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.
Keletso 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.
He began with the face page.
Arm the Homeless!
What do we want?
We don’t know!
When do we want it?
All Together Now: Every Man for Himself! (Libertarians)
Power to the Feeble! (Left)
Reason’s Greetings! (atheists, holiday card)
There was a note in the margin, in pencil, in his brother’s microscopic penmanship, which gave him a stab.
Ray saw that he was going to have to endure Rex’s penchant for antic capitalization.
Proof God loves us is that he makes us deaf to the vile, wracking snores we emit that so torment those who choose to sleep beside us.
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.
Life is a sentence of corporeal punishment. Or, Life is corporeal punishment. Life, passages of Sturm interrupted by sequences of Drang. From puberty to senility life is continuous foreplay interrupted with declining frequency by actual sex.
