Mortals

without being in an unproductive position. I knew…”

“You didn’t know. You couldn’t prove it. You thought you knew.”

“Have it your way. I thought I knew, okay, and I was right. I was right, wasn’t I? And it was material to her situation.”

“To her depression.”

“Yes.”

“To her unhappiness.”

Ray thought, I have to get off this route, give it up. He was outsmarting himself. He could see this leading into the story of his life, the justification for each step he had taken, the justification for the whole edifice he had created, something he was hardly in the right position to undertake since he was leaving the whole thing, he was gone, he was out of it. And he knew what Morel’s picture of the agency was going to be, the cartoon it was bound to be. And in a way he agreed with most of it, even though it was the sixties refusing to die that lay at the root of it, the sixties cartoons forever.

Maybe what Iris wanted was the sixties, which she would get redivivus in Morel. What could he do? He was inhabiting a stupid paradox. He was through with the agency, for his own reasons and for other reasons that owed something to certain ideas of the sixties, to be entirely fair about it, but he was on the exit ramp. La guerre est finie, with the Russians, was one of the reasons, a large reason and one he was not about to go into with Morel, agreeing yes this and that and the agency, Guatemala, Indonesia, terrible, mistaken, bad, but did Morel know why the Taiwanese happened not to have the atom bomb to play around with? It would be ignominious. He was not going to declare himself a turning worm as a basis for the next level of discussion here.

Under the right circumstances he would be happy to discuss the generic question of lives getting stuck and set in certain patterns. It was too large a subject right now. Somehow powerful personalities, hysterics among them, got to determine whole trains of events that innocent, less powerful personalities got caught up in. Who were these strong personalities and why were they so prevalent? Morel was a strong personality choosing to operate in a forceful way in narrower and narrower ponds, the United States, Cambridge, and now in the still, small pool Botswana constituted, the pond Ray had been happy enough in until this giant toad had flopped into it waving and croaking. We would all like to be great, if at all possible, Ray thought.

Morel was waiting for him to say the next thing. Time was passing.

If she wanted the sixties she was going to get the sixties in spades, so to speak, with Morel. The sixties annoyed him. The sixties said that if you knocked down certain well-meaning but imperfect institutions you would get something altogether more beautiful and wonderful flowering up to replace them. People never appreciated how touch and go it had been with the Russians at certain points, the ongoing possibility of a sociopath asshole getting into control of the magnificent death technologies science had created and that the Russians had brilliantly stolen.

“Well, let’s leave what I do for a living out of this, if we can. Let’s say you’re right and let’s set it aside. For the sake of the argument, let’s do that.”

“I loathe what you do,” Morel said. Ray was taken aback. Morel had presented his feeling very evenly, as a statement, not a cry or shout.

“Okay, I understand. Maybe that can be on the record and we can get on with this. I… look. I agree with a lot of what I assume you think. You might be surprised at how much we agree on. But there is no way I can get this into the right perspective for you.”

“I loathe that word.”

“What word? Perspective? Then how about how about there’s no way I can enter all the germane facts into the discussion. You loathe everything.”

Why was Morel being so absolute on this? Ray thought he knew why. He was suddenly seeing more deeply into the surroundings of his downfall. He thought, How better than perfect could it be for a seducer if by seducing the fair maiden he was saving her from association with an enemy of the good? Of course that was assuming that Morel was the seducer, something he had no evidence on as yet. He had his ideas and that was all he had.

There was no time for a seminar on the proper attitude to take toward the triumph of the pretty good over the utterly abominable that was roughly a fair summary of the Cold War, roughly but of course incompletely. He granted that. And Morel couldn’t help it that he hated imperial America. That was a truth about America that had to be lived with, but it wasn’t the whole truth.

His cover had been a laugh, clearly. The idea that the suspicion might be out circulating was not something alien to him. But it had been comfortable keeping the possibility there in a pallid way, not in boldface.

He was making life difficult for himself by carrying on two dialogues at the same time, one with Morel and one with himself. He had to concentrate, to get away from the extraneous. There were certain words he needed Morel to say and he was going to extract them. He was close to getting them. When he got them he would be able to breathe normally.

Ray said, “Okay, you have your own opinion of me and of my relationship, such as it is, to the truth. I don’t have the time to prove to you how misguided you are. But maybe someday.

“So. So, pushing the reset button, let’s agree that you have a shall we say certain relationship to the truth that’s superior to mine. Truth blows away the night and fog and makes you free. Everybody says so.

“In a way you might say you’ve devoted yourself to being against lying, institutional lying but not only that kind, that form of lying, untruth. You hate that.”

Morel said, “Make your point. Stop the overture. End it.”

“Very good.”

Ray decided to skip some absurd introductory piety about how much he respected what Morel was doing. He was not in superb control of himself, his voice. It would show in his voice that he resented that Morel was able to do what he wanted to do because he had the money to allow it, support it. Even if it didn’t show in his voice, there was the danger he would bring it up as a discrete item, just mention it glancingly, mention how nice it was to have inherited the money that would let you be a certain kind of moral paragon, how nice indeed. And he also knew that it wasn’t Morel’s fault that he was rich. That was another thing.

Ray said, “I want to know if you love my wife and also if you’re fucking her.”

Waiting for the answer was too hard. He went on. He said, “Yes, go ahead, here’s your chance. Truth can speak to untruth, in the person of myself, yours untruly.” He needed to stop being antic.

“This isn’t funny,” Morel said.

“No indeed.” Being antic was stupid. It created byways for Morel to duck away into. But Ray was having to struggle with the temptation to be reckless. Because he felt reckless. He felt reckless because of the extremity of the scene he was in.

He shouldn’t crowd Morel, but the man was taking too long. You have to have patience, Ray thought. Demonstrating the patience to wait for the truth to be spoken gave the sign that the truth was already there and that he knew Morel was going to have to yield it.

“Take your time,” Ray said.

Sounds of a disturbance reached them. Morel held his hand up for silence. He wanted them to listen together. Ray held down a surge of grief and irritation. The disturbance had to go away. Morel would use it for a diversion. In Morel’s place, Ray knew he would do the same thing, buy time. I am going to pray to God and Jesus if this doesn’t stop, Ray thought.

And then it did stop. The shouting trailed off. The banging sounds ended.

He let Morel continue waiting.

Morel broke. He said, “I don’t think this is the best time to have this discussion.”

“On the contrary I beg to differ,” Ray answered, stumblingly. He persisted. “In fact I can’t think of a better time and I’ll tell you why. And why is because the hammer of death could come down on us, either one of us, anytime.

“And I’m not saying it will. We have certain things going for us. But nothing is guaranteed. These bastards are high on Mandrax. You smelled the dagga out there. And we have a right, or not a right, precisely, but it would be, what should we call it, it would be morally preferable to go into death in full possession of the truth on this subject matter at least.”

“The subject matter being…”

“Oh quite simply the truth about you and Iris, my wife. Which I already know, in any case.”