Mortals (85 page)

“That’s fine,” Morel said.

The feeling of lightness was prompting Ray to swallow repeatedly, as though through swallowing he would ingest something from the air that would restore his normal solidity or center of gravity, whichever it was that needed restoring.

“I’m sorry,” Morel said again.

“Don’t mention it,” Ray answered.

“No. I am.”

“Of course you are. Don’t mention it.” What Ray didn’t like in Morel’s apology was even the merest shadow of the notion that his regret extended to having gotten involved, which suggested the specter of impermanence, which could mean Iris ending up out on a limb. He didn’t want that for her. And he wasn’t going to be around to rescue anybody, like the rejected lovers in teenage songs, waiting around forever. He was not going to hang around Gaborone. He would be gone. And there was
nothing he could do to predetermine the future she would have with Morel, her happiness.

The sound of breaking glass resumed. This time it was clear that they were hearing a deliberate, punctuated process.

Morel said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking? In westerns when the Indians or outlaws are coming and you’re holed up in a cabin …”

“You knock out the windows so you can shoot freely, right. I’m way ahead of you.”

The glass-breaking came to an end. Others were acting. We’re too passive, Ray thought. He had to refine his tasks, reduce them to the essential two or three. And then he had to find a way to complete them. One was his shoes, he had to get his shoes, or some shoes. Two was
Strange News
, which he had to get hold of and not let go of again. And the third task was to be sure, be
sure
, Morel survived the storm that was rolling in. It was obvious. If anything happened to Morel it would be Ray’s fault. Iris would spend the rest of her life counting the ways her husband had been responsible directly and otherwise for the rising new love of her life’s death, an impossibility that would lead to hell. There would always be the suspicion that he had eased Morel’s way into death. His strength had to go into protecting his rival, the victor, like it or not.

Morel looked depressed.

Ray said, “If anything happens to me I want to be cremated. I just realized I don’t think I ever discussed it with Iris. I think it was just assumed. But let me get on the record with you anyway.”

“You may get your wish,” Morel said. A strong odor of smoke was in the air, stronger than the occasional smoke from cooking fires they were used to, and with a chemical taint to it.

They both laughed.

The smell of burning passed. They had nothing to say to one another. Sounds of groups of men, heavily shod men, running, occupied them. But that too came to an end. There was more waiting to do.

A
metallic crackling commenced. There were two episodes and then a continuing, spaced-out manifestation. It was the first gunfire. It was faint and sporadic but there was no question what it was. It was originating at a good distance, from the north, in the direction of the pan. It occurred to Ray that the ridge constituting the high side of the pan would provide a logical parapet for an attacking force to make use of. The elevation would be favorable and they would have superior fire zones.

Morel heard it and fell silent. He had been talking, lecturing really, mainly to himself. Ray resented having been told that he was the one who never seemed to shut up. Morel had been droning on about a writing project he had put off completing, which he now regretted, because, as Ray understood it, he had been planning to popularize a term for religious belief, immaterialism, that he had come up with and liked. Before that there had been a muttered discourse about how various false narratives, most of them religious in nature, had been to blame for the confluence of events, however he had put it, that had led to their being in the present fix. He’s a bigger pedant than I am, Ray thought. Iris was going to be in for some surprises. Ray had pretended to be an interested hearer out of pity for the man. It was necessary for Morel to be doing something. He had a low tolerance for inaction, obviously. It had sent Morel into the monologue that was just mercifully coming to an end. They had to be quiet now. They had to concentrate, to follow, to scry out as much as they could of what was happening outside, because sooner or later it was going to come inside and get them. It was that simple.

Ray was thinking ahead. He said, “Do you know where they put my boots?”

“How would I know that?”

“Just asking in case you noticed anything about them when you were out.”

“I have no idea where they put them. I didn’t see them.”

“I have to get them.”

“I completely understand.”

“I have another couple of pair in the Land Cruiser. Did you see where they parked my Land Cruiser, blue Land Cruiser?”

“I didn’t. I was looking for my Land Rover and didn’t see that anywhere. But I think they have all the vehicles on the far side of the main building. That’s my guess. That’s gunfire we hear.”

“Small-arms fire, yes.”

“You know what a gunshot sounds like to me? Like what a bar of metal
snapping
in two would sound like, if such a thing could happen.”

“Well, that’s suggestive. Of course different guns make different sounds.”

“Can you tell things like the caliber of the weapons being fired, that kind of thing?”

“In a limited way. I’m not a weapons expert.” A subtle shift was taking place. Morel was showing an unsolicited deference to Ray, based no doubt on his perception of him as an expert in peculiar matters like the present one, bloodshed. He wanted to tell him how misplaced his notion was. But he couldn’t. What was the point in scaring him? Ray had gone out of his way to have nothing but the most minimal contact with weapons instruction. He had gotten the initial introduction and then he had evaded the subject, except for two mandated refresher courses there had been no way to avoid. The agency was organized guile, not organized gunplay, in his parsing of it, his own individual parsing of it. His practice in the agency had been founded on outsmarting, outthinking, on intellection. He had been so fastidious, so wonderfully fastidious. A bolt of ennui struck him. He was weary of himself.

“We have to get out there,” Morel said.

Oh, just step out into bloody confusion and then get shot, Ray thought. He said, “We need to think about that. We have a couple of ways we can go. We can get poised to jump on whoever comes to the door and overpower him. We might want to attract attention by yelling when the fighting gets closer, if it does.”

Morel was enthusiastic about that. “I like the idea of shouting. We could take turns. We could shout Kea tsala, I mean ditsala …”

Ray said, “No, that means we’re each
other’s
friends, I think. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Oh, you’re right. No it would be Kea lona ditsala.”

“That’s it. That might be good to shout. A good thing about it is that it wouldn’t offend anybody, whichever side heard it.” He had to come up with some semblance of a plan of action, even if it was for the sole purpose of calming Morel down while events unfolded into some more readable shape.

“But let’s consider the opposite possibility. Stop walking around so much. We need to conserve our energy. And here’s the opposite possibility.

“We have no idea who’s going to win this thing. So the opposite strategy would be to keep our mouths absolutely shut. In other words, we sit tight and silent and then make a move when it’s all over, when we think it is. For example, maybe we can go back to figuring out how we can rip our way through the roof up there, the thatch, once we think it’s safe to appear in public. We could take turns being each other’s footstools so we could get up high enough to claw away up there. You could be the footstool first.”

What he was doing was wrong. He was yielding to the impulse to tease Morel, a little. But in fact he was just doing his best to suggest calming options, and the teasing was incidental. He did think that with some currently unimaginable exertions they might get through the chicken wire and the other impedimenta and then finally through the thatch, their fingers bloody shreds at the end of the procedure.

Ray said, “So there are different ways to go. It would help if we could get some room service. I’m starving.”

“Let me give you some advice,” Morel said, suddenly authoritative.

“Go on.”

“Try not to think about food. Don’t articulate what you’re thinking, is what I mean. This sounds stupid but it isn’t. Here is the thing. Don’t name the thing you want or need to yourself.”

“Funny, that’s exactly what I was doing, not speaking of it. Then I lost it.”

“Where do you think the fighting is?”

“You mean the firing. I don’t know if there’s any fighting going on yet.”

“You mean you don’t know who’s firing or do you mean you can’t tell if the guys down here are firing back?”

“Take it easy. I don’t know anything for sure. What I think is that there’s shooting coming from the west rim of the pan, the high rim. That’s the only high ground in the vicinity. It overlooks everything. I’m sure it’s the Kerekang people up there. I don’t hear anything that sounds like local return fire, so far.

“I don’t know what anybody’s doing. But the pan rim is a good defensive position for Kerekang in case koevoet wants to go after them. Koevoet has some truck-mounted machine guns, heavy caliber, would be my guess. But they can’t put vehicles into the pan, so they can’t get close to him. I don’t know. Maybe he’s going to send Bushmen down to blow darts at these bastards. I’m just making that up. I’m doing my best here, with nothing to go on.”

There was a crescendo in the firing.

“I hate war,” Morel said.

“Who doesn’t?” Ray said. Here we go, he thought.

The firing sank away.

Morel said, “War is unnecessary. All the monstrous stuff, weaponry, huge standing armies, all that … There’s a way out of it and the way would be for all the countries of the world to decide to drop the load of competitive armaments by agreeing that there would be one body, the United Nations, and what it would do would be to operate a powerful force that would enforce agreed-on boundaries. That is, everyone’s boundaries would be agreed, imperfect or not, frozen, accepted as final. So nations would go down to what they needed to police themselves inside secure boundaries … so if no country is threatened with any kind of incursion, then that means no need for overseas bases, no arms races, because the justification for those is defense of the realm. I’m not saying you could ever get to the point where this would suddenly blaze up as a good idea to all hands on deck. It’s a thought experiment.”

“Good idea,” Ray said. He was truly astonished. It was hard to credit that he was hearing what he was hearing. What he was hearing was a proposition appropriate for a sophomore symposium somewhere, a colloquium. Morel was a type. He wanted to be fair to the man who was taking his wife away, far away, taking her in his arms and flying away with her and landing in some excellent place. Fear was precipitating him into little lectures, fervent ones. The pitch of his voice was higher. Ray would have to capture all this in words, in the cameo he would do of Morel, assuming they got out. It would be delicate, getting it right, but here was a man in fear of death urgent to register his bright ideas, in case he was going to die suddenly, register them with another potential corpse. The answer to the question
What is life?
is
Life is abnormal psychology
, he thought.

Ray was not going to spare himself, either. He was going to encapsulate himself but maybe not in the same book with the other Lives. Mine would be
My Life in a Nutshell
, which would be appropriate, he thought.

Morel seemed satisfied with having said what he had. No doubt he was
rummaging something else up he wanted to be remembered as having thought of. I feel small, Ray thought. It was fairly horrible. This man was overflowing with items like plans for universal peace. There was a kind of idiotic nobility to it. I feel like flotsam, in comparison, Ray thought. And now he wished, for the sake of the sketch he was going to do, that he had paid better attention to a couple of other deliverances Morel had let fall in passing earlier. One had to do with a correct understanding of what the entire human race was basically up to, that understanding being that mankind was engaged not only in internecine conflicts unending but in a general collaborative war against the trees, as he remembered it, mankind as a kind of planetary mange. And the idea of these formulations was to make a light go off in the mind of man that would stop him or her in his or her tracks and lead to huge changes. The other deliverance was lost to him, for the moment. He had to get a pen, somehow, and a tablet, a notebook, anything.

“You think they’re shooting down from the pan?”

“Yes.”

A serious detonation shook the shed, jolting Morel into another presentation. Dust and grit sifted down over them from the ceiling.

Morel said, “I got a look at the pan. It’s like a gigantic pockmark. I read about it before I came up here.”

The detonation was significant and represented a change. Morel wasn’t asking for his opinion. In fact he had no opinion. It was possible that it was a mortar hit. It was possible that through some accident some ammunition or explosives had gone up. It was serious.

Morel continued. “Do you know that there’s some mystery about what causes pans? The geology is mysterious. One theory is that there were natural depressions in the terrain and that there used to be much heavier winds in the area that scooped them out and much heavier rains that filled them up, so that when they dried, these beds of clay and soda were left. But the problem with that theory is that there are no pans in other deserts, only around here.”

Ray was fascinated. This was beyond wanting to deposit his aperçus before misadventure struck. This was sadder, a need to demonstrate that he knew certain things the average man might not.