Mortals

Morel was thinking about it. The truth was coming. Ray tried to feel self-congratulatory. He was going to get what he wanted.

“Why are we going through this if you already know?”

He will do anything not to answer, not to have to lie, Ray thought.

“Believe me, I do know. But that doesn’t change anything. Because you owe me the truth. As a man, you owe me the truth. You may as well tell me. Oh, and another consideration. We have to cooperate if we’re going to get out of here and that means I need to trust you. We need to see into each other…”

“This is wrong, God damn you. It is.”

Rail, Liar! Ray thought. That could be an addition to Rex’s little collection of palindromes in Strange News, but of course that would make it a collaboration. Rex had been fascinated with palindromes from an absurdly young age. In all their early life together Ray hadn’t come up with a decent one of his own, none that wasn’t marginal. Rex had… I moan, Maori… I mean, Naomi… and they were in Strange News. Of course now computers would take over the whole process and this would never be an issue between two brothers again. Goodbye, he thought. Madam I’m Adam was something he could say to Iris, not that it qualified for anything in any way.

Ray said, “One other thing you need to consider. We’re not even. You know everything about me, to your satisfaction, which I’m sure you think is fine. So an element of balance comes into it. You know what I mean.”

Morel said, “I don’t have to say anything to you.”

“Of course you don’t. But that would be a basis for a conclusion of some kind, wouldn’t you say?”

Morel said, “You say you already know something. That’s interesting. If there was something there, some secret, why would Iris send me up here after you, exposing me to all this, your suspicions? Would that make sense?”

“Hey, she had no choice, did she, Frank Buck? Do you know who that is? She had no choice, you were it. She has a conscience and so do you and so do I. She needs me to come back alive. And she needs me back in town so we can burn everything down we ever had, us, there, settle everything so you guys can go on sweetly. Oh well. You know, I am not a troglodyte like some people. I can give my blessing to this if I have to, but I can’t give my blessing to a liar for my girl, for her next husband, because as you know she was married to a liar and it wasn’t good, was it? What a mistake she made, not realizing that. Frank Buck went to Africa and brought back lions and tigers for zoos and circuses so delicately and always alive. Frank Buck never hurt Africa…”

“You’re hyperventilating.”

“I am fucking not.”

“You need to stop this.”

“I won’t and I can’t. Why should I?”

“Because it’s too much. I’m hypertensive. I am. I can take a lot. But they have my medication. I need that.” He was taking his own pulse.

“Does Iris know this? About you?”

“No.”

“Well why the fuck not, my man. Here we go. I have perfect blood pressure.”

But slow down, Ray thought. It would be one thing for Morel to come to a bloody end through the stupid actions of their captors and something else for him to end up having a stroke and lying there like a log for the rest of his life, grateful if he could blink once for yes and twice for no.

“Let’s go slower,” Ray said. The man is less than perfect, he thought.

“Slower is better,” Morel said.

Ray nodded. “Fine. I don’t want to give you a stroke. And in any case I consider the question answered already, and I’m not referring to what I know separately about this subject matter. But even leaving that aside, the question is answered by the sheer volume of resistance I’m getting from you.

“I’m sorry for you. You’re condemned by your own what, scruples, ideology about lying. You could have lied outright, fast, in an absolute way, when the question first came out. It wouldn’t have done any good, in the long run. But you didn’t do that. You began circumambulating.” I have him, Ray thought.

“Excuse me,” Morel said. Now what? Ray thought. The man was an eel.

“What?”

“I have to use the bucket.” So there would be another interruption so the man could defecate. It was going to be defecation. If he had just had to urinate he would do what both of them had done, he would have gone over and done it without missing a beat. No one could argue with defecation. And what a prodigy he was. Even in captivity his bowels functioned like a Swiss watch. Defecation demanded silence. Momentum would be lost.

Ray went to stand by the door, keeping his back to Morel and his business.

There was some significant flatus. Ray wondered if silence might not be less kind than doing some patter.

He said, “Your bowels shall sound as an harp. Coleridge.”

Morel was not having his easiest evacuation, Ray couldn’t help but gather. This was going to be a little embarrassing for a man whose religion was regularity. He had gotten that impression from Iris, who could be raffish and funny about the lower self and its discontents. “Must you fart so?” was something she had said to him in mock pique. It was hard to say exactly why that had seemed so funny. It still did.

He said, “I’ll tell you something. This is in the category of trivia from my history with Iris, our life. I just mention it. Most of the places we lived in had the tub and the toilet in the same room, not like here in Botswana. So when it would happen that Iris needed to go and I happened to be in the tub, we developed a protocol. I would sing some nonsense to overwhelm any sounds that conflicted with her… her darlingness. And of course I would keep my eyes closed throughout.”

“Do you want to sing something? Go right ahead.”

Ray thought of doing “Carrickfergus,” and then of doing the national anthem. He had to make a quick choice, if he was going to do something so antic. There was a feeling of sacrilege about the proposition of doing one of the songs he had actually sung when Iris was on the pot. “Greensleeves” was one of them. Singing it had been a jocular sort of choice, a sequel to conversations they’d had about whether that was the most beautiful song in the world or whether “Amazing Grace,” Iris’s choice, was, or whether “Down by the Salley Gardens,” his candidate, was. All at once any impulse to sing was gone. There was nothing he could think of that would help, that would get him anything, in this situation, his wife’s lover on the pot.

Morel was straining. Briefly Ray wondered if a flight-or-fight reaction had played some part in Morel’s urgency, the urge to evacuate being one of the accompaniments of the physical mobilization for panic flight. I would like to think that, so it’s probably wrong, Ray thought.

Humanly, he felt for Morel. Doctors hated to be sick. A holistic doctor would hate to be constipated. No, he couldn’t sing. That was out. But he could recite something. Almost anything would do.

“I can’t sing, but I’ll recite something. I don’t feel like singing.”

Morel grunted something Ray chose to take as positive.

“I’m not going to sing. But you might be interested to know that her choice for the most beautiful song of all time is ‘Amazing Grace.’ We love that song. It might be the kind of thing you want to know, for the future. Anyway.”

He cleared his throat and waited for the right piece to recite to suggest itself. It should be one of her favorites. In fact, it should be her all-time favorite, “Dover Beach.” The poem could still move her toward tears. Or at least it had, the last time he had read it to her, which had been when? It had been pretty long ago, maybe as long ago as their vacation in the San Juans. “Dover Beach” was the perfect choice.

He began. “‘Dover Beach.’

“The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits… on the French coast the light
Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,