Mortals

“Well of course. But…”

“But nothing. You’ve formed an attachment. You’d see that she was all right. Her family is a zero, her mother. She has a sister, you may know about her, a basket case with a child, and we even thought, mainly Iris thought, we should consider taking her in…”

“Oh hey God damn me, man, I forgot. I have news about Ellen Iris wanted me to give you. The news about your brother drowned it out, I guess. Sorry.

“Anyway, Ellen met someone. I have to be sure I have this right. She teaches in a Montessori school and what was it, she ran the music program. And she ran a recorder consort, as part of that. And a parent of one of the students, a widower, young widower, joined the recorder consort. Well, young. He was fifty. But in any case they came together and he fell in love with her. He’s an attorney, very, as she tells it, well fixed.

“There’s more to the story. At some point after some stumbling attempt of his to participate correctly in the recital she went up to him and told him she loved him, like that, just announced it…”

“It runs in the family, being very direct. Iris was direct with me. She wasn’t what I was used to,” Ray said.

I have to escape this, he thought. Scenes from his courtship of Iris were the last things he needed to descend on his ass, her straight pure declarations, how little jockeying there had been, the shocks of straight truth, her pure face, her face so graphic.

“So you know all about her family.”

“Oh yeah, pretty much.” He had the decency to say it lightly, but still it stabbed, bit. Everything he says hurts, Ray thought.

Morel kept on. “The main thing is that they’re married. He adores her and the child. So it looks fine. Just between us, I have to say keep your fingers crossed. But Iris is looking on the bright side. She’s very relieved.”

I am plunging into something, falling down, sinking, Ray thought. He wanted to know what it was, why it was, because it was terrible, worse than anything.

I know what it is, he thought. It was Iris needing no help being Atlas, and holding up the world the way it had taken two of them to do. She had only been able to do it with his help, up to now. On the one hand there had been her sister and on the other had been his brother and now there was nothing, the mist leaving the trees. What it reminded him of was the brilliant cover on the magazine Impreccor that the Communist International had distributed around the world in the thirties and forties, not to mention the twenties, with the graphic of the muscular worker raising his sledgehammer for yet another blow against the chained-up globe, the world, the chains breaking but also the underlying world fracturing, incidentally. It was all there. He had studied those pages like a madman in the days when communism was going to be a permanent half or three-quarters of the world, including China, and there was going to be destruction, machines of destruction, created in those dark precincts and then it had all turned into mist stuck in the trees on Orcas Island until the sun came out. His brother was gone and her sister was fine. All their thinking of what to do was over and he was unnecessary. Morel had money, like a thick soft cloud and pillow under anything he wanted to do, enough for two of them, enough for her to develop causes and projects of her own. The truth of the matter was that she could begin to think differently about what she wanted to do in the world now that money in larger magnitudes was heaving into view. He couldn’t help but wonder if this hadn’t occurred to her. It was a truth. He was giving her situation a Marxist analysis, which was to say a cui bono analysis. And there was nothing wrong with Marxist analysis, only with Marxist prescriptions. He was not saying she was mercenary, because she wasn’t, as God was his witness. But she would have what, scope, more scope, scope was the word, with Morel. He had intimate knowledge of Morel’s financial status. It was impressive. No, she could think up any number of causes she might want to throw herself into. Or she might want to join the good doctor in his great crusades against circumcision and Christianity, turning back the tide of Christian belief, like Canute. Be yourself, he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to do anything she wanted to. It was only fair. Wife is unfair, John F. Kennedy should have said. In Uruguay there had been a radical group he had read about in training, Grupo los Canuteros, and it was odd that it was only now he realized the deliberate irony in what they had called themselves. They had identified with King Canute and his broom and sweeping back the waves. They were long gone. Irony weakens, he thought. Morel lacked irony, which was why he was strong and attractive to her and up for a few more runs at the brick wall constituted by everything that was the case.

He said, “Well, that’s good news. Genuinely, Ellen was pretty unstable. We didn’t know what to do. We talked about it a lot.”

Ray got up. It was time to go head-on with the subject matter. He had to be on his feet for that. He wanted his shoes, not that there was anything he could do about it. He wanted to be on the same footing as his rival his betrayer, so to speak. It was unfair that Morel had gotten his shoes back and that he had to proceed with his performance in stocking feet.

He said, “We both want the best for Iris.” He put it as neutrally as he could, as much like an observation about the weather as he could.

Morel nodded. Ray could tell he was back into wariness.

“And also we both believe, you and I, believe in the truth. I mean, that’s what your mission is, here in Africa, basically, I believe… to get the truth out… the truth shall set you free, all that, the truth till it hurts.” He had botched the tone. He hated himself.

Morel was annoyed. He replied sharply, “Why would you say you believe in the truth? Maybe you do. But I wonder why you think we’re in the same boat on this.”

This was a gauntlet and Ray hadn’t been expecting it and here it was, take that, bang.

Maybe it was all right. Maybe it was for the better, in a way, a contest framed that way. Morel would get war if that was what he wanted.

“You’ve reached a conclusion on me, I see. Based on what?”

“We don’t need to go into it. I’m sorry I said anything.”

“Oh yes we do. You think you have the truth, some kind of truth about me. Go ahead.”

“I know what you are. What you do.”

“Oh and what am I?”

“I don’t need to tell you what you are. You know what you are.”

“You think you know more than you do.” Ray warned himself to slow down. He was talking too fast, agitated. He was on war footing. This was war.

“What do you think I am?”

“I know. Trust me.”

“So Iris told you something.”

“No, not a word. She didn’t have to. What a laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think nobody knows who you work for. It’s a laugh. I was hardly off the plane and I knew.”

“She told you.”

“You’d like to think that. Wake up. Everybody knows who Boyle is, the consular officer you can never get hold of. That woman who works for him does everything in the office.”

This was bad. It was impossible for Ray, the idea of presenting the complete picture of what he was and what he was doing and what he had done, justifying himself. It was the wrong moment. He had to get out of this. He was on the wrong tack. And now he had to deal with the new question of whether, in addition to everything else that had to be settled, whether Iris had revealed what he did. They had an iron agreement about that. Whatever happened, it was supposed to be honored.

“Iris never said anything. That’s what you’re telling me.”

“There was nothing to tell me. I told her what I knew. What was being said. It was common knowledge. She wouldn’t even confirm it. She talked around it.”

“But finally she did confirm it to you.”

“All right, after I hounded her. But she only confirmed it after she was convinced I knew.”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this. She knows there are specially, specially approved doctors to go to if anybody connected to the agency needs to see somebody. There’s one in Pretoria. She shouldn’t have done it. She broke an oath.”

“You seem unable to grasp that I knew already. She couldn’t keep denying it