Mortals (72 page)

Tomorrow it would be combat. He had to sleep.

He had to conquer his thirst by not thinking about it. He was thirsty. He wanted to save most of his water for the morning.

He was a husband. Every path he took swung around and led to her and so to guilt and worry and wakefulness.
Every
path did.

It wasn’t the agency, his life in the agency, that filled him with agitation. He had conducted that life in a certain way that fell short of being shameful. Regret was one thing and shame was another. If everyone in the agency had conducted himself as delicately, as carefully, as he had … then the agency would have been an innocent ineffective waste of the taxpayers’ money. Unless he was overly flattering himself, that was true. He had lived a Kantian life in the agency, for the most part, unless he was flattering himself again. There were certain parish priests in the Roman church who winked at everything and did palpable good while the mother church rolled on telling poor devils never to use condoms on pain of hell.

That wasn’t exactly the analogy he wanted. There were better ones. But the fact remained that he could think about it without falling into shame and despair, and he
would
think about it, later. There would probably be time.

No, it was Iris he had to keep his mind away from, his failure with her, the great failure of his life.

He needed the right mental games. Earlier he had tried one game and it had failed him.

He had played Backwardation for a while. Backwardation he owed to
his brother, whose ability to pronounce words in reverse had shown up at an absurdly early age, during his prodigy phase. It had been pretty remarkable and Rex had flaunted it, with the help of their parents, of course. And of course Rex had been challenging about it to his older brother, and as his older brother, Ray had been unable to elude the challenge. There had been various ways to lose to Rex, having to do with the length of words as well as the rapidity with which they were successfully reversed.

They had been out walking in the neighborhood when Rex had begun reading street signs backward, just like that, in his piping little voice. At first it had only been street names and the names of landmarks and points of interest. Nedlit Krap, he remembered, Tilden Park, had been a very early success of Rex’s. But then there had been Llihtoof Draveluob and on and on.

So he had played Backwardation briefly earlier, giving it up for a couple of reasons. He had seemed to be unable to keep the place names he was backwarding, African place names being the category he had chosen for himself, unable to keep them from getting closer and closer to home, to Gaborone, to his neighborhood, their street, their neighbors, and ultimately to Siri Hcnif herself, the evol of his efil. He would try something else.

One thing he could do was settle the question of what the best food, the best taste, was, the best-tasting food, in the world.

He thought about it and decided that the answer was bacon, crisp, hickory-smoked. That was if only one single food could be chosen. But if foods could be combined, then it would have to be ripe avocado slices on freshly baked whole wheat bread, with olive oil, with shreds of red onion, and with fresh-ground pepper and sea salt. Which would be very good with the crisp bacon on it. And this was a mistake. He was salivating. And it wasn’t a game.

But there could be a game connected to food. One had just suggested itself. The game would be to convert great literary names into main dishes. Salmon Rushdie would be an example. And there was Rice Edgar Burroughs.

There could be Bacon Francis, of course.

Nothing was coming. Rex would be an ace at this. The problem was that this was not a game they would ever play. Rex was dead. He knew it. And if he was, it was too much.

There could be Oats Joyce Carol or it could be simply Joyce Carol Oats.

Some people, like Rex, were very good at games, and other people were not. He was not, himself, very good at games. He was very good at a game no one knew he was playing, or almost no one, only the people who paid him. So there was that.

Ermine Melville was a possible, if people ate that animal. Probably in the Middle Ages they had. In the Dark Ages they ate anything.

Lamb Charles and Dorothy was too easy.

Another possible would be Edgar Allan Po Boy, after the New Orleans sandwich made with oysters and something else and with hot sauce. They were supposedly delicious.

He had run out of anything presentable. He was going to reject Edgar Allan Poi and Sole Bellow and Spuds Terkel and Graham Greens.

He thought of what he should do next. It was an exercise and not a game, but it would work. It was something Iris had come up with. The point of the exercise was to recapture the feeling of utter fatigue and physical constriction that passengers suffered on endless nonstop transatlantic flights like the one from New York to Johannesburg, seventeen hours with one brief refueling moment at Ilha do Sal. They had taken that flight together how many times? And the trick was to remember the yearning and envy everyone felt toward the flight crew, whose members could take shifts napping full length on foam rubber pallets in a special compartment. And then the trick was to identify your own present ability to be lying flat in the bed you were tossing and turning in with what it would have felt like to be permitted to lie flat sometime during the last three or four hours of that flight. All paths led to his girlfriend.

He put himself in the plane again, with Iris beside him. Unconsciousness would sweep toward him now. It had begun to move. It would have him in no time.

H
is first formal interrogation was about to begin. He was in place. It was morning, still early.

Early rising was the order of the day. He was famishing for light, because the gap between coming awake and being blindfolded for the day’s business had been disappointingly narrow, a blink. He was under the impression that they would dispense with the blindfold when he was on his own in the cell, as they had yesterday. So far, the drill being imposed on him was straightforward. When the banging on the door began, the prisoner was to rise and go to stand at the far side of the room, back to the door, hands high on the wall. Then came the blindfolding. And then came a little breakfast, cold maize porridge in a tin bowl which he had been expected to eat with his fingers, a cup of tepid bush tea. There had been two people in his cell, a male to handle the blindfolding and the cuffing, and a female server. Their voices, in the fragmentary exchanges between them, in her murmurs, had told the story. She had guided him to rinse his hands in a basin of water, after drizzling a substance like Phisohex on them. And then his hands had been cuffed behind him.

He had been expected to remain standing for eating and ablutions, such as they were. All he could say was that his captors seemed to be following some definite set of standards of treatment. This was not, as yet, chaos and the fiery pit. The woman had been in a state of fear, though.

They had led him across open ground to the main building. He had counted exactly two hundred and twelve paces between his cell and this venue, a room, probably a bedroom. What he had picked up in ambient noise on the way over was mundane. There was poultry somewhere
around. There were a few dogs. Someone had blown a police whistle. Confused shouting had gone on elsewhere in the building he was in, but briefly. That was all he had.

They had placed him in a heavy armchair whose feet were nailed or bolted to a smooth wooden floor. Rare woods from the forest around Kazengula had been used in the Sand Castle’s interiors. With his feet, he detected added metal bracing securing the chair legs to the floor. A leather belt had been passed around the chairback and over his chest and cinched tightly but not painfully. He could get his breath. His wrists had been cuffed to the chair arms, again tightly but not cruelly.

It was almost boring waiting for your tormentors to get to work. He was realizing something interesting, though, as he sat in idleness. They had made a mistake in not letting him at least rinse off his face even minimally before blindfolding him. His skin was greasy, especially the skin of his face. He could make the blindfold slip, he was fairly sure, even though it was on tight.

He decided to try something. By forcing his head over and down against his shoulder he was finding he could drag the blindfold down on one side. They had left him alone in the room and there was no one to stop him from doing what he was doing. He was elated. With luck, he should even be able to repeat the action in reverse, assuming no one caught him. He was going to do this. They were taking too long. He did it. His right eye was free.

He was in a disused bedroom. Along three walls mattresses and tall cylinders of rolled-up matting had been propped, imperfectly blocking the room’s windows. Some light was coming in at the tops of the windows. He would have to be standing in order to see out at all. He wondered if the mattresses were intended for anything more than making looking in or out a difficult feat, intended for example as improvised sound-sops. He hoped not.

There was no housekeeping going on. There was sand on the fine broad-planked hardwood floors. The rug, a mock Persian or possibly the real thing, had been roughly rolled off to one side. There were dismantled bedsteads crowding one side of the room. There were oddments of debris strewn around, lager cans mostly. There was no air in the room, only heat. There was nothing he could do about the sweat drops burning his eyes. That was torture of a sort, but not something anyone would mention, because it was nothing, compared to what could be done, was done. It was nothing. No man would mention it. Sweat was eating his eyes alive, however.

Adequate light came in over the mattress barrier, but there was an array of candles in saucers, some fresh, some half burned, on the card table directly in front of him, the candles tending to suggest that interrogations were proceeding into the night and that there was no general power supply in the building. There were fixtures on the walls, sconces with pink torch-flame-simulating bulbs in them.

His interrogator would sit on the straight chair behind the card table, facing him, and begin by having a leisurely smoke. There were cigarettes on the table, a lighter, a carafe of water and two tumblers. There was no ashtray, which meant that very restricted time horizons were controlling this phase of whatever was going on. And there was no cassette recorder in evidence, which was a further support to the image that everything was very present tense. Ashes and refuse were going on the floor and nobody cared because this place was going to be vacated sooner rather than later. That was what he thought.

He saw nothing exotic in the way of abusive implements on the table. There was a vial of liquid that might be ammonia. And that would be to revive people who fainted during their torments. There was a giant flashlight on the table. But there was nothing like a thumbscrew, say, or pliers.

He knew what most of the props were for. His interrogator would sit down at the table and make him wait lengthily while a Santos Dumont was smoked. The conventional idea was that everybody was dying for a smoke and it went with the parallel game of pouring water into a glass noisily and sipping loudly from it at intervals. Ray was not particularly thirsty yet, which was good. He had had the tea and the leftover water to drink.

There were four open cartons on the floor near the table and in one of them he could identify items of his projecting out, his map case, his knobkerrie. This was a discovery. His documents would be in the carton and so would
Strange News
, he would bet. This was a victory and it was enough. He should reset the blindfold, if he could.

He took too long being pleased with himself. The door opened and his interrogator and his assistant strode in. The assistant was a new character, a young black African in sunglasses, another example of physical culture taken to an extreme, a man rather festively dressed in a cherry-red silk longsleeved shirt and plaid Bermuda shorts, his chest crossed by bandoliers. Ray was sure the wardrobe was expropriated. Maybe it had come from the closet of the Englishman who had built the Sand Castle. The bandoliers were for ornament only. There were no cartridges in the holders, so far as Ray could tell. But he couldn’t be sure.

His interrogator was going to be Quartus, and he was in a rage seeing the state of Ray’s blindfold.
Hopping mad
would capture him. He was a peculiar figure, a gaunt, bald man in his forties whose prominent, knoblike cleft approached deformity. It was severe enough, in its resemblance to a pair of buttocks, that it might, Ray thought, have pushed Quartus out of the main game where the most symmetrical and physically standard usually won and into the military realm where traits like ferocity would carry you up the stairway to power no matter what you looked like, if you didn’t get killed along the way, and where rage at what nature had done to you could be productively redirected at selected representatives of the more normal population. He was cursing in Afrikaans. I have regular features, Ray thought. His appearance had never been an obstacle to whatever he might have wanted to do, for which it made sense to be thankful in the There but for the Grace of God Go I sense, a platitude which in itself ought to be enough to destroy religion at the root the moment anyone employing it fully grasped what it meant about God.

He was having a seizure of sympathy for Quartus, for his joke of a chin and for the dire anxiety showing in his exhausted-looking face. Ray had seen him plainly up close and he was not taking it well. Oppression is hard work, Ray thought.

Quartus was a Boer, definitely. His eyes were cornflower blue. One eyelid was burdened with a sty. From gums to mid-level, his teeth were tobacco-stained. If he had a wife she would pity him, seeing him as Ray was seeing him.

Both men lunged toward Ray, converged on him. All in the same moment his blindfold was jerked back into place and he was slapped across the mouth, twice, and then once, harder, on the side of the head.