ray had the beginnings of a fair collection of narrative-like entries to use for soporific purposes.
There were little lists of enemies in different spheres of the arts that were going to be difficult for Ray to edit because so many of the names were unfamiliar to him. He had to be careful. Some categories could be combined, he supposed, like the
Wisdom of the Mob
and the
Wisdom of the People
entries. The Mob wasn’t the Mafia. The Overheards could remain, or most of them could.
408. Overheard I
At a party one time I asked who a familiar-looking ancient guy was. He could hardly stand up. X couldn’t remember his name but said he was a Yale Younger Poet.
X said The best way to keep a secret is not to tell it to anyone.
This is true. A woman I know went to a psychotherapist and was upset when the diagnosis she got was that basically she was too greedy.
I feel so good after a high-fat meal I could run around the block and beat the shit out of somebody, unfortunately.
Man and wife were buying sundries in a job-lot discount emporium. The woman filled her basket and took it to the counter to pay for her choices. Her husband, who was handling tools in the hardware section, suddenly ran up and added a hammer to her purchases. “We have a hammer,” she said. “So, I’m getting another one. It’s cheap.” “Why would we need two hammers?” “
I’m getting this
. We need it in case two people have to hammer at the same time.”
Hey how about
air burial
for pilots and stewardesses and plane passengers who die in flight.
It was more fun than eating on the roof.
My penis is sensitive lately.
Well I should hope.
His problem is he can’t tell his anus from the Mammoth Cave or some other tourist attraction like that.
Ray realized that he was encountering very little gay matter in
Strange News
. Has it been sanitized? he wondered. Because it would be logical to have something so central represented, if this was Rex’s true monument. Anything he could learn on the subject from Rex would be fine with him. But maybe there was nothing to learn and it was what it was and that was it. Something else was hanging over his efforts. He might as well acknowledge it. It was possible he was searching for something directed
openly to him, some statement or apology or he didn’t know what, something.
All he could do was doctor this chowder he had been given. A certain amount of shuffling was required. For example All Power to the Country Clubs! should go into the Cries and Chants for Sale section, and maybe Put Paid to Poverty! which he had apparently thought of as something appropriate to the British Labour Party. If the gay aspect had been left out by Rex himself, the reason might have been to make Ray love him as a soul, if he thought Ray held that against him. Ray was tired. Nobody likes to say goodbye, he thought. His eyes were burning.
Tears rushed from my eyes
, Keletso had said in some connection. That’s what he needed. There was a jingle going through his mind, ending mea culpa youa culpa din dan don, which was from “Frère Jacques,” the din dan don, if he was right. People separated from their siblings in childhood moved heaven and earth to find them, these days, to get back in touch. He knew he had been singing a deformed “Frère Jacques” to himself as mental background music. What could he do? He was far from sleep. Now his brother was trying to kill him with love, with guilt, with proof he should have appreciated him. Too much is enough, he thought. He would be able to sleep nevertheless. The span of time he could sleep soundly in untoward positions was lengthening. But sleep had to come knocking. We can be wrong, he thought. We can be wrong about anybody, he thought. His eyes were tearing, a little. It was the Titles sections that hurt the most, stung hardest, because presumably they stood for ideas for potential books, articles a healthy person might have attempted.
The Importance of Being Important, The Future Assembles, All I Can Tell You Is This, The Urbane Guerrilla: Etiquette for Revolutionaries
, and another similar one,
Out to Luncheon: Notes Toward a More Elegant Mode of Disparagement
…
The Bungless Cask
…
Fumes from a Vial of Wrath
…
Flea Circus Rebellion
. Rex tried things. He wasn’t afraid not to be great. I have to honor that, Ray thought. Pity was attacking him, threatening to fill him up. He was fatigued. There were animal eyes out in the darkness that flashed when he swept the flashlight beam around. They were low to the ground so were, presumably, attached to bush babies or some small and similarly unthreatening species. Ray pulled out a few narrative entries to read.
803. Friends
Two friends who worked in different departments of a Catholic orphanage met to talk. The kindergarten director had recently
begun working additionally part-time in a different institution, a state mental health facility, one evening a week, teaching crafts to adolescent patients. She wondered if her friend might be interested in joining her.
Sylvia, the art therapist, said, “You know, I might. It would be easy for me. You know what we did today, for example? I brought in shoe polish …”
“What kind of a project can you do with shoe polish?”
“I brought in shoe polish and they played odds and evens and the winner got to polish my boots.”
He thought he could go to sleep.
He slept.
W
hen the explosion occurred, it made Ray wonder if somehow the future was an already existing thing. Because he felt he’d known for twenty or thirty minutes before the blast that it or something like it was about to happen. Keletso was unhappy. They had to pull over and see what could be seen, and Keletso was showing his unhappiness at having to do that. But they had to.
Ray got out. He climbed onto the cab roof and stood up on it carefully, his feet placed precisely over the reinforcing rods whose locations he had early on ascertained by probing the fabric lining the cab ceiling with his forefinger. He was determined to return this particular piece of government property in unchanged condition. That was important to him. He didn’t know why, unless it was because doing the small things right when the central thing he was supposed to be doing was so undefined, undefined but hazardous and probably stupid, seemed essential.
Using his binoculars, he studied the terrain to the north. It was high noon. The heat was insane, as usual. The horizon appeared to be writhing. He grimaced violently, to dislodge the little scabs in the corners of his mouth, which Keletso, who was watching him closely and with apprehension, mistook for an expression of fear. He shook his head to reassure Keletso, but clearly he was failing in that. He couldn’t do everything.
There had been a significant explosion in the vicinity and it had produced a ball of inky smoke, which was now dissolving. The site was reachable, not distant, not more than three or four kilometers to the north. They were aimed east. Everything to the south and west was dead flat. To the north he could distinguish a succession of very modest ridges,
three of them, bare along the crests, thick brush packing the intervals between them. There had to be a settlement or more likely a cattle post just beyond the horizon ridge. More smoke was rising, from several sources. The explosion had been unusual, manifesting more like a gigantic insuck of breath than like an outward push of air. He could make out a palm tree, just the top of it, in the smoky area, and as he studied it he thought he saw flames in the … not leaves and not spikes and not fangs, no, in the fronds, fronds, bright flame. The palm tree meant water. It would be a cattle post. He had to get over there, and now he was sorry he’d gotten rid of the mouth scabs, because now there were visible traces of blood where the scabs had been, no doubt making him look like a vampire just when he wanted to make a good impression. He knew what he needed, exactly what he needed, and didn’t have. He needed a styptic pencil. He doubted they were even manufactured anymore. The ridges he would have to cross were reddish, gravelly-looking, with some glinting element here and there, probably mica. He had to get over there. He climbed down from the cab roof.
He readied himself to go alone cross-country. There would be a spur road into the post, a track at least, but he was hardly going to boldly drive up as big as life. He would have to go in subtly and alone, and that would mean leaving Keletso behind, with the vehicle, like it or not.