Mortals

subtly.

Morel said, “Okay, but, man, I can’t hardly remember the whole thing, you know? Let’s see…” Ray knew Morel was ashamed of the lurid can’t hardly because he had half swallowed it to the point where it had been hard for Ray to pick up. Morel had to be embarrassed by the blunt black thing he was doing. But distress was behind it, it should be remembered. It did raise the question of who Morel was and the question of false pretenses… which, Ray realized, was a classic redundancy. And generations of linguistic professionals had looked at it and not seen it and it was exactly like rapid eye movements being discovered by a graduate student after generations of sleep experts and theorists had droned on and on, not seeing it. Typically of life he didn’t know the name of the graduate student who had finally seen it, discovered it. He should be famous. His name was Jewish, he knew that much. But that was all he knew, except that he Ray himself had used false pretenses all his life up to that moment.

A nearby blast shook them, and Morel resumed, finally.

Morel said, “No, what I said to her about Milton… in fact she probably mentioned it to you…”

“She didn’t.”

“That’s funny. She seemed to be struck by it. Well anyway I don’t know if this is anything or not, but when I asked myself why in hell you liked a poet I especially didn’t like and that I had been forced to read reams of…”

“You can stop mentioning that. It’s been established.” Ray sensed that Morel, now that he was having to present his thoughts on this subject, was feeling slightly in over his head. He had tossed something off and now he had to engage someone who had spent years confronting the Hydra of Milton interpretations, slashing at them in the privacy of his office.

Morel said, “Okay, so I asked my question and I saw a pattern. Here’s what I’m saying. Paradise Lost the great Milton thing is a parable about how terrible disobedience is, using Satan’s disobedience to God as a metaphor for disobedience generally, with Milton’s disobedience to his king in the background.

“So now of course before he wrote Paradise Lost, hey, he had joined up against the great evil of his time, monarchism, the king. He goes for republicanism, joins up with Cromwell, who kills the king but then turns himself into Hitler. Milton works in the Ministry of Propaganda. Sad thing. And Milton is doing his job writing public relations stuff defending slaughtering the Irish and getting the English deeper into the slave trade. Then Cromwell loses, falls. Monarchy comes back and Milton has to live with it. So Paradise Lost is where he takes it all back, takes back his embrace of Cromwell, of republicanism, of political dissent. Paradise Lost is how he gets himself rehabilitated. The royals love it. I think that’s about right.”

“Well, it’s too simple.”

“But hey, let me finish, man.”

“Proceed.”

Morel was hyper. He said, “So here’s where you come in. You’re at the right age, pliable. There you stand. Communism is abroad in the world and it’s a great evil and there just happens to be an instrument, like Cromwell was an instrument in his time, there happens to be this instrument that’s working against the evil of our time and the instrument is the CIA. And the agency gets hold of you just when you’re studying Milton and the sixties are happening.

“So you see an evil and you see an instrument against it and you join up…”

“If you could make it not sound so much like joining the Boy Scouts that would be better.”

“Okay. So you’re twenty-two, twenty-three, and you go with the instrument that you, well, you’re in it. And the instrument you’ve joined up with is gradually becoming Satan. You signed up before Vietnam. And there you are, in revolt against your generation, your peers, their sentiments, their ideology, because the war in Vietnam they see as pure evil and they associate the agency with it. And it gets interesting because Satan is secretly the hero of Paradise Lost, despite Milton’s intentions, Satan is the secret hero. Milton couldn’t help it. He set out to glorify obedience, but disobedience hogged all the glamour. No wonder it fascinated you, Ray. Okay, so you stay with the instrument. You have doubts after a while, the impulse to draw back, maybe, but you’re in it. Your generation is against the CIA in the most fuckingly absolute way. And they focus on the exact things in the work of the agency you disagree with and reject, yourself…”

“Just a minute, Davis, aren’t we the same generation, the two of us? How old are you?”

“Just forty-six.”

“And I was just forty-nine.”

“So you think I should have said our generation?”

“Don’t you?”

“Okay. But Iris I put into the next generation down. She’s thirty-six. At thirty-six.”

Ray had to bite his tongue. It was a shock because if she had given thirty-six as her age it meant she had been willing to lie and the lie was a sign that she had wanted Morel starting as far back as filling in the date of birth on the medical history form, on her first visit. He couldn’t believe it. This was so far beyond unlike her that he couldn’t believe it had happened. Could Morel be misremembering? That had to be the answer.

“Finish your thought,” Ray said.

“That’s about it. What I proposed is that Paradise Lost addresses all your ambivalence about what you’re doing with your life. And the ambivalence gets more acute as your side wins. You feel it winning before it finally happens. You have the victory, not like Milton, who had to see the kings come roaring back into London. So I think Paradise Lost tells you not to abandon an imperfect instrument, the agency, just because most of your peers say you should, just the way Paradise Lost told Milton not to abandon an imperfect institution like the monarchy just because the people, a lot of them, said he should. And with your enemy down and out you have the option of leaving the imperfect instrument… But it looks like you can’t.”

Let this go, Ray thought. There might be some truth in it, but there was a great deal that something so simple left out. Morel was stripping away everything in Milton that didn’t serve his thesis. For starters there was the conflation of biography and art, a quagmire. He wasn’t saying there was nothing in Morel’s construct. But showing Morel why it was inadequate was something he had no strength for.

A loud explosion occurred, closer than the last one.

Ray said, “Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? I’ll have to think about it. I point out, though, that you generated this analysis of me not out of an interest in penetrating a fascinating truth, but out of an interest in penetrating my wife.”

Morel looked stunned. “That’s not the way it was,” he said.

Ray said, “Some other time we can talk about it. I’ll give it some thought.” He was curt. There were numerous things wrong with Morel’s thesis, not the least of which was taking a cartoon of Paradise Lost as representing the sum of Milton’s huge labors and leaving everything else out, the Areopagitica, the pamphlets on divorce…

Coldness seized him. It was the word divorce. There would have to be one, of course. There would be procedures, papers. Only an idiot wouldn’t have realized that. But it would have to be worked out even though it conflicted with his image of a quick vanishment into a new life, a quick and sharp exit. He was divorcing the agency too. It was over, all over. He was through. He wouldn’t discuss it with Morel. He couldn’t. Of course it would seem to him like a lunge or an adaptation late in the day to get Iris back by giving her what she had wanted for years, now, when it was too late. Tsk tsk goes the clock, he thought.

An explosion came, about as loud as the last one. A new flux of white smoke began feeding in.

Ray asked, “You know another thing white smoke tells you?”

“No, what?”

“It means we have a new pope.”

It was nothing, but they both laughed, a peacemaking laugh.

Iris had been his pope, or something like it. He had believed in Iris, in her goodness, her patience. There had been an early time when he had believed in the agency. But that had gone. But he had always believed in Iris and her steadfastness, the way Irish drunks believed in their saintly wives. But that wasn’t quite right. Now Morel was her pope, or she was Morel’s pope. It could go either way, in life.