Mortals (59 page)

It was time to write on his site-assessment form. It was something he had to do, had to be seen doing. He had put down a few scribbles already, during his approach to the baobab, for Keletso’s benefit. But, out of Keletso’s view, he would do something new. It had started as a joke but it had turned into something a little interesting. Instead of jotting down fake notes and observations, he had tried relaxing and closing his eyes and going blank and letting himself write in a dissociated state, or as much of one as he could attain. It was automatic writing, a weak variant. It was something to do. So far mostly he had gotten poetic flotsam, weird doggerel, grandiose self-instruction, pure nonsense, and sequences written so illegibly it was impossible to tell what was meant. He slid down to a squatting position and set the clipboard on the sand in front of him. Another nice thing about baobabs was that tampan ticks avoided them, the shade cast by the baobabs being so negligible. He got his Bic out. He tried. He had waited too long to get started. This wouldn’t work if he felt pressed. But he tried. He hummed to distract himself. He wrote a little. He hummed more vigorously, the
Ode to Joy
, always his first choice when he needed a tune to block something out, distract him. He was trying. It was no good. He couldn’t let go. He looked at what he’d written.

This was his worst effort. Thy should be thine. The glints from the dim past were boring. As a child he had thought someone saying
He hit my fist with his eye
was funny. He had known what he was writing as he was writing. The Bic was wrong. With the Bic he had to bear down too much. A pencil required less pressure and the results had been better, although still stupid. He got up to go.

Lately his appetite was problematic. His clothes were fitting more loosely. Keletso didn’t like it and was being maternal. Keletso wanted him to eat what he had just been handed. He wasn’t sure what it was. It was a mass. He probed it and concluded that it was a concoction of two kinds of dried fruit, apricot and pear, boiled soft. He was supposed to eat it with some of the warm box milk. He couldn’t.

Keletso was eating his own portion demonstratively. Ray was touched. It was possible that he could eat some, a little. They sat in the solid heat.

It was definite that government presence in the region was withdrawing, ceasing to be, where it had existed at all, in widely separated nodes, hamlets strung along the main north-south route. They were finding government offices closed, with no explanations for the closures posted. Government vehicle traffic was down to almost nothing. They were still seeing the occasional Wildlife officer. The last one they had seen had told them that the two fishing camps between Sepopa and the Caprivi Strip, on the western edge of the Okavango, had been closed, mysteriously.

Keletso was waving a shaker of cinnamon at him. He accepted it. Keletso wanted him to sprinkle cinnamon on his compote.

It was Ray’s turn to hold the umbrella support, but Keletso was refusing to relinquish it to him and at the same time making head motions indicating that it was more important for Ray to concentrate on eating. So he ate.

Keletso said, “Rra, someway you must phone up your wife, isn’t it?”

Ah, Ray thought. This was bold of Keletso. He was picking up that their radiophone contacts with Gaborone had stopped, just about. Clearly it worried him. They had gone four days without being able to
find a link. Keletso was beginning to appreciate the strangeness of the zone they were in. So far Keletso hadn’t asked for any messages to be passed along when they had managed to make calls. He mailed something once. He was a bachelor.

Ray said, “You’re not married, yourself, rra, you told me.”

“Not as yet.”

“So, still, do you have any need to send word to anyone, when we phone next? Do you, rra?”

“Yah, well, no.”

“I apologize for not asking.”

“It is fine because in any case we must be returning back soon.”

Ray nodded vaguely. Keletso wanted to be reassured that this was going to end soon. Ray couldn’t help him. He didn’t know when it would end. He was waiting for a sign. But it was definitely time to get back, from any standpoint. He had had a nocturnal emission, for one thing. He thought, No it’s nomads with gonads, what we are.

Keletso said, “Rra, I must find a wife yet. I am searching even now.” He swept his hand around broadly.

The man was in his forties and seeking his true love. Ray hoped he found her soon and that no one would take her away once he had. Constant Pain would be a good title for something.

“Because, rra, you can see, else we cannot be at ease. So I must seek. She can be hereabout. It is no matata if she can be from the bush and be pleasing to me, I can take her. You see, a wife is like some rose flower. And as well the Bible commands us to marry. So we must search about.”

Ray made a show of looking around, and they laughed together.

“Have you some children, then?” Keletso asked.

“No, none. We were unable to.”

“Ah, shame.”

“Yes.”

“Rra, if you can pray, God can aid you. Even as you are older than some fathers. If you pray you can go back and see your wife and she can say, Ehe I have fallen pregnant whilst you were off.”

“That would be truly amazing.”

“It can only be if you pray.”

“I understand you.”

“I can tell you from the Bible that many an old man, monna mogolo, is made to be a father, by God, nonetheless.”

“Yes,” Ray said. He had eaten everything.

Nothing prepares you for life as a human, Ray thought, and when
Keletso looked questioningly at him he knew he had uttered his thought-gem aloud, which was not good and was a thing that was happening too much in the last day or so. He was declaring his vacuity. With his thought-gems he was like the drunk at the last embassy party who had taken him aside to say, portentously, Life is sincere.

“Sorry,” Ray said.

He needed to watch it. He was shooting his mind off. Yesterday it had been necessary to attempt an explanation for exclaiming
It’s Edward Young, for Christ’s sake
. In his head he had been unaccountably attributing the line
O my coevals
to Milton and it had been a relief to suddenly have it right again. At times Keletso was seeming a touch afraid of him. He couldn’t have that.

The day was the mixture as before, cruelly bright and hot. Earlier Keletso had pointed out two or three rogue thunderheads off to the northeast, but now the sky was unembellished. They were six hours west of Nokaneng, and that was as far west as he wanted to be. Dust, blowing, was an increasing problem, away from the delta. It would look better if they could return eastward without retracing their route, to enable him to stare at fresh territory in accordance with his supposed mission, so he had decided that they should leave the track they had been following and transit six kilometers of open bush with the aim of reaching a grade four veterinary road indicated on their sector map. So far the map had been reasonably reliable. The area to be crossed was hardpan, very level, treeless for the most part. They should be fine. So far, aside from having to circumnavigate a single long low dune, they were proceeding uneventfully.

Ray tried to doze, succeeding fitfully for a while until a change in the light registered through the blankness he was cultivating. The air was gray and seething. They had entered a phenomenon, a storm of flies, not just a cloud of them following the vehicle but a dense swarm extending out indefinitely on all sides. It was appalling, which was the right word, since it was a pall of flies, in fact. Iris liked the Exaltation of Larks game and was good at it. A pall of funeral directors would be a candidate for the game and so would a pox of whores or rash of whores or rash of dermatologists, but what constructs that she had come up with could he remember? He remembered some of his, a skeleton crew of coroners, a surplus of misers, a dearth of nonentities, but he didn’t want his, he wanted hers. He wanted her. She was fun, his wife.

Keletso was being stalwart but it was clear he was unnerved. He was sweating and murmuring. The explanation for the flies had to be something
arising from rainfall, sudden heavy rainfall. The locality they were in had received a drenching. They had passed abruptly from furnace to steambath conditions. The windows were fogging. One of Keletso’s thunderheads had obviously delivered, and the sudden moisture had either drawn or hatched, if that was possible, this abomination. He had never read about it, but there had to be a connection.

There seemed to be two kinds of flies involved in the spectacle, big clumsy ones interested in banging against the vehicle, and smaller and faster glittering ones not. To the right was a long object on the ground not immediately recognizable as the carcass it must be because it was clad in a seamless, glinting, writhing coat of flies. This would not be the place to die.

He was sorry for Iris. He had gotten her when she was young. In retrospect, that was a problem. Her premarital sexual experience had been so paltry it was unfair. It was pathetic. He was what there was of her sexual universe, with, as he recalled, two ancient exceptions, both unsatisfactory. How her condition could be what, undone, reversed, at this stage of the game without terrible pain he had no idea, but she had a right and he recognized it and he loved her. He needed to keep in mind her mother, how dreamily repressive her benighted mother had been when it came to sex. After all, Iris had been thirteen years old before she realized it was permissible to actively wash her genitals as opposed to gazing up at the ceiling and whistling something merry while soapy water passively traversed them in the shower. She had made the discovery during a summertime visit to the country place of one of her girlfriends whom she had observed routinely giving herself a good scrub between the legs, case closed. It was licit. But when he said she had a right he meant that she did and she didn’t at the same time, because there was a preexisting deal of course, their marriage, all his love, their love, years of it, her vows and his, of course. All he knew was that he had to keep her. And if he could possibly construe Morel as someone for her to be into and out of, and then back to him and into his arms wiser and with a better sample of the real world of unsleeping penises and a notch on her garter belt that would make her feel better, then … then good luck with construing, since it looked like he was going to be unable to expel her doctor from his personal universe by the main scenario he had come up with. He thought, Help me, but it would say something if she came back to me post facto, not that I can bear to think about it. He was full of pain again. If it would help her after the fact, he could concoct a lie about fucking someone he hadn’t, but that
would require conviction, details, be impossible. Don’t ask me to, he thought. He couldn’t. Keletso was mumbling that it had been a mistake to leave a gazetted road. Ray was in no position to disagree. He would try not to propose doing it in the future. Keletso had turned the windscreen wipers on, the flies were so thick.

Were events like this extraordinary to the local population or were they the equivalent of leaf storms in September in Massachusetts? It felt to him like a what, a genuine abomination, Miltonic, an epiphany or revelation about some underlying corruption pressing up, the earth rotting from the heart outward and breaking the surface and the flies pouncing, summoned from everywhere, some conceit like that, some nonsense like that. It was getting darker, amazingly. Iris had to be free. He thought, If only you could pluck certain thoughts out of your head like thorns, via machine, if there could be a device for that like the blackhead extractors that used to be advertised in comic books, bastard things. He had owned one and it had produced little bloody wounds and scabs on his face, essentially. Why had he persisted with it for so long, refusing to credit that the thing was worthless and having to explain his face downstairs in the morning, his purchase?

He thought he was detecting a scorched smell in the air. It reminded him of something from his past, and he knew what it was. The dead past is forever, he thought. But he knew what it was, it connected to his brother’s asthma, when he had been delegated to watch a pot boil containing water and chopped-up grapefruit rinds stewing to make a home remedy for Rex, a thick liquor. His family had loved home remedies as opposed to quick going to the doctor and paying something, no, the thing was to go endlessly with home remedies and time would pass and all would be well for free. And he had gone off to read while he was waiting, one of the Fu Manchu books, and he had gotten engrossed in it and the elixir had boiled down to a foul gum and then scorched, sending a stench into the bedroom, where his mother sat incessantly stroking his brother’s forehead while he coughed histrionically, giving her a fit. It’s amazing what stays with you from childhood, not to mention what doesn’t, he thought. Recently he had been embarrassed to have to admit to Iris that he had forgotten what his first words were, or word. He must have known at one point. But with age the fabric of the mind started to develop blank spots here and there, like cigarette burns, as it had been described to him once upon a time. His mother might remember what his first word had been, or she might not.

It was unbelievably dark.

Ray thought, She is my light, my nightlight, my pilot light, and she is out, going out, out and about.

Keletso was looking at him. Obviously he had done it again.

“Nothing,” Ray said.

Sudden commotion from the front seat brought Ray sharply awake. The flies were behind them. It was sunrise, still dim, and Keletso seemed to be half out of the cab flailing one leg violently against the side of the vehicle,
why?
And he was cursing, which was unheard of, another shock. Ray bent across into the front in order to help, to do something, and grasped that Keletso was fighting a snake. In terror he climbed over the seat and lunged for the storage pocket on the right front door where there should be a machete, unless they had moved it. They had. Then it would have to be in among the miscellany of infrequently used tools and oddments under the seat. He found it. They had never used the thing and it was still tight in its canvas sheath but he had it and freed it and flourished it as he got out of the vehicle on the passenger side shouting,
“Here I am.”