Mortals (63 page)

He was looking gaunt, there was no question about that. But a good bath would help and a careful shave would help and the end of the world would help.

Keletso had taken a chance. And then Ray had taken a chance. And it had been because they were both a little desperate for fresh fruit.

They had noted a solitary homestead just off the road, very tidy-looking, two rondavels inside a low mud wall painted in a red and black checkerboard pattern, and Keletso had decided it looked abandoned and that therefore there was no reason not to stop and go in and knock down a couple of pawpaws growing on a tree next to the main rondavel, the one with the trimmed thatch, the male rondavel, as they were called. Rondavels with untrimmed thatch, sometimes called weeping thatch for no reason Ray could think of, were considered female. They had passed other abandoned compounds along the way, more than a few when you added them up, especially in the last week.

How Keletso had been able to tell the compound was abandoned rather than merely vacant while its occupants went about their business elsewhere out in the bush had been unclear to him. And Keletso’s conviction about it had been called into question by the celerity with which he
had vaulted the wall and hauled himself up the tree and cut the fruit down and then gotten the hell out of there. And then there had been his not wanting to cut the fruit open until they were almost a kilometer, by Ray’s reckoning, from the compound.

Keletso had come back with two papayas, large ones, brownish and withered-looking. When they had stopped and rather feverishly cut them open, Keletso had rejected one of them as dubious but declared the other one, which looked identical to the one rejected in every way, fine to eat. The flesh of the supposedly fine pawpaw had been dark and hard and, in Ray’s opinion, soapy to the taste, but to be companionable he had eaten some, a small amount, while Keletso had eaten a lot, chewing heroically, and was now sick, vomiting, behind the vehicle.

But he himself was fine. In fact he was in an elevated state, he might say. Burning
Madame Bovary
had helped him deeply, somehow. They were in a broad, dry valley. They were suffering with the universal dustiness, but he wasn’t minding it. At some point in antiquity a river had run through this desert. It was impossible to imagine what that must have been like, not that he was trying very hard, because he was feeling elsewhere, he was feeling
above
things. He could enjoy small things like the rare moments of coolness when a cloud passed over. And also there were golden knobs of something, horse droppings, in the road, that looked aesthetic, at that moment.

He put his head out of the vehicle and asked, loudly, if he could get something for Keletso.

“Nyah, rra,” Keletso answered, with some difficulty. He wasn’t through retching.

Ray wanted to be cremated when he died. Definitely.

It had been the best idea, burning
Madame Bovary
. And he had another idea, a fine idea, and he was going to carry it out before anyone could object. He needed to hurry.

His passport was in the glove box. He extracted it and looked at it. He liked the color, navy blue. And he was proud of its thickness. Extra pages had been incorporated into it because he had used up the available space for visa stamps.

He got out of the vehicle, taking his passport with him. He walked up the road, toward a bobbing cloud of gnats. They would have to drive through it later.

He knew what Iris wanted. She wanted a different man. He could be a different man. When he returned he could be a different man.

Nothing could happen to him if he had his passport with him. That
was factual. Nothing could touch him once whoever came to oppress him, as people liked to say, saw his passport. The iron wings of the United States were over him, gently beating, wherever he went, so long as he had his passport to wave in the face of anyone who knew what was good for them. There was a skit going on. They were seeing evidence of fire again, lines of smoke, four of them at one time, once. The omens were that trouble was coming to meet him face to face. His passport made him a prince.

Keletso was part of his armor, too. And Keletso was going to have to go back. He set the passport on the ground, open, spine up, and with his cigarette lighter set the interior pages on fire.

He was proud of himself for a stupid reason. He had never memorized his passport number, a ten-digit thing. He didn’t know what his number was. But he had resisted the temptation to take a look at it before burning his document. He could pick things up in a flash. He was trained to do that. He would have remembered it and he would have been able to recite it if need be and that could have been a loophole, a loophole up his sleeve, conceivably. But he had resisted.

The pages were burning satisfactorily but not the cover, which was a plastic sort of fabric. He tried harder to get the cover to burn, picking it up and holding the lighter flame steadily at one corner. The cover began to curl and blacken and finally it began to melt. He was burning his fingers a little. He was succeeding. It was unrecognizable. Half of it was viscous. He mashed whatever was left of his passport into the sand.

Keletso surprised him. He stood up and faced him. Keletso looked ghastly and he would want to know what was going on. He hadn’t thought ahead.

“Rra, are you all right?” he asked Keletso.

“Ehe, rra, but I am empty and you must drive.”

“Of course.”

“Only until such time as I am recovered. I can have tea, I think. But what is this fire?”

“This fire is … a fire I just made.”

“Ehe, but why? What is it about?”

“Ah well, while I was waiting I saw these gnats and I thought while I was waiting I would go and smoke them out, smoke them away.”

“Nyah, that is just foolish, rra.”

“Yes, because you see they are still there. But it was just, what shall I call it, passing time till you came back.”

Keletso shook his head. He looked searchingly at Ray. He wanted to say something, clearly, but was thinking it over.

“I feel great,” Ray said.

“Nyah, it is not right. But come out of this sun. I must wash my teeth.”

Ray got back into the Land Cruiser. A blister was rising on the pad of his thumb.

He was going to feel elated, he knew it. He had done it. There was no color of protection in his remaining documents, his driver’s license, his letters of reference and authorization. Without a passport to accompany them, they would automatically be suspect. They would prove nothing.

He expected to feel fine soon, very soon.

K
eletso was asleep, which was good because he disapproved of Ray reading himself to sleep with the aid of a flashlight, because it was wasteful of batteries. He had never said anything directly, but Ray could tell how Keletso felt. There were plenty of batteries left anyway, and if not there should be batteries available in Nokaneng in whatever travesty of a general store they would find there. They would make it to Nokaneng easily tomorrow. Alternatively it was possible that the light from Ray’s reading activities made it hard for Keletso to fall asleep, not that there was the least evidence of that. Africans seemed very adapted to total darkness. In the villages you could find them sitting around having discussions in total darkness. Maybe their eyes were better. His eyes were still good. He was going to be forty-nine and his eyes were still good, knock wood. But there was no wood to knock. Forty-nine is not fifty, he thought. His eyes were better than Iris’s. She owned reading glasses but she was, he would say, a little furtive about using them, like someone in politics. Her eyes were beautiful things. When they got to Nokaneng he would begin to machinate to send Keletso home, out of this, out of the fire. He had to.

Tonight he had the back seat. For reading it was workable, but it was shallower and not as comfortable as the front seat. He had learned on this excursion that he could fall asleep in a propped-up position and stay asleep for as long as a couple of hours before cramping made him change his position. Also he had learned how inextricably connected, for him, reading and falling asleep had become. It was alarming. It had crept up on him and established itself and he had never noticed it because in his life, his
normal life, there was always a surplus of reading matter. And now his ability to fall asleep for the immediate future reposed on his brother’s what, his bits and pieces, his ejecta, his literary essence supposedly, his literary effrontery, his posturings. It didn’t matter. He had sworn he would read through his brother’s corpus, this ragbag pretending to be a florilegium, whatever it was. He could be fair, but he knew what he was going to find, to wit, the debris of Rex’s ambition to be the gay Mencken, one, or two, the gay La Rochefoucauld, or both.

He could begin anywhere. He could skip around from flotsam to jetsam. He had before him pages and pages of isolate phrases, sentences, paragraphs, each entry numbered, the numerals in ink, in differing hands, it looked like. There was plenty of white space. He had a twinge briefly relating to the fear that unless he rationed his reading, this collection wasn’t going to last him all that long. He was in a ridiculous position. The numbering of the different entries was not consecutive, which you would think meant that ultimately they would have to be reorganized consecutively, but according to what Rex had told Iris, no, the numbers were what, decorative. Iris had irritated him by referring to his brother’s slumgullion as a poem, some postmodern equivalent of the classic epic poems, some conceit like that which it would be no trouble to disprove.
Strange News
was something, but it was not going to be Milton.

He began with the face page.

There was a note in the margin, in pencil, in his brother’s microscopic penmanship, which gave him a stab.
Def.: the Homeless—Roofless Cosmopolitans
, Rex had written.

Ray saw that he was going to have to endure Rex’s penchant for antic capitalization.

That was odd, a synchronicity, given the sleeping situation he was stuck with. Synchronicity was boring. Keletso had an intermittent tendency to light snoring, to which Ray felt he had adapted pretty well, without complaining. He could sink directly back into sleep most of the time. It was part of life in the Kalahari. But what is life? he asked himself, taking a sheet of typescript at random from deeper in the stack of pages. I don’t like this, he thought, seeing what he had come up with.
Strange News
was turning into the
I Ching
on him. He resented it.

So what he had before him was Rex’s desperate attempts to achieve wit, and then what, then use it as a hammer to smash the stale cake of custom plus the frozen lake within and all of that, all of that wrongness, Wrongness. But Rex was not the soul of wit. Twice he had gotten his column suspended because his bons mots had given offense to women, in one case when he’d referred to them as
the leaky darlings
, which alluded tastelessly to the fact that they menstruate and are sentimental and prone to weeping, and then in another case when he’d called them the Cleft Sex. He was reckless. Rex had been writing for gay publications, and Ray could see that he’d been attempting to carry off a sort of parody of old-hat gay attitudes toward women, but he’d misjudged his readers and the power the new literalism had over them. In the same spirit he had defined
men as the Apposite Sex, but he hadn’t gotten in hot water over that. Probably people had just found it baffling and gone quickly past.

I am not your editor, Ray wanted to say. But that was going to be the plot. He was designated to boil this froth down into a bouillon cube of near greatness, even if there was only enough for a chapbook of the best thrusts and gems, to be given away, distributed somehow to some population he had no idea how to identify or reach. But he had to, because Rex wasn’t well. There was strange news coming, bad news, and there was nothing he could do about it. This was what he could do. This was his fate, part of it. It was hard to credit.

An unwelcome sound came from the front seat, followed by a few low-spoken unintelligible words of, conceivably, apology. Barely audible mutterings could be called mutterances, why not? Suppose I had turned my mind to producing glittering nothings like Rex’s, what would I have? he thought.

He plucked out another sheet at random and there was more synchronicity for him, annoyingly. Entry 308 was death-related. Or more precisely, it was life-residue-related. He ought to stop the random selection business for a while. He was toying with some imaginary thing. It wasn’t good.