Mortals

affirmative. For example, what did it mean that her husband botched an operation on some poor devil with a clubfoot, making it worse, making him lose his leg? Poor Charles does it out of hubris stoked by delusions about what he was competent to do. So was the analogy the agency, the agency’s interventions, the agency’s hubris, and his part in what she might think the agency was up to? He was feeling paranoid. He was hoping this was paranoia. He had to get up and move around. His back was killing him.

He walked in a circle around the dying fire. He was still enclosed in the quasi-tent, carrying it with him like a fool of some kind. He needed to list the options he had for interpreting what she had done to him, putting Madame Bovary in his hands. But fire interrupted him, a bloom of flame declaring itself around him, dragging the breath out of his lungs. The netting had gone up. He had dragged it across an ember. He pitched the burning mass away. He was all right. He was trembling. His hair had gotten singed in back, was all. He had made a spectacle. Keletso was coming to him.

Nothing in Africa is fireproof, he thought.

It was morning and somewhere in their cargo was a magnifying mirror. He needed it.

He found it in among the first aid paraphernalia. His reflected image was not gratifying. He was less presentable than was good and less presentable than he’d expected. He had a mild burn on the back of his right hand that looked worse than it was because the Vaseline he’d smeared on it seemed to highlight it. He touched it and it hardly hurt. If he ruffled his hair he could still produce a shower of black specks, bits of charred hair. A good shampooing would take care of that. He would never understand why people insisted on saying they had circles under their eyes, dark circles, when what they had were semicircles. No one had circles under their eyes. The lashes of his right eye were mostly gone. He asked himself if it might be a good idea to trim off the lashes of his left eye in the interest of symmetry and the answer was no, it was an extreme idea and in addition his hands were too unsteady. That would pass, like everything. He could keep the idea under advisement.

On waking he had found himself in possession of the conviction that yes, providing Madame Bovary had been deliberate, but that the point of doing it had been precisely to show him that she was fundamentally innocent, so innocent that she felt free to include the inflammatory thing in his reading because, precisely because, it meant nothing and was there only because it was something he had in fact said he hadn’t finished reading. So it had been a deliberate declaration of innocence. But that conviction had proved to be delicate. He had lost it. He had lost his grip on it during breakfast. He had held it too hard. He had crushed it.

But he had gotten rid of the Bovary enigma anyway, another way. He had gotten rid of it the way Johnson refuted Bishop Berkeley, in that spirit, at least. He had been creative and burned the thing, pushing it into the embers of the breakfast fire. He resented mystery and he had dissolved that one by destroying the occasion of it, the object, the evidence. He knew himself. Know thyself, he said to himself, for reinforcement. If he had hung on to Bovary he would have returned to it for obsessive research. So he had saved himself. And already it was easier to stay longer with the idea that the whole thing had been a mistake, a betise on her part, something she had done automatically in the rush of throwing his personal supplies together for him. He had to focus on how much she wanted him not to limit his leisure reading to crap, even the better sort of crap, vintage Penguin mysteries, Dorothy Sayers and Simenon, and how much she wanted him to use that for filling holes in his lacunae, which was an incorrect construction, a betise, like saying someone has a loophole up his sleeve, but not exactly like it. Iris had made up the loophole phrase, being funny. He was losing a funny woman.

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