Mortals

Inspector Lestrade, on television? Granada television, British, but it was shown all over the Commonwealth, like Mr. Bean was, which I know they had on in South Africa. Lestrade was my brother’s idea. He sold it to the producers.”

A snort of disgust from Quartus or the other was his only reply. Ray didn’t care. Rex deserved credit. The concept, built on reversals, was clever. In the series the thickheaded Inspector Lestrade of the Doyle stories was instead a brilliant Scotland Yard detective perennially harassed by a bumbling, intruding, fantastical screwball Sherlock Holmes, a formerly celebrated consultant to Scotland Yard who had gone off the rails through cocaine abuse. That was the nut of it. Lestrade had provided a steady trickle of money to Rex, culminating in a really handsome lump-sum payment during the ultimately abortive run-up to a feature film version of the property. Ray had never wanted to know the details. He had avoided paying close attention to his brother’s coups and deals, out of envy, pure and simple. And he had erected an unjust caricature of his brother as someone who scanned the world for literary cultural figures people got pleasure out of and turned them into figures of fun. He had seen him as a specialist in mockery, a mercenary specialist in mockery, but where had that come from? There was only Lestrade, as an exhibit. And Rex thought of things and gave them away, too, he should remember. For example he had given away gratis the idea for a short subject consisting of three or four minutes of banal family drama and twenty minutes of credits, a thing that had been a hit for somebody in art house cinemas during the period when movies of sleeping people, Warhol movies, had been in vogue. The film had won a prize, in those stupid days when prizes were awarded for flies crawling up walls. He wanted to tell his brother something. He was sorry for certain things. People had apparently found the movie with tedious credits hilarious. And Lestrade looked like becoming a permanent cult item. His brother’s name was there forever in the credits, which was immortality of a sort, more than he himself would ever have. Rex had probably been looking for a reaction from him, anything, and he hadn’t given one. He was sorry.

He said, “It’s a parody of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. It makes an idiot out of Sherlock Holmes. You can rent it.”

It was oddly interesting to return to Lestrade, which, of course, had been a delayed attack on his own personal boyhood cult of Sherlock Holmes. He had wanted to be Sherlock Holmes.

Quartus said, “That’s enough.”

“This is interesting. You watch television. Of course you do. It’s on videocassette. Maybe you’ve seen it.

“By the way, the whole thing was an attack on me. Because Holmes was a hero of mine. I was bookish. I read all the Holmes stories over and over and forward and backward, really. When I’d read them all I was very depressed that there weren’t any more of them. Anyway, my brother made Holmes an idiot, in this series. And he made the true hero gay, by the way, a poefter, to you. Ah well…”

He was struck on the neck. It was pro forma.

He hadn’t thought about his Sherlock Holmes phase in years. It had been important. He had saved money in his adolescence to buy a book of pastiches of the Holmes stories, a limited edition, by a man named August Derleth. They had supposedly been the best of the pastiches produced by fans of Holmes who wanted more. But they had been inadequate. Reading them had made him feel worse.

“This is real,” he said. They wouldn’t get it.

Another hit to the neck came, more a swipe than a hit.

He was having insights, ridiculously. He understood something that had been pestering him. He had made a deduction. Recently he had developed a slight mania to have something in his right hand to grasp, like a tube of Chap Stick or a pen cap. It was the recurrence of a mild grasping mania that had surfaced earlier in his life during periods of stress, although mania was too strong a term for it. Out in the Kalahari it had resurfaced and it had only defined itself as a problem when he had to take over the driving, because he needed the use of both hands, obviously. He had never inquired into it, this tic. It had been transient enough that he had never bothered to ponder where it came from. He was feeling the need just then, even. It was present. But now he understood why.

“You know what,” he heard himself saying, stupidly.

He ignored a shouted question about Toromole, another one. Because what he was onto was much more interesting. It was as though lights on the bottom of a swimming pool had been switched on, showing various bodies in the depths, some moving, some not. It was as though the light pouring up was hot and was showing or melting little frozen scenes from his early life, his early boring life. He wanted to look at these things but stay safely above them. Scenes starring himself were lighting up, saying Hi. This was nothing Quartus could understand. He felt like calling him Watson, but he wouldn’t. It would be funny to address Quartus as My Dear Fellow, except that it wouldn’t, it would only mystify him more.

There was another slap. Quartus said something unclear. Ray’s ears were ringing. They were interrupting his thoughts.

Now the gripping-tic could go away. It might. He knew where it came from. In his boyhood he had owned and loved a little lead toy, a rocket ship, blue and white, with minute pulley wheels set between the top fins so that Buck Rogers could be sped along a taut length of string to get him to wherever he and Wilma and Doctor Huer had to be. He had loved Buck Rogers. And he had loved the goddamned rocket ship, and somehow clutching it had gotten associated over time with falling easily asleep. It had been an intermittent practice but it had persisted as he what, adolesced, persisted longer than it should have because it was so inconspicuous a thing to do. It was his version of a teddy bear. He had pretty much forgotten about all this. He had hung on to the rocket ship and how peculiar was that considering that millions of grown Greek men never leave home without their worry beads, which in his humble opinion was not so far out of the rocket ship bailiwick?

And he had kept his ship cached in a tobacco pouch nailed to the wall behind the headboard of his bed, cached along with kid contraband like the occasional cigarette that had come his way and his first condom, lonely thing sitting there endlessly. And then at some point his ship had disappeared. And he had known in his heart it was Rex. There had been no one else to suspect. And all his maneuvers to force him to confess had failed. And the option of bringing it up with their mother had been unthinkable. How old had he been when it had happened? He didn’t know, but old enough for the issue to be a humiliation. And he had done a magnificent job repressing all this until now, if he did say so himself.

He was thinking of thanking Quartus for the insight when he was slapped smartly on the mouth. His face was going to swell. The level of pain was rising and was not as episodic as he would have liked. He wasn’t cooperating. They were saying that.

What else was there about the rocket ship and why had all this disappeared until now? Well, in fact, the ship had been the size of a solid, erect penis, or a little under, but as a proxy penis it certainly made sense. Deep in his soul he had been terrified of masturbation. He had been so infrequent a masturbator as a boy he hardly qualified for the title. He had been afraid. From their mother had come the message that the practice was terrible and weak and it had somehow gotten firmly into his mind that losers masturbated and that winners in the life game didn’t because they didn’t need to. And then of course the fact was that his brother had been a precocious and florid masturbator, not that their mother had known anything about it, but Rex had gone out of his way to let Ray know what was going on with him. MASTURBATION IS SELF-RAPE was something he had seen written on a bathroom wall in junior high.

This must be therapy, he thought. He was going to change his opinion about therapy.

“This is therapy,” he said, not that Quartus would understand. He didn’t care, and said, “I don’t care about much that much.” He wasn’t making sense.

Quartus was saying something about Cuba Ray couldn’t follow. He had a headache, so his head was hurting from the inside out as well as from the outside in, from the hits and smacks it had taken.

Apparently Quartus had found something about Cuba in Strange News. Ray was tired, but it would be good if he could somehow point out to Quartus that he was being inconsistent in the way he handled the material in Strange News. Because on the one hand he was claiming everything was coded and on the other he was picking out statements like the statements about Reagan that he regarded as openly subversive, inflammatory. So how logical was it that his brother’s book was both things at once? It was too subtle, though. Also how could he explain his brother’s cold eye on certain anecdotes that were bound to strike Quartus as leftish, but that Rex was registering for purposes of mockery, like the one that was very deadpan about the young woman who had abandoned her master’s thesis on Sartre after she realized he was a smoker, a