chain-smoker, abandoned it halfway through. Nothing is simple, he thought, Rex’s attitude toward Cuba was focused on Castro’s antigay policies. But all Quartus was seeing was the word Cuba. One thing Ray knew was that Cuba was the only country in the world where married men were required by law to do one-half of the housework. That was just a fact. It didn’t relate to what he wanted to say. He was too tired.
Quartus seemed far away. His voice was rubbery, going from close to far or from loud to soft. It was stretching away from him. Ray needed to steady himself. He thought of singing a slow song inside his mind, like “Old Man River.” He made himself do it.
The oddness passed. He felt steadier. Although it would be good not to think about rivers, water, brooks, because he was thirsty. He had to steer his thoughts away from that.
Nothing was going on, suddenly. He was alone there.
It was boring, waiting. He wanted them to come back. He wanted to see what they would do next. In fact he wanted them to do their worst and get it over with. There was plenty they could do, even if they were trying hard to keep from marking him up too much.
They hadn’t pushed his head back and poured water down his nostrils, for example. They were playing, petting him. The thought depressed him. He was violating his own rule about not thinking about water.
I need to concentrate on my distractions, he thought. He resumed listening conscientiously for anything interesting going on in the vicinity. He could make out music distantly issuing from a radio or cassette player and it was “Rivers of Babylon,” a song he knew, sung by Boney M, a soft reggae piece that had gotten popular in southern Africa and been immortalized on the background-music tape loop that was never changed year after year at the President Hotel.
He had to conceal from them how thirsty he was, when they came back. He would think about water but try to extract something from the images if he could, instead of suffering from them. He could try it, anyway.
He would let himself relive going to Orcas Island with Iris, years ago, in August, on vacation. The San Juan Islands constituted a terrestrial paradise. They always would be, for him, a drenched, moist paradise, emerald- green humps sticking up from the gray waters of Puget Sound, silken, the waters, in some places and in other places herringbone. They had stayed at the Rosario Hotel, a rara avis of a hotel, a hybrid of mission style and art deco, built on the beach of an inlet, steep green hills making an amphitheater around the harbor, the jetties, the pleasure craft.
And at first, when there was no sun, they were unhappy. But then they had gotten more than used to the cloudiness, the fog, the periods of soft rain, the mist sticking in the tops of the firs until noon every day and then lifting. So it had been an apotheosis of succulence, moisture, and they had embraced it.
And they had walked everywhere on the one-lane roads of the hiking paths forking through jungles, evergreen jungles was what they were, the deadfall so thick you had to stick to the trails. And then coming on the little vestpocket farms with chive-green meadows and a few cows or sheep for decoration. Every shade of green was represented perfectly somewhere on Orcas Island. So then the one time they had ventured off the marked trail and gone wandering through the brush they had stumbled on an abandoned cottage, abandoned for some time obviously because the firewood in its crib had rotted away and there were furnishings going to pot visible through the windows, and then she had found a tricycle completely involved in vines, abandoned in the yard, invisible until she almost tripped over it. And that had been melancholy for her. And for him.
She was tender. When they had hiked to the top of Mount Constitution and then climbed to the top of the observation tower on its summit, the thing she took away from the experience was not the magnificence of the view but pity for the ranger on the top platform who obviously had to answer the question hundreds of times a day if a particular piece of the landscape was Vancouver Island or not, an unnecessary question because everything was explained by the very clear map under glass fixed to the platform railing. But still people asked. It was not Vancouver Island. It was obvious it wasn’t.
He had never liked cod until then. True cod, it was called, they had eaten. And they had visited a kelp farm, something he had never known existed until then. Her lips had tasted of salt.
She understood what was wrong with repetition of experience, vocationally. She understood why he had never wanted to be just the one thing, a teacher, for that reason. She had understood about what the agency work had meant to him. The agency had provided him a receptacle, a chamber, a secret chamber where what was going on was not boring. Secret adultery would undoubtedly accomplish the same thing for other people. He wanted to think about something else.
He thought, Everything ends… The ferry to Anacortes comes and you have to get on it and go back.
His thirst was better, somehow.
They were back and doing names again. When he denied knowing a name he could expect to be hit on the legs with the knot.
His legs were hurting. He thought he might acknowledge knowing one or two names, just for the respite he might get. He had been asked about Dwight Wemberg and he had denied knowing him. But that now seemed dumb, because their paths could logically have crossed in Gaborone. He would say that he’d been mistaken and that now he remembered.
Quartus was close to him, affecting weariness, pronouncing names directly into his right ear.
“You are giving me aggro again,” Quartus said.
“I’m sorry. I am doing my best.”
“Is it? Then think again, meneer, if you know who it is, Rra Bloke Molefi? He was very big at UBS, Student Representative Council, very big. You teach at UBS.”
“No, well, I did. I haven’t for a while, and the way I knew him was just hearing about him. There was a strike. It had to do with the tuckshop, money missing. I paid no attention to it. I was only there once a week. I am so thirsty.” He hadn’t intended to say that.
It was so boring, the protocols. In a minute Quartus would go and have another of his voluptuous drinking experiences.
Ray had an idea. He said, “Why don’t you hit me yourself, meneer, when I don’t know? Why make your African hit me?”
He heard Quartus asking for the knot and then a painful blow to his knee came and that was the answer to that. He wanted Quartus to have to do the hitting himself.
He would see to it.
“Who is Dwight Wemberg?” Quartus asked coming back, drinking whatever he was drinking, tea, water, Ray wanted cold tea. I want cold tea, he thought.
“I’ll tell you who he is. I just realized who he is. He’s agriculture. He’s a sad case. His wife died while he was out of town and she was buried by the time he got back and now they won’t let him exhume her and take her back to the States. I realized that’s who you meant. I think I met him a few times at embassy parties. That’s all.”
Quartus said nothing. But then in a rush more names were asked and Ray began thinking about names, funny things about names in general. He was going to need a new name himself in the next phase of his life, he realized, if he survived into it, because he was going to have to cut sever and smash any connection to the specious present, what he had been, especially if he was going to write for a living, which he might have to, which he might have to attempt, with God’s help. Names were funny things, like his own name, which was not Finch but Fish or Fisch, in truth, that name glimmering under his public name like a trout in a pool of milk, under a lily pad or something. In the thirties there had been a famous magazine editor with the perfect last name Crowninshield, a name that had struck him at first contact as pretty perfect, Crowninshield. Of course his first name had been Frank, when it could have been what, Beowulf or Manfred. Ah well, he thought.
Yes, he would need a new name because he knew like thunder and lightning what he was going to do in his new life. Pym, from the Poe story of the guy who went down a maelstrom, might be good, because he was going to pitch himself into the ocean of words, stories. He was going to write Lives, like Aubrey’s
There was a consultation going on. They were taking their time.
But there would be a market for what he could do. He could compress any life into a jewel. Rex would know
