Mortals (11 page)

Was that it? Probably not, although in a cheap way it seemed to fit. He wanted not to be superficial. His life, or at least his life with Iris, depended on it. The problem was that he had thought until fairly
recently that he had solved the woman question, so to speak, by getting happily married. And the conventional idea that he had been raised with was, roughly, that if everybody did what he did and got happily married there was no woman question, which now turned out to be an incorrect idea. He had been operating with simple, oversimple, ideas, obviously.

When Iris had said to him, hurting him, had said to him, Ask yourself sometime if you talk to yourself the same way you talk to me, and then tell me … that had been rough. It had been like being flayed without sufficient warning, or something. They had barely been able to discuss it later. The implication of the question was that he was talking down to her or shaping what he said to her in order to keep her pacified or in a cheerful frame of mind or something like that. Something good if painful had come out of it, he thought. He had concluded that it might be true that his manner of talking to her was less direct, or more processed or something, than he liked to admit. And he had stopped. Or he was trying, at least. The implication was that he was trying to control her.

Something else had come out of that moment. He wanted to sigh when he thought about it. He had noticed that the level of language he used on himself … was questionable, and limited, suggesting the influence of some force inside of himself acting to keep him … acting to keep him within certain borders. But that was a new subject …

The question of women as a subject came down to their
unhappiness
. And what was happening was that the general unhappiness of women was turning into a force and developing institutions and mandibles whereas before it had been a kind of background condition like the temperature, as he had thought, something that rose and fell within certain stable limits. He thought of his mother’s unhappiness. Iris was not what he would call a feminist and yet, if he was anywhere near understanding what was going on with her, she was part of this great unhappiness. Just his luck. But then his luck had never been good, except for finding and marrying Iris, paradoxically, which had saved his life.

What was the general unhappiness of women about? He would have to concentrate … except that he wouldn’t have to at all! The answer was in the category of answers you possess without knowing you do. He had the answer, he realized. Sometimes you carried the answer to an ultimate question around with you like something in a parcel, wrapped up.

Unwrapped, it was simple. It was like this. What they wanted, he gathered, feeling pleased with himself, was for their own personal rational deliberation to replace what?… to replace tradition and custom and instinct, what men called instinct, in arriving at the nine or ten major
decisions life presents all of us with. That meant when to mate, of course, but not only when to mate, it meant whether to mate or not, and with which sex, even … what to be professionally and whether to have children. It was banal, but an insight can be banal and radical at the same time, apparently. It had a Freudian tinge to it too, as in Where id was, ego shall be. It was other familiar things. It was our friend the Enlightenment, still rolling merrily along, for instance.

He didn’t know how he felt. It was immense, of course, because the only kind of societies the human race had ever been able to build were ones in which half the population was being very accommodating to the other half. Now it was going to be … Where id was, contracts and negotiations and taking forever to work things out are going to be. How was it going to work? Life was going to take longer. Everyone would have to adjust.

He felt better, strangely enough. He thought: God moves in a mysterious way, when he moves at all. It annoyed him that he was using one of his brother’s bons mots, but it seemed to apply, a bit. The world ahead was going to be seriously different. He had a sense of it. He felt that if he kept his mind still he might sense even more of how it was going to be. It was going to be a world full of divorces, for one thing, and you could forget about people joining nunneries. That was about all he could think of. He had his limitations as a seer, obviously. But he was getting a presentiment of the magnitude of the change that was coming.

He felt, what? He felt uneasy. He felt melancholy, in fact.

He needed to get this over with.

Now to the list. He was dealing with fragments. He should assemble fragments.

One, she was more profane lately. She was saying Shit more than he remembered, and this was in the context of informing him that intramale sexual profanity could be intimidating to women in the vicinity. Probably there was no conflict there. But she was more profane lately. One, Shit, he wrote on the pad, at the top.

She was noticing things and making a point of mentioning them, and they were things that seemed to imply she was undergoing some deep revision of what she had assumed up to that point. It was on the order of going to the barber and getting your hair cut in a new way and looking into the mirror and discovering that, although you hadn’t noticed up till then, you have a very small head. She had said I bet you don’t know you
have a tic of just almost imperceptibly hefting each forkful of food as you start to raise it to your mouth, as though you’re weighing it, when you’re feeling defensive about something. It had been a neutral observation, not meant to make him stop weighing his food. She included herself in these discoveries.

Three evaded him. He sat waiting for Three.

There was an exercise he sometimes did that was reassuring. He had put his head into a ten-year-old girl’s bedroom back in the States, just glancing in, years ago. This had been during training. The point had been to memorize at least a dozen discrete items of decor. He still had every one. One, cat motif posters and knickknacks including a cat piggy bank. Two, painted decorated rocks. Three, Charlie Brown stickers on dresser drawers. Four, horse sculpture. Five, miniature watering can. Six, multicolor raffia-ring curtain covering doorless closet. Seven, music stand. Eight, pennants. Nine through Twelve,
Heidi, Stuart Little, Black Beauty
, a Laing Fairy Book. Thirteen, flocked riding helmet.

Three was about losing things. She was more absentminded recently, and she was losing things to the point that he had referred to their bedroom as the Lost and Found. There had to be a better Three.

Three could be Rex, instead, and everything connected with Rex. Or Three could just be the implication he was getting more and more often from Iris that he should find everything Rex wrote hilarious. He was loaded down mentally with quotations from his brother. He seemed to be cursed with total recall for everything Rex produced. What had there been along those lines lately? He remembered something from a sketch Rex was writing, about someone who’s trying to be more decisive and aggressive and who writes a note to himself that reads
Consider starting to make an effort to try being at least a little less half-assed about things
. He wanted to forget Rex, not anatomize everything connected with him.

Four could be Iris’s feeling that he, or they, he and Iris, were no longer as funny with each other as they had been. She’d said We used to say stupid things more than we do now. She had examples. One was when she said, after he’d been repetitious, You must be History because you just repeated yourself, and his instant comeback of You must be Power because you abhor a vacuum … cleaner, which had been an allusion to her lack of love for housecleaning, which by the way was a problem Africa had solved for her.

Then Five came to him. He didn’t want this Five. Five was Iris saying to him apropos of nothing, saying, and looking steadily at him when she
said it, to separate it from everything else that had preceded it, saying I know this sounds stupid but one thing I want in this life is to have nothing to do with … with cruelty. She had looked at him as though he was supposed to make some kind of vow back to her. This was Five, and it was Iris being suspicious of his work or her notion of his work. It was an assault. He resented it. That was Five.

R
ay was enraged. This was reckless, and Victor had never been reckless before. This was sheer recklessness.

He was enraged as much at his own flux of panic as at the stupid act that had provoked it. There was an obvious flaw in the system he had developed for Victor. He had told Victor never to call him on the phone. So the flaw was that if something turned up that Ray needed to see urgently at some point between his scheduled visits, Victor was stuck with waiting. This had never happened before. Victor was obviously taking himself more and more seriously in his work for Ray. And then it had probably been a mistake to increase his remuneration so sharply the last time. No doubt Victor was seeing Morel as a treasure trove he had to plunder expeditiously before all of Morel’s goods had moved through.

Ray went to the door of his office to reassure himself that he was locked in. The curtains were secure across both windows. He returned to his desk.

He turned on the tensor lamp and again sorted through the contents of the packet Victor had so goddamned recklessly gotten a courier to bring to him, paid a courier to bring to him, a mobashi. Probably that was the dumbest part of a dumb maneuver. The courier had been one of the ragged street children, the bobashi, one of them, a mobashi, than which or whom or whatever nothing could be more conspicuous standing next to the main gate into St. James as the students in their neat uniforms streamed past on their way to first period. And the packet itself had been absurd, an outer mailing envelope overlarge for what it had to contain, and a flat sweets box wrapped in two layers of kraft paper and that parcel tied with string and the knots sealed with crimson candle wax. And Ray’s
name was on it in pencil, presumably so it could be erased and the paper reused at some point. His name had been printed on the envelope and the inner parcel, both, in block letters.

He was calming down. Ray felt a kind of joy, handling the exhibits. Victor had been right to think that they meant something arresting about Davis Morel, although what they meant, exactly, it was difficult to say. They were at the very least suggestive of Ray’s idea that Morel was planning to set himself up as a part-time Antichrist of some kind.

There were four exhibits. Three were printed cards. Victor had noted on each one that it was a sample taken from a quantity of the same card. There were several hundred of each kind. Ray was relieved that Victor hadn’t gone on to make an exact count, which was the kind of thing he might well have done, for which Ray would have been obliged to praise him a lot.

The cards were four by six, on heavyish white stock, and professionally printed. Ray supposed that they were for handing out, primarily, although the typeface was large enough to permit display in the privacy of your own catacomb, say on your bedside table, or stuck into your shaving mirror. The cards bore free-thought slogans loosely speaking.

One read
The Creator, A Comedian Whose Audience Is Afraid to Laugh
, H. L. Mencken.

The next read
WHAT YOU MUST LEARN ABOVE ALL ELSE IS WHY YOU SAY YES
,
Der Jasager
, Bertolt Brecht.

The last one was, to Ray, weird. It read
SYSTEMS UNEQUAL TO THEIR WASTES ARE EQUAL TO ONE ANOTHER
. There was no attribution line. Ray felt that this was probably Morel’s own creation.

The remaining exhibit was different. It was a listing. It was for display, but probably for personal display, for Morel’s own personal display needs. The listing was, according to Victor’s note, in careful—probably meaning calligraphic—handwriting. Victor hadn’t, thank God, felt free to send the original, so he had recopied it in his own peculiar hand.

This is a pure mystery, Ray thought. He read the list again. It related to nothing he could think of. It seemed vaguely Latin American, but that told him nothing. A job, he thought. He was pleased. He locked everything away in the top drawer of his desk. His top drawer locked frontally and also from the left via a special bolt arrangement activated through a side drawer. It was his own arrangement. The top drawer was lined with galvanized iron, which he had fitted himself.

The mobashi had asked for him by name. The boy, not more than ten years old or so, had been pathetic, with an injured hand in a filthy improvised dressing, a train of scabs along one leg, arms like laths.

It had been unwise but he had given the boy money, which had prolonged the exchange between them and exposed Ray to more attention than had been necessary. It was certain that Victor had already paid the boy.

Sending the boy had been an error and being prodigal with him had probably been an error. He had given him a five-pula note and the boy had been stunned. Ray hoped he wouldn’t start hanging around.

But enough pity and terror for one day, he thought.

He wanted to know who was responsible for doing something for the bobashi. Someone had to be. It was terrible. There was something wonderful on poverty, in Herrick, but he couldn’t remember the whole thing. There were better quotations Morel could have used. Come to me next time, he thought. What was English Literature for, if not to constitute a midden of thought-gems so acute, so beautiful, so apt … But you needed a guide to get the best ones. On every side of every issue there were gems. He thought, Take Herrick: Poverty the greatest pack: To mortal men, great loads allotted be, but of all packs, no pack like poverty. Marxists don’t even know that it’s there. He should look it up. That also would calm him down, his books, sometimes just touching his books.