Mortals

bag. I’ll get my boots. They can keep the laces if that’s what they’re worried about and I want my watch, but that’s nothing, they can keep it. I want my toothbrush. They can watch me use it if they think I’d like to turn it into a weapon, a shiv or something. Fuck them. I’ve got to clean you up. And I want water available in here full-time, not only when they feel like it now and then. No no.”

Morel was in a sort of dancing state, a punching state. It was unusual.

Ray said, “Dream on. You’ll get nothing. Be prepared.”

But against his will he was finding Morel slightly inspiring. All assholes respond to extreme self-confidence, he thought. Morel was like a coach. He was the type a white college under pressure to diversify would fall on their knees for, somebody smart about getting along with the white alumni but jive or tough enough to motivate the black and white team, the troops, into crushing the enemy of the moment, the team from another venue. There was a weak but distinct in-and-out pattern in his friend Davis, a modulation from a regular sort of down-home black up into the doctor, good schools persona. Iris probably loved that without knowing she did. One minute the man was tough, and the next it was would she like some Constant Comment tea and had the last issue of the New York Review of Books arrived and where had she put it? Because she had a habit of putting things in odd places. Davis would discover that. Ray did know that Morel had a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Whether he read it or not was another question. He was thinking of himself and his own backlog of Times Literary Supplements which this nightmare hell trip had at least allowed him to eat into. Not one of his unread TLSes had ever gone astray. She had just been being considerate, but saving them so strictly had constituted a reproach, not that she knew it. How could she? He had said they had to get the TLS because in Africa that was the way he could keep in touch with the other world of thought and writing, which he had meant, he had meant it, but it had been a lie. Because over the years it had gotten more and more painful to look into the world of the scholarly literary others busily producing, dancing. But she had continued saving these painful things, faithful to the end.

He heard something. “They’re coming,” he said.

“Breakfast, you mean?”

“Right, probably, but listen. I have to know what you told the people who captured you, took you. I have to know what you told them about me. We have to be on the same page. You understand. Jesus, we should have talked about this before. So, quick, please. They’re coming.”

Morel said, “No don’t worry. No, this is what I told them. I’ll tell you.

“I told them you were with Education and you were in the bush looking for school sites. That was what you were doing.”

“And so what did you tell them about why in the name of God you were up here looking for me?”

“Okay, this is what I told them. And forgive me. I told them you were my patient and your wife was worried about you.”

“You said I was your patient.”

“Yeah. I came up with that and I thought it was clever. I was coming to look for my patient. Look, they knew I was a doctor. There was no question about that. And I didn’t have anything ready to say and I came up with that. I don’t know, I thought it was clever, kind of, at the time. I went into how upset your wife was, distraught…”

“You said I was your patient. I had escaped from you. I needed to be under control. So the implication was, is, was that I was a what, mental patient?”

“No a therapy patient. You were receiving therapy.”

“Christ almighty. It’s a little humiliating, isn’t it? From my standpoint?”

“I did my best.”

“Let me think about this. It’s a shock. But maybe it isn’t all bad. Let me think. I’m an escaped patient…”

“Look, all I said was erratic. You were behaving erratically and it was a concern to your wife and to me and so on. They seemed to buy it okay. Come on. You can work with it. Come on.”

Be a realist, Ray said to himself. There was the singing outbreak of the day before that this idea comported not so badly with. There was his attachment to a peculiar and, as his captors saw it, incoherent manuscript.

“This is going to work out,” Morel said, squaring his shoulders, projecting the impression that the matter was settled, radiating definiteness, resilience.

Of course that was what Iris needed and had a right to have, an optimist. I am a traveling grave, he thought. Billowing dark sorrow over his brother rose up, as though for emphasis. He pushed it away. No, what she needed was a congenital optimist, so to speak. Morel was a heroic optimist. Anyone who thought he could break the grip of the white hand on Africa by arguing the continent into rejecting the Lord Jesus Christ was an optimist at the extreme end of the spectrum, a caricature figure worthy of Moliere. It was at the level of comedy. I am a traveling grave, he thought again. It occurred to him that Morel would make a very good choice for one of the Lives he was going to write. He would think about that more, later.

“Are they coming with breakfast?” Morel asked.

“Room service is coming. Don’t worry.”

He was realizing something. Iris could be loving something she hardly even knew she needed. She could be loving a clean heart, the lightness of being that a clean heart gives, gives the eyes, the voice. She had a right to love someone with nothing to declare versus someone… someone else. Because a certain amount of his mortal life had been given over to burying certain matters, misgivings, and to not disclosing things having to do with the agency, what blessed Marion Resnick in the grip of red joy had told him about Malawi, to name just one thing, killings, by Banda, by Banda and not the agency, but the agency allowing events to go on without acting.

He was starving but he had no appetite. He would have to ask his physician how that could be. And he was surprised at how little fear for his body he had felt so far.

We bury death, he thought.

Morel was talking to himself. Ray knew what he was doing. He was repeating the list of items he was going to get their captors to give him. He was making himself believe it was going to happen. Ray couldn’t help admiring the exercise and even more the ability to think it was worth doing. Morel was moving around oddly, dancingly, clenching his hands softly behind his back. What a guy, Ray thought.

“They’re coming. This is going to work out,” Morel said.

Morel thought he was going to fix Africa. Ray wanted to tell him some things about Africa. Africa was broken, and broken everywhere and broken worst where the West had come in, intervened. He was thinking of Angola. How could it ever recover? Angola had happened during his time in the agency, not like Indonesia, say, which was earlier and far away. Angola was going to limp forever. Resnick had been against helping Savimbi and he hadn’t been careful about letting it be known. And that hadn’t helped him in the South Africa Region Office with his superiors. But he had been right about Angola, of course, Resnick had. By the time Angola got back to normal the undamaged white West would have vaulted further onward and upward, out of sight, the white gods, technologically speaking, would be unattainably ahead. Land mines kept going off in Angola, removing people’s legs and arms. He was part of the system that had led to that. The mines would outlive him. He had to let all this come into him, everything he had struggled to keep out. He had never been interested in wrecking anything in Africa.

Something was going on at the door.

Morel was striding arduously forward, friendly and resolute, which was wrong. There was a routine to follow.

“Davis, we have to stay over there against the wall,” he said.

There would be trouble. They were supposed to have their backs to the door, their hands over their heads. There would be trouble and it would be his fault. He knew the routine and they would assume he had communicated about it.

“Dumelang,” Morel said, booming it out, full of morning cheer, as the doors were pulled open.

Ray didn’t understand.

Two men in black balaclavas had delivered breakfast, a genuine breakfast, of sorts, not just a dish of samp or mealie-meal. No, they had provided a leathery brown omelette, an ostrich egg omelette, served on a square of kraft paper, cold. And with it had come two kinds of crackers, eight of them, four of each kind. The omelette had been huge, and there had been eight figs, pretty dried up but still edible, which Morel had insisted Ray eat all of.