Mortals (49 page)

“I’m running out of ways to say this, my friend …”

A light commotion could be heard, nothing unfriendly about it.

Kerekang began to speak. The tape ended. That was all Ray had.

H
e was going to be late and it was because he had been overpreparing the event, stupidly, admittedly, overgrooming himself for the moment of homecoming with the result that she was going to be standing there annoyed or worse, and exhausted from the flight.

He hurried, sucking his mint pastille, unhappy. He disliked his appearance more when she was away, deprived of the tinted mirror she was for him. Of course, he never slept as well when she was absent, and that showed.

Ray disliked the overextended new big airport and disliked in particular the absurd, oversized terminal rearing up in front of him. The runways were endless and represented so much overcapacity that Zimbabwe thought there was a military rationale underlying the facility. The Botswana Defence Force had been called in to bomb or shell certain small koppies in the surrounding plain where baboon colonies had been established since the dawn of time, according to the animal rights people who had ineffectually protested. Even as things were, the baboons had come back, to a degree, frightening or delighting airport passengers, depending on who you talked to.

The way he felt was that the grandiose airport misrepresented the country. Botswana was a modest place. And the terminal was ugly, to boot, a tall vast Corobrick building with a serpentine, pushed-out facade and a peculiar fluted-concrete roof whose turned-up eaves gave a pointlessly oriental touch to the whole. There was enough parking for an army. This airport was for the thin stratum of winners, and for expatriates and tourists and official busybodies from Washington and London. It had nothing to do with the hewers of wood and whatever the rest of the quotation
was that described the overwhelming mass of the Batswana stuck out in the swamps and velds, the drawers of water, although that hardly applied because of the drought. The site was perpetually underpopulated, except when the large tour flights came in, but the whole operation was geared to run on the fiction that it was a hive of industry, with long arrays of booths and stands offering elephant-foot wastebaskets and Bushman hunting kits and packets of groundnuts and other necessities. The arcades were melancholy. Most of the stands had portcullises that were dropped during closing hours, but it was not uncommon to see dispirited stand-clerks napping inside these cages in the middle of the day, portcullises down, because there was no business. Ray liked the humble, antique airport where Victor worked. It was devoted to cargo and military exclusively.

He was inside, on the concourse. The terminal was underlit. Someone had chosen dark pink flooring, so a dark pink gloom was generated. There were tall ventilation slots in the upper walls, housing in each slot a single vertical louver permanently fixed, apparently, in the open position, which accounted for the permanently gritty condition of the floor and the endless swabbing activity the blowing sand necessitated. It made no sense that there was no mechanism to close the slots in the event of storms. But then it equally made no sense that in half the toilet stalls the door bolts were mounted well above or below the receptor slots.

Where was she?

He saw her, his darling. There she was, leaning against the wall just outside the mouth of the arrivals tunnel, her swollen carry-ons at her feet. There she was, but how was she? She was beautiful and he was seeing that again, her graphic face. She waved and he waved. He hurried toward her. They never checked baggage when they flew. Africa had traumatized them permanently in that department.

His jewel was back, his what, his pivot, his unwobbling pivot, his wife. The question was, had she come back clearer about things and more like the way she’d been at the beginning, and happier to be with him? Her sister had been an ordeal. She would be glad to be clear of that.

The house she was returning to was clean to a fault, the yard policed, food in the refrigerator, no tasks waiting for her, only his needs, lucky woman.

Was she thinner? She was wearing something new to him, elf pants, he was tempted to call them, very tight green leggings, he guessed they were, so tight they made her legs seem flocked rather than clad. That was fine, but not for Botswana, which she undoubtedly understood. She was
wearing a white tee shirt, sneakers, and her travel tunic, a pretext of a garment composed entirely of pockets of different capacities, not a jacket but an undeclared third carry-on. The pockets were jammed. When he put his arms around her it would be like embracing a sack of rubble. She was wearing her hair pulled back. If there was something distant or vexed in her expression, it didn’t matter. It could be because he was late. And God willing he would obliterate it with his love.

He reached her and caught her in his arms. Her breath was perfect. He said, “Thank God to see you,” demonstrating his confusion. She didn’t take notice of it.

“Oh Ray,” was what she said, followed by nothing, not that she was so glad to be back, not that this was where she belonged, nothing like anything from his maximum dreams. He loved her. He had wanted something unalloyed and stronger.

“How late am I?” he asked into her neck. He couldn’t let go of her.

“A while. It’s all right.” His embrace was harder than hers.
Clasp me, delicatest machine
, he thought, which was Wallace Stevens and which was what she was.

He held her. He thought, There may not be such a thing as a perfect human being, but there is such a thing as the bell curve and there is such a thing as a woman who fits into the thin part that covers only the very best.

He stepped back and bent down to gather up her carry-ons.

She said, “I have to tell you something.”

Still bent over, he froze, seized by the certainty that something ominous was about to be said that he needed to hear every nuance in.

“Don’t
do
that,” she said, truly irritated.

He knew what it was. It was that tic he had, which was to stop whatever he was doing in order to hear perfectly what she was saying, if for some reason or other he thought it might be something potentially significant. He might stand there not closing the refrigerator door while she completed a sentence. Between them there was a phrase for his tic, which was Caught in the Headlights of Your Love, which wasn’t quite right literarily because it was his own love, love and fear, that drove him to want to suck the marrow out of some particular statement, or else.

He straightened.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “But you know how it drives me crazy when you do that.”

His tendency to fear what was coming in certain situations with her
grew out of what, in him? It grew out of the fear that something she was saying was the precursor to I am going, goodbye, You are nothing. He thought, Cocteau called it
the storm coming from the depths of time
or something close, which can be anything from personal death to You are really nothing, my dear.

“I’m sorry,” they both said.

He asked what it was she had been about to say.

“I’m suffering. There’s something I haven’t told you, Ray.”

I knew it, he thought, in agony.

“You are determined to kill me. Go ahead and tell me.”

“I wrote Ellen a check, for a lot. At the last minute. At the airport.”

“Oh
in the name of God
, Iris! So
what?
You terrified me there.”

“For a lot, though, Ray. Three thousand dollars.”

“That’s perfectly okay.”

“We can still stop the check.”

“We don’t need to. It’s fine, it’s fine. Come on.”

“I felt guilty about leaving her. It was an impulse. I need to discuss it with Davis. I don’t like that I did it so impulsively, Ellen is almost in and out of reality, almost to that point. So I wrote the check.”

He squatted, got the carry-on straps over his shoulders, and stood up, with difficulty.

As he turned to lead the way out, he saw or thought he saw what he wanted least of all at this moment to see … Morel, dodging out of sight into the Tiro ya Diatla fabrics stand. Rage filled him.

I could be wrong, he thought. It ought to be easy with someone who had a short leg, because his gait would betray him, normally. But Morel’s gait was perfect. He had trained himself to hide his condition and done that admirably.

“What is it?” Iris asked. Clearly she had seen nothing. And it had been brazen. Clearly Morel had been hiding in among the skirts at Tiro ya Diatla and scanning the arrivals scene. Ray had to get Iris out of there. He felt like telling her what her limping swain really was. He was a
paranoid
. He had a universal diagnosis for the world’s ill, which if it wasn’t paranoid was close to it. In his humble opinion her glorious boyfriend was a
panacean
, so to say, not that he would ever really be her boyfriend, so help him God. Of course something was wrong with the world, clearly. But what was wrong was hardly just one thing, like the existence of national languages with the cure being Esperanto. And what’s wrong isn’t that the workers don’t rule, either, he thought. And who was the one who
said it was all due to people not having orgasms, a German? Reich, another panacean, he thought. It was possible he had coined the term, right there.

A porter drifted toward them, but he waved him off.

“Why don’t we get a porter?”

“No this is faster. The porters make you wait while they go for their carts.”

“But we have time.”

“No, I want to get home.”

He was making for an exit door at the extreme north end of the terminal.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Over there.”

My life is taking forever, he thought.

“Where are you
parked
, Ray? Why are we going over there?”

He had no answer.

“Why are you running?” she asked.

How she had managed these monstrously heavy bags was something he wanted to know. She was strong. Or he was getting old.

There was no kiss, he thought, with pain. It was true that the recommended protocol for expatriates in Botswana was decorum in public. The Batswana were supposed to find kissing objectionable. The injunction was in the embassy orientation pamphlet. Even the Westernized younger Batswana who took up kissing would, he had been told, rub their forearms across their lips before they went at it.

“Why are we here?” she asked. She meant Why had they emerged into an overflow parking area not in use, with barrier booms down at its entry and exit points? Their Volkswagen was in the main lot. They had doubled the distance they had to travel to reach it by coming out where they had.

He was making a show of scanning intently around.

He said, “I thought I saw Moyo come out here. I need to talk to him about St. James. You have to catch him when you can. He has no phone. Well if he was here, he’s gone.” It was the best he could do.

“Africa,” Iris said. “I need my sun hat.”

“Take mine,” Ray said.

“Yes, and kill you. You’ll get a stroke as it is. We should have gotten a porter.”

He toiled on. She would warn him about his knee, shortly.

“Why don’t you rest for a minute, Ray?”

“Because we need to get home.” And because Morel could be anywhere, he thought. He had wanted to get her away because an encounter with Morel would have wrecked the homecoming. Now he was wrecking it himself. There had been no pleasantries from her about how good it was to see his face, nothing. He had done everything he could think of at home, including buying a new pair of shoes for Fikile.

“
Please
let me take one of those, Ray.”

“There’s the car. I’m fine.”

“I worry about your knee.”

“I know, but it’s fine and that was years ago. What have you got in this big one, anyway?”

“Something I have to tell you about. There’s a huge manuscript.”

“What manuscript?”

“I’ll explain it later. It’s your brother’s.”

“Oh God let this cup pass from me. Don’t tell me this. What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Read it.”

“But what is it, a memoir, something embarrassing about his miserable life?” A bitter triviality from the stupid past thrust itself on him. For a long period, growing up, Rex had gone out of his way to claim that his favorite thing to eat was mashed beef-stew sandwich, saying this on those occasions when children were expected to answer with spaghetti or hamburger or chocolate cake. Their mother had been proud of her boeuf bourguignon. And rightly so, as everybody seemed to say these days. And at one point Rex had childishly mashed his beef and carrots and pearl onions into a spread and clapped it between two slices of bread. He had given Ray a bite. Ray had found it delicious. But when Ray had tried to make the same sandwich for himself, his mother had turned on him and he had been prohibited from doing such a thing. It had been fine for Rex because he was, and apparently continued to be for years, a baby. Rex had been able to make sandwiches out of his boeuf bourguignon for as long as he chose to. And he had chosen to for years, rolling his eyes and smacking his lips and even elaborating the process, to taunt Ray, dropping capers into the mixture, or olives.

And now he had written a book. Ray wanted to write a book. Ray had a book to write. But now he had his brother’s book. He didn’t want it. He didn’t want it. He had Morel to crush. He had no time.

“I have talked so much to Rex,” Iris said.

“So describe this manuscript.” My problem is that I was raised by idiots, first two idiots and then just one, so of course I grew up to be an idiot, he thought.

“I don’t know how to. I don’t know what it is, exactly. It says
faits divers
in large letters on the title page but that’s crossed out. It’s fragments. I’ve read here and there. It’s very fragmentary. I’ll explain what I can, which is not much. He sent it to me to bring to you because he wanted to be sure it didn’t get lost. It’s called
Bright Cities Darken.”

“Poetry?” Poetry wouldn’t be a problem, because any poetry by a family member, private poetry, secret, was ninety percent of the time going to turn out to be pathetic.