Mortals

experiment.”

“Good idea,” Ray said. He was truly astonished. It was hard to credit that he was hearing what he was hearing. What he was hearing was a proposition appropriate for a sophomore symposium somewhere, a colloquium. Morel was a type. He wanted to be fair to the man who was taking his wife away, far away, taking her in his arms and flying away with her and landing in some excellent place. Fear was precipitating him into little lectures, fervent ones. The pitch of his voice was higher. Ray would have to capture all this in words, in the cameo he would do of Morel, assuming they got out. It would be delicate, getting it right, but here was a man in fear of death urgent to register his bright ideas, in case he was going to die suddenly, register them with another potential corpse. The answer to the question What is life? is Life is abnormal psychology, he thought.

Ray was not going to spare himself, either. He was going to encapsulate himself but maybe not in the same book with the other Lives. Mine would be My Life in a Nutshell, which would be appropriate, he thought.

Morel seemed satisfied with having said what he had. No doubt he was rummaging something else up he wanted to be remembered as having thought of. I feel small, Ray thought. It was fairly horrible. This man was overflowing with items like plans for universal peace. There was a kind of idiotic nobility to it. I feel like flotsam, in comparison, Ray thought. And now he wished, for the sake of the sketch he was going to do, that he had paid better attention to a couple of other deliverances Morel had let fall in passing earlier. One had to do with a correct understanding of what the entire human race was basically up to, that understanding being that mankind was engaged not only in internecine conflicts unending but in a general collaborative war against the trees, as he remembered it, mankind as a kind of planetary mange. And the idea of these formulations was to make a light go off in the mind of man that would stop him or her in his or her tracks and lead to huge changes. The other deliverance was lost to him, for the moment. He had to get a pen, somehow, and a tablet, a notebook, anything.

“You think they’re shooting down from the pan?”

“Yes.”

A serious detonation shook the shed, jolting Morel into another presentation. Dust and grit sifted down over them from the ceiling.

Morel said, “I got a look at the pan. It’s like a gigantic pockmark. I read about it before I came up here.”

The detonation was significant and represented a change. Morel wasn’t asking for his opinion. In fact he had no opinion. It was possible that it was a mortar hit. It was possible that through some accident some ammunition or explosives had gone up. It was serious.

Morel continued. “Do you know that there’s some mystery about what causes pans? The geology is mysterious. One theory is that there were natural depressions in the terrain and that there used to be much heavier winds in the area that scooped them out and much heavier rains that filled them up, so that when they dried, these beds of clay and soda were left. But the problem with that theory is that there are no pans in other deserts, only around here.”

Ray was fascinated. This was beyond wanting to deposit his apercus before misadventure struck. This was sadder, a need to demonstrate that he knew certain things the average man might not.

Morel said, “The pan here isn’t the biggest one in the Kalahari. This is a small one, less than half a kilometer I would say, measured longwise. It’s an oval-shaped thing.”

Morel was speaking more rapidly as he went on. Ray wanted to slow him up a little, not stop him.

Ray said, “The pan used to fill with water every rainy season and stay full most of the year. They say it was beautiful. It was shoulder-to-shoulder marabou storks and fish eagles, Cape vultures, rare birds. That’s why they chose to build this monstrosity out here. Of course then the drought came.”

In Morel’s eagerness to proceed, he interrupted Ray. “Man, you should see it now. I saw it. Christ, it’s an eyesore.

“You wouldn’t go near it. It’s a boneyard. You see cow skeletons stuck halfway in the mud. You see skulls sitting there. The floor of it is checkered and you can tell that what happens is that when you step on these individual slabs they tilt up and dump you into this white mire, muck.

“There are a couple of abandoned trucks in there, just the roofs showing. It’s blinding to look at, it’s so white, pure burning white, white as snow.

“I couldn’t see much, though. That is, I couldn’t look at the thing for very long without my sunglasses. That’s another thing I want back. My bag I have to get first, first thing. People are going to be hurt.”

Morel was neatening himself up, beating dust out of his hair and off his shoulders. Ray was doing the same.

“That last explosion, what was that?” Morel asked.

“That’s what I’m thinking about,” Ray answered. He didn’t want to alarm Morel. And even if somebody was firing a mortar or mortars, they might not have many shells, maybe even only two, even only one.

“Is there anything we could make a white flag out of?” Morel asked.

“Your shorts, perhaps,” Ray said, regretting saying it. Morel looked at him closely.

“That was an attempt at levity. And also a recognition of the fact that my shorts are khaki-colored and in fact the only white sort of thing around is your shorts. I’m not suggesting it’s practical. My socks are white, or they were, it occurs to me. I don’t see how I could give them up. They’re all I’ve got to protect my feet. But none of this amounts to a flaglike item, if you know what I mean. I imagine if we started waving socks and shorts around, people would take it for an insult, and bingo… It was just a thought.”

“I understand. But if we want to surrender, that is surrender even more than we have already surrendered… we just put our hands way up. I think that would do it.”

“Be quiet for a minute,” Ray said fiercely to Morel. They had to be alert. Ray realized for the first time in his life that he sounded like his mother when he used the imperative mode, not his father. There was a whistling sound he didn’t like.

“What is it?”

“Just listen.”

Somebody had a mortar. Mortar shells whistled in flight and something was coming toward them and whistling. The whistling was getting stronger, so this was incoming. Now the possibility of getting pushed into death by one or the other of these ignorant armies was up a notch. Because mortars were not weapons that could be aimed in any real sense of the term. Or they could be aimed only in the sense that a shell would be fired and the people firing it would try to see where it had landed and then they would move their mortar around a little and try again. What that meant was that it was true they could be sitting ducks, by accident, and die. They could actually die. Either or both of them could turn into a terrible bloom, bloodmist, gobbets of flesh, shards of bone.

A violent detonation, close by, jarred them.

“Prosit,” Ray said, for no reason. Morel had to be told what was happening.

Ray said, “They have mortars, at least one.”

“That’s dangerous,” Morel said.

“Oh yes.”

“We could die in here.”

“We could.”

“I never got a chance to talk to you about Milton.”

“What’s that? What are you talking about?”

“You’re a partisan of Milton and I hate Milton and I’ve thought a lot about why you would like Milton so much. My father forced me to study Milton, memorize parts he liked. Well, forced is too strong a word, but…”

“Look, right now we need to figure out the safest place to stand in here, while this is going on. We want to be out of the middle area. I think we should stand in opposite corners. I’m not even sure it makes any difference. It would be better to be in the corner if the roof came down, those beams. And I think it makes sense to crouch down, contract the amount of flesh you’re making available for injury. And let’s each pull one of these pallets over us, which might help in case flaming fragments of shit come our way. It’s all nonsense, but let’s do it.” Morel was agreeable.