Mortals

Shall we watch TV?

X said, “That’s what it’s for.”

X said, “I really think people watch television because there’s too much to read.”

Where are you going?

“Out this door,” X said.

It was clear that a penstroke had converted an original J to X. J would be Rex’s Joel, these were echoes of Joel.

Not all were cases of camouflage, only some.

His brother was sick. He could be dying. He could be dead. Ray couldn’t bear it. He would work with the fact that Strange News was a melange, workroom scraps, with lame political shots and shafts that would get dated. Rex’s trust in a campaign of bons mots against the world’s evil was touching. He believed more in the power of the word than Ray did. Rex had no idea how solid the machine in the basement was. He was an innocent. Literature is humanity talking to itself, Ray thought. Rex thought it was more. Ridicule changed nothing. If its targets even noticed it, all it did was madden them. Ray had the beginnings of a fair collection of narrative-like entries to use for soporific purposes.

There were little lists of enemies in different spheres of the arts that were going to be difficult for Ray to edit because so many of the names were unfamiliar to him. He had to be careful. Some categories could be combined, he supposed, like the Wisdom of the Mob and the Wisdom of the People entries. The Mob wasn’t the Mafia. The Overheards could remain, or most of them could.

408. Overheard I

At a party one time I asked who a familiar-looking ancient guy was. He could hardly stand up. X couldn’t remember his name but said he was a Yale Younger Poet.

X said The best way to keep a secret is not to tell it to anyone.

This is true. A woman I know went to a psychotherapist and was upset when the diagnosis she got was that basically she was too greedy.

I feel so good after a high-fat meal I could run around the block and beat the shit out of somebody, unfortunately.

Man and wife were buying sundries in a job-lot discount emporium. The woman filled her basket and took it to the counter to pay for her choices. Her husband, who was handling tools in the hardware section, suddenly ran up and added a hammer to her purchases. “We have a hammer,” she said. “So, I’m getting another one. It’s cheap.” “Why would we need two hammers?” “I’m getting this. We need it in case two people have to hammer at the same time.”

Hey how about air burial for pilots and stewardesses and plane passengers who die in flight.

It was more fun than eating on the roof.

My penis is sensitive lately.

Well I should hope.

His problem is he can’t tell his anus from the Mammoth Cave or some other tourist attraction like that.

Ray realized that he was encountering very little gay matter in Strange News. Has it been sanitized? he wondered. Because it would be logical to have something so central represented, if this was Rex’s true monument. Anything he could learn on the subject from Rex would be fine with him. But maybe there was nothing to learn and it was what it was and that was it. Something else was hanging over his efforts. He might as well acknowledge it. It was possible he was searching for something directed openly to him, some statement or apology or he didn’t know what, something.

All he could do was doctor this chowder he had been given. A certain amount of shuffling was required. For example All Power to the Country Clubs! should go into the Cries and Chants for Sale section, and maybe Put Paid to Poverty! which he had apparently thought of as something appropriate to the British Labour Party. If the gay aspect had been left out by Rex himself, the reason might have been to make Ray love him as a soul, if he thought Ray held that against him. Ray was tired. Nobody likes to say goodbye, he thought. His eyes were burning. Tears rushed from my eyes, Keletso had said in some connection. That’s what he needed. There was a jingle going through his mind, ending mea culpa youa culpa din dan don, which was from “Frere Jacques,” the din dan don, if he was right. People separated from their siblings in childhood moved heaven and earth to find them, these days, to get back in touch. He knew he had been singing a deformed “Frere Jacques” to himself as mental background music. What could he do? He was far from sleep. Now his brother was trying to kill him with love, with guilt, with proof he should have appreciated him. Too much is enough, he thought. He would be able to sleep nevertheless. The span of time he could sleep soundly in untoward positions was lengthening. But sleep had to come knocking. We can be wrong, he thought. We can be wrong about anybody, he thought. His eyes were tearing, a little. It was the Titles sections that hurt the most, stung hardest, because presumably they stood for ideas for potential books, articles a healthy person might have attempted. The Importance of Being Important, The Future Assembles, All I Can Tell You Is This, The Urbane Guerrilla: Etiquette for Revolutionaries, and another similar one, Out to Luncheon: Notes Toward a More Elegant Mode of Disparagement… The Bungless Cask… Fumes from a Vial of Wrath… Flea Circus Rebellion. Rex tried things. He wasn’t afraid not to be great. I have to honor that, Ray thought. Pity was attacking him, threatening to fill him up. He was fatigued. There were animal eyes out in the darkness that flashed when he swept the flashlight beam around. They were low to the ground so were, presumably, attached to bush babies or some small and similarly unthreatening species. Ray pulled out a few narrative entries to read.

803. Friends

Two friends who worked in different departments of a Catholic orphanage met to talk. The kindergarten director had recently begun working additionally part-time in a different institution, a state mental health facility, one evening a week, teaching crafts to adolescent patients. She wondered if her friend might be interested in joining her.

Sylvia, the art therapist, said, “You know, I might. It would be easy for me. You know what we did today, for example? I brought in shoe polish…”

“What kind of a project can you do with shoe polish?”

“I brought in shoe polish and they played odds and evens and the winner got to polish my boots.”

He thought he could go to sleep.

He slept.

26. This Dead, Thin Person

When the explosion occurred, it made Ray wonder if somehow the future was an already