Mortals

of Reference, one, two, three. That is all.”

“Let me go and search. It was there.”

“Nyah. Give me your hat, rra.”

“Why?”

That was wrong. Nemesis reached over and plucked Ray’s hat off, made a cursory examination of its interior and threw the hat aside. Ray knew he would now be asked to stand and turn his pockets out.

That happened. Afterward, he was allowed to sit again. His hat was not returned. There had been nothing of interest in his pockets. He should be pleased with himself, since the point of tearing his passport to bits and burning it had surely been to court something just like this, the scene he was in, or entering. Or at least not to be under its protection during it.

Nemesis was leafing through Strange News.

The man was superior in rank to his associates. Ray decided to rename him Uno. What he had seen of Uno’s mouth and chin and his eyes would be enough to identify him whenever, if ever, he saw him unmasked. I have my skills, Ray thought.

And Uno’s immense arms would help identify him, although overmusculature was not in short supply in this milieu, from what he could judge of Uno’s associates. And the degree of physical development they displayed meant some formal training regimen, with weights, and that led back to koevoet and to the South African Defence Force’s special units division. Lips were more individual than teeth, often. He would know Uno. And voices were absolutely individual, miraculously.

Uno shouted something and made a slashing gesture and Ray knew what was coming and he was right. The engine went silent. That was fateful. A corner had been turned. They were not going to send him on his way. He was ready.

The sun was beginning to hurt. He was drying up. His lips felt like balsa.

Perversely, it had been a relief when the engine was shut off. It made his path clearer. He was in the cup. For how long, he couldn’t guess. He was feeling better, definitely. He had an image for his sense of improvement. It was that there was an outline around his body, invisible but real, and that now he was expanding, his self was, to fit it, snugly.

“You are not BDF,” Ray said. He felt he needed to be more resistant. He needed to sow a few pips that would grow up to give pause, hints, hints of threats.

He went on. “I want you to understand something, rra. I am expected in Maun this week. If I am not back there soon there will be an alarm. I am performing a mission for the Ministry of Education…”

Uno cut him short. “Yah, I see your Letter of Remit. It is a lie. It is nothing. Why would you be carrying on with this mission whilst you are in the midst of bandits? Why shall you come out in the midst of burning and fighting? They are burning everything hereabout. They think it is SouthWest coming again.”

That was interesting. Ray was seeing something in the shape of events that he had missed before. The Boers were finished in SouthWest. In fact, there was no SouthWest. It was Namibia. SWAPO had won. The Boer death squads that had been in action there, like koevoet, had been pushed out but had reconstituted themselves as mercenary veteran outfits operating out of floating camps in eastern Angola, where Savimbi was in charge, or up in Zaire. They had numerous sponsors. Some of the nicest governments in the world were sponsoring them, off the books of course. He could imagine Boyle imagining the possibility of a linkup between SWAPO and ISA. He could imagine Boyle selling his paranoia to goromente and/or vice versa. Things were going haywire in Zimbabwe, but Boyle was fixating strictly on Namibia and its discontents, on a country one-twelfth as significant as Zimbabwe. God save us from the geopolitical mind, he thought. Boyle understood nothing when it came to ISA. Ray had done what he could to make him understand. It had been pointless, useless. I know Kerekang, Ray thought. He had a moment of agony caused by the feeling that he himself could sort everything out, given a modicum of power, he could. But he had no power.

“Oh God,” he said, unintentionally. He hated himself for it. It had been fervent.

Uno looked at him with interest. He wondered if Uno was religious and if some specious bond had been accidentally forged between them by his outcry. He wondered if something could be done with the impression, which he could amplify, that they were cobelievers, if one had been created. There was no conflict between being a murderous thug and being a believer, being a pious thug. They were everywhere. His intuition was that there was something here to work with. But he was tired. What he wanted was to get out of the sun.

A drumfire of unintelligible exclamations was coming from the associates as they rummaged through everything in the Land Cruiser. Uno seemed not to be attending much to them, though.

“Oh God,” Ray said again inadvertently.

Uno regarded him oddly.

“Yah, God sees us.” Uno’s tone was interesting.

“He sure does,” Ray said. It wasn’t what he’d wanted to say. What he wanted to say on the subject of theology was something more like If God existed he would turn every scene of impending violence into electrifying tableau, he would drench every scene of impending murder with X rays that would show all parties that they were gesturing skeletons, brothers under the skin, pathetic. He could imagine it, imagine something like a phosphorus shell going off and making everything transparent and leaving all concerned too bemused to kill each other. He wanted to express something like that, but it would take more energy than he had to spare.

“Jesus must come,” Uno said.

Ray couldn’t think of how to play this intelligently. He wanted his hat back. His other nemeses, who were manhandling his goods in the Land Cruiser, had evidently found something exciting. They were Ovambo, definitely. They were unintelligible to him. He was missing some opening with Uno. His mind was everywhere. Far away to his right off in the haze he could see tiny white objects he believed were marabou storks, four of them. People traveled long distances to see marabou storks. The storks were moving around fitfully. They were carrying out their mission in life.

Ray said, “Yes, Jesus is coming soon, they say. And it will be judgment for all.”

Uno was nodding vigorously. He seemed mournful. He stood up. He was being summoned to the Land Cruiser.

“Come right back,” Ray said. He was reaching the point of being nonsensical. It was the sun doing it. It was torture, pure and simple. He could probably amble over to retrieve his hat and get away with it, but he wouldn’t do it. Obedience was the ticket, for the moment anyway. And there was another consideration arising. He had to think of Iris. It would be impossible for her if anything really terrible happened to him. She didn’t need that. He hadn’t really thought clearly enough before about what it would do to her if anything genuinely terrible came to pass with him. His thinking was too volatile. He was leaving things out. One way you could tell if baldness was starting to pluck at you was if you noticed that for the first time when you happened to pat your head after you’d been out in the sun it was tender, or if your wife happened to pat your head affectionately then.

Uno trotted past, not looking his way, clutching to his chest the consolidated Strange News manuscript. They had the whole thing now.

Sol Invictus was the Roman name for the sun, which they’d worshiped. He could understand worshiping something powerful and inexorable that there was nothing you could do about, he supposed.

The storks were gone. He had been right, they were storks. It was important to be right.

Uno had disappeared around the curve of the road. Ray waited.

Finally Uno reappeared. Another figure, a stocky man in regular military kit but wearing a kepi, came out into the road. He was holding Strange News. He was Caucasian. His face was ruddy. He was too far away to make out clearly. You’ll see him again, closer up, don’t worry, Ray thought.

Uno returned, trotting again, carrying a blindfold and plastic handcuffs.

29. Riding on Events

He was a bundle in a bakkie. He was being conveyed somewhere. He was blindfolded, his hands were cuffed behind him, he was a bundle bouncing on the naked metal bed of a bakkie. He could sit up,