Mortals (52 page)

“I’ll tell you what he wants from you, if you let me.”

“Tell.”

“He wants you to read it and judge it. He wants a trained literary intelligence to read it and judge it. And I don’t mean sample it and judge it, I mean
read
it and judge it …”

Thousands
of pages, he thought. He realized unhappily that he was incorporating into his consciousness Morel’s theory of religion as a conspiracy against free time and applying it a little differently, free time being mortal time, limited, limited, applying it to other, what, entities, like family I hate you, families as blind machines using up their progeny with demands on their time, whatever was left of their lives, the progenies’ lives, the time before the toad arrives, death the toad. But I have no children, he thought. He knew through Pony that on the wall in Morel’s meeting room was a papier-mâché Mexican carnival mask with a toad or lizard occluding the smiling face.

“Ray, he wants to know if this is a brilliant thing, major, or if it’s a failure and a mistake. He doesn’t know, Ray.”

“What about the possibility he’s done something in between, something pretty good, say?”

“I don’t think you’re going to think it’s mediocre.”

Ray said, “I’ll do this. I’ll do my best.”

“Ray, look straight at me when you say that.”

He did. “I’ll do my best.”

“Because I want you to say this as your
self
.”

“Don’t follow.”

“There is a difference between
being
yourself and
playing
yourself, which is something we all do. You do it when you’re tired and want to get through something that’s difficult in some way. Men do it more, I think. I don’t think I do it much at all anymore, since I started going to Davis. But the paradox here is that since I started going to Davis you’re doing it more. But please don’t do it now.”

“I am now not doing it, to the best of my knowledge.”

She didn’t like that answer, clearly. All this for my brother, he thought. It was baffling that Rex was making an appeal to the bond between them that Rex himself had sought all his life to deny and destroy.

Ray’s experience of brotherhood was hardly what anyone thought. Brotherhood, or brothership, a better word for it, had been something he had gotten from being in the agency, even if, except for his friendship with blessed Marion, it had been more abstract than not, an appreciation of membership in a male alliance, it was like, he imagined, being with the Allied armies during World War II, despite pattern bombing and the betrayal of the White Russians. He had a live brother, no thank you very much, who had made brotherhood odious, gone out of his way to do that. He wondered if the attraction the agency had always had for him would have been there if his experience of brotherhood with Rex had been normal. He felt pathetic for a moment, which enraged him.

“Ray, I know I’m putting you in a hard place. You can tell I want you to think this thing is wonderful …”

“A masterpiece, if at all possible.”

“Of course. That would be my dream.”

“But of course I can’t promise to like it.”

“No, and if it turns out you don’t, I’m going to ask you to agree to something in advance. Will you?”

“Will I what?”

“Will you agree that if you don’t like it you are going to negotiate with me what you are going to say?”

“You mean the
wording
?”

“More than that, really.”

“You mean you want veto power, or what? I am having difficulty with this.”

“What I want is your agreement to negotiate with me as to what gets said to Rex, but that I get to decide, when it comes down to it.”

“This is like nothing I ever heard of, my weird woman.”

“Now you’re hearing of it.”

“I mean, am I cognizing here that I’m supposed to let my judgment about this thing come out as a lie, at your hands, is that it? If this is not a masterpiece?”

“Yes, but before I answer that … well I just did answer it, but what I meant to say is that there are certain things you need to know.”

She was about to weep again, he could tell, it was coming. He wanted to be kissing her face and fucking her, but this had to be gone through, which was a shame because he was floating on a wave of heat toward her, real heat, the kind that dissolves everything into hot perfect form, perfection renewed. Everything dissolved into the fevered onset, in that state of heat, milk glands being palpated were transformed into different items, different, celestial items separate from any function. It was a realm and he could be in it, like that, if she would finish with this, with his brother, sometime this century.

“Don’t be upset, Iris. Okay, it’s a deal. Reminds me of when somebody asks you for a reference and you say You write it I’ll sign it, but …”

“Then thank God,” she said.

What was this? She was almost vibrating. Part of it might be jetlag, but what was he missing?

“Two, then, Ray, you also have to promise to do this with speed. You have to address it right away. Can you do that?”

“Wait a minute. How can I promise that? You’re talking about thousands of pages of …”

“Yes, but some pages have only the one sentence, so … At least can you say that you’ll try? I’ll make it easy for you. I won’t bother you. I …”

“I want you to bother me. That’s the point.”

“Please agree to this.”

It was too much. He was being bullied. But she was almost vibrating. He nodded.

She was wringing her hands, not something he could remember seeing her do, ever.

“The importance of this … You know, how he sent this to me.

“He knew I was leaving by a certain date and he wanted me to carry it
personally to you and he hadn’t even finished photocopying. One thing I have to do first is take care of that, maybe at St. James. Of course I assume he has the original drafts these pages came from, in some form or other. But it needs to be photocopied straight through. I won’t ask you to do that …”

“Oh thanks.”

“So what he did was send this to me by courier. And I don’t mean by a courier service. It was a friend of his.”

“He paid a friend of his to
bear
this to you?”

“No that’s another remarkable thing about this. He didn’t pay him. This guy paid his own plane fare, Armand. This is just someone who loves your brother. He has a kind of group, or following, Rex.”

“Some sort of homosexual what, um, would you call it, homosexual what would you say, civil rights group?”

“Oh they’re gay, but that’s not what defines them. They’re friends of his. They love him. Can you imagine …”

“Not really.”

“You know what I mean. It’s remarkable. I can’t imagine people doing that for me.”

“Please calm yourself, babe. It’s okay. My babe. Please.”

“I’m almost fine,” she said. “Just one more thing I need you to do. Ah wait. I have to go to the bathroom again, oh thank you … 
Please
retain what it is you did to my feet. I am so relieved. I just need you to read two things of Rex’s. In his handwriting. Just these two things I need you to read and I think you’ll … you’ll see what I see. You’ll see it. I’ll get them.” She left the room rapidly.

He waited. Family I hate you, he thought. He was dreading something, with Rex. He thought he knew what it was, but why she hadn’t been more direct about it, if he was right, was more than he could figure out just then. His brother had some weird charm, or charisma, even. It was an ancient mystery. Now Iris was in his thrall, if that was the right word. Somehow Rex had always possessed what could only be called glamour, he supposed, as peculiar as that was.

The problem with Iris conducting him into this prolonged new waltz with his brother was that it was energizing and resurrecting memories and incidents he had successfully and happily forgotten. Pick a scab, any scab, he wanted to say to her sometime when she was stirring up the sediments of his past. The idea that it was helpful to go back and relive the most annoying passages of your life was one of the dumbest notions ever to acquire a following. He had read something by or referring to a therapist who specialized in treating Holocaust survivors who had come to the
conclusion, after years of the opposite approach, that the survivors who had done the best job of repressing their hideous experiences were the best off, the happiest, the most successful, and that the practice of reliving was ruinous for a lot of the relivers, ruinous. But who knows? he thought. Of course Morel would be all for reanimating injustices, dead things, like Frankenstein, no doubt.

He had to have her. He had to be careful. He had to be gradual. He could do prolonged kissing all over her body, in some pattern he would think of, and postpone touching her puss and going in until she said uncle, please, enough. Of course that was fine as a plan but less fine as a campaign on the ground because it got him too fucking hot too soon, her too. It was possible he could surprise her with how long the kissing would go on. She would be expecting something else. It had to be fine between them, that way. It had to, with Morel hovering, it had to.

Rex was clever. He granted that. And he would like to forget it if he could. It had been his luck to have as his brother a sacred monster. The designation had never occurred to him before, but it was apt, and it was a little comforting.

Here was Iris. She handed him two airletters dated well before her trip, with certain sections checkmarked. Then she turned and went to her luggage and began rooting through it for something, another piece of writing, which she found and brought to him, murmuring that he should take his time while she took care of a couple of things. She fiddled with the papers, arranging them in the order she wanted them read, before leaving the room. She was agitated.

He took up his task, thinking Love your enemies. She seemed to have it askew, poor dodo. She seemed to love
his
enemies, his brother. She was indiscriminate. She loved the world, and insofar as he could love it at all, it was via her in some way. He should tell her that, or, rather, never tell her that. She would resent it. In her place he would hate it. It would make her responsible for him just at the moment she was what, experimenting with her feelings or whatever she was doing. It would be fatal to interfere with that. He had to keep her, keep her or what, die, was his situation.

Iris reentered. She presented him with a magnifying glass, a surprise. She left again, hurrying.

He hadn’t known she owned a magnifying glass. He did appreciate having the use of it, not because there was anything wrong with his eyesight, but because his brother’s small but perfectly formed handwriting could be a trial for anyone. Rex’s excruciated hand was on the border between the eccentric and the insane, in his opinion. Good eyesight ran
in his family. He needed to be attentive to reading in a good light more now than previously, was all. He would begin in a minute.

He had to get going. He would like to know what, exactly, she was doing, as he began. He held his breath to help him listen in her direction, for any clues. He thought she was on the phone. He wasn’t sure.

Item one before him was a segment of Rex’s tips for long-absent returning natives, a joke genre created specifically for Iris’s benefit that of course relied on the canard that Iris was hearing nothing about movements and events in American cultural life from her husband, not to mention that she was herself an assiduous reader of everything from the
International Herald Tribune
to
The New Yorker
. Rex obviously wanted him to be a what, a stumbling block, an incubator of ignorance.

Here was his brother: