Mortals

must be much more throughout the building that was worth preserving. Eccentric rich people had indulged their tastes here. The treads of the first flight were bare, but he could see, from the landing, that the carpeting that had once covered the treads of the second flight had been ripped free and pulled down into a hump, an obstacle. It was difficult employing his torch and keeping his rifle in any sort of threatening pose. Everything was too heavy, including the torch. The stairs were crowded with boxes and rubbish.

He decided that it would be best to set the rifle aside and take his torch and negotiate the stairs to the second floor. And when he got there, after surmounting the debris in his way, he would creep around and attempt to locate whatever stairs or ladder gave access to the roof. It was clear in his mind that he had to go up onto the roof, where hell was. But first he would come back for his rifle. But for reconnoitering he would need to be nimble.

He found a niche for his rifle between two wooden crates filled with metal shavings, the sort of waste that collects under lathes. He wondered why it had been saved, or if the answer was that plans to dispose of the waste had been interrupted by bankruptcy. You’ll never know, he said to himself.

He was at large on the dark second floor. He was using the torch in short bursts. He thought that was best, even though someone hanging head down clinging like Dracula to the wall might see it as a code, if they were near a window. The battle was directly and loudly on top of him. Individual voices, taunting or imprecating or whatever it was they were conveying, were distinct. He had to keep reminding himself that when his breathing was laborious when he was exerting himself it was because of his medallion, Strange News, which was still cleaving reasonably tightly to his chest. He decided to discard his shirt. He took it off and rather than look for a place to cache it in he tossed it over his shoulder.

It felt better with his shirt off. He prowled swiftly through the second floor, looking into rooms, finding one bedroom mainly intact and ready for tourists once the dead insects were swept up and the dust had been beaten out of the various upholsteries and the bolsters. Every room had apparently been supplied with giant bolsters. He might have occupied this room with Iris if life had been different. Pausing to look at himself in the baroque mirror the room contained gave him an idea, the inspiration to do something with the fact that he looked like hell, skeletal, his ribs showing, his arms womanish and thin. He was minimal. If he was anything he was the object he was bearing more than he was anything else.

Back in the corridor, he was toying with the idea of going up, once he found the way, going up onto the roof naked, although not naked so far as his feet were concerned because he would cleave to his shoes forever or until Christ came again. He wanted to do something helpful with the impression he seemed to be capable of giving that he was carrying an infernal device around. Taking his shirt off had been smart. It made the bomb central. But dispensing with his jeans might help even more, because arriving in hell showing his sacred penis, showing he didn’t care who saw his sacred penis, would mean that something serious was up and that they should be afraid. He felt suddenly that he could do it. Embarrassment would be nothing to him after he was dead. He removed his jeans, half disbelieving what he was doing. He would certainly be an alarming spectacle unless, of course, somebody just turned around and reflexively shot him the minute he popped up and they saw his white headband. And that thought suggested he should dispose of the headband, because, on balance, it created more potential problems than it solved. When it came to Kerekang’s people he could just shout out who he was. A problem was that his head was going to be the first visible part of him when he emerged from a trapdoor or looked around a corner as he arrived on the roof. He pulled the headband off. My Brief Career as a Human Bomb could be the title for a chapter in someone’s unfinished memoirs.

He went back to find his discarded shirt, folded it neatly, and carried it into the intact bedroom where he pushed it under the bed, out of sight. He wanted to be able to reclaim it. He didn’t know how things were going to go. People might say you’re dithering, but you aren’t, he thought. He was planning. He was doing his best to plan.

He was listening hard to see if he could make out anything in the firing patterns that might tell him how the fighters were deployed. Unfortunately it was hopeless. Either the firing was lighter or he was losing his hearing.

Sweeping his torchbeam around the bedroom one last time, he noticed a possible accessory for his human bomb costume. A metal crank showed at the edge of the heavy purple drapes shrouding the windows. That was how the windows were opened and closed. He wanted the crank. He seized it and tugged at it and it slipped easily off the shank it was meant to turn. The shank was square and it fit into a square slot in the butt of the crank. There was no securing pin or screw. He had been worried that the crank mechanism might have been rusted. But in the Kalahari nothing rusted. That was worth keeping in mind. He wanted to laugh. He had the crank. It was going to look good. He forced the butt of the crank deeply into the overlapped tape bindings so that the handle projected at the foot of the bundle, where his right hand could quickly grasp it. Of course, it was a joke. But it was a joke that only had to remain unpenetrated for a relatively short period of time. He went to the mirror again and lit himself up, armed as he was for war. He realized that there was a sense in which to the intelligent eye the crank would seem to imply that the bomb he was carrying was primed by clockwork of some kind. He didn’t care. It was the overall effect that counted and the overall effect was good.

He disheveled his hair. It was an afterthought. It seemed appropriate.

In the corridor again, he felt he was getting better oriented. This main building was in the shape of a laterally stretched-out block letter U, with the shorter elements, the uprights, constituted by the east and west wings, and the long base span between them constituting the central mass of the building. It was a considerable piece of construction. He was through with this wing of the building. The stairway connecting the first and second floors was located at the southwest elbow of the building. The endless-looking corridor to the east wing lay unexplored before him.

The place was eccentric. The baseboards were carved in the same serpentine pattern as the banisters. Armies of people had been charged with keeping the woodwork polished. There were heavy black beams in the ceilings. He didn’t want this place to burn.

Exactly halfway down the corridor of the main section of the building he found what he was looking for. There was an alcove with a narrow tin-clad door set into one wall. There were nail-punch designs in the tin facing, fruit motifs, insofar as he could tell. This was not going to be a door leading to a closet or pantry. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did.

The door was unlocked.

He inched the door open. There was light coming down from above. A wash of heat touched him. A steep, straight flight of iron stairs led to the open sky. The sky was streaked with smoke. There was a trapdoor at the top of the stairs and it seemed to be secured in the open position. He closed the door. There had been blood on the stair treads. He knew the smell.

He could go up immediately or he could go back and retrieve his gun. He was feeling strongly that he had cached the gun too far away. If he had the gun, he could drag it inconspicuously behind him as he proceeded with his original plan or he could stow it someplace closer to where he was going to be. It wasn’t that he was giving up his plans, his plan, it was that he was trying to refine what he was going to do.

He ran to retrieve the rifle and returned with it to the alcove, where he let himself collapse, sinking down against the door, to get his breath. He was hungry.

He had to go up there now. He supposed his idea was to terrify people into doing something he ordered them to. He would decide how to act once he saw what he was going to be confronted with, that is, whether he should act like a fou, a nut, or like a coldblooded type, a zealot but cold.

He started up the stairs. He couldn’t let go of the gun. He thought, Anyway, we are all fragile puddings, doomed slumping puddings trying to stay hard as long as we can. It was conceivable he was just about to expose himself to sudden death. He had to get himself in order, be clear, concentrate his mind. He couldn’t set aside more time to do it because he’d already dithered enough. He had to be in order, though. He would give himself until he got to the top of the stairway to the roof. He would have to be succinct. But he had to mount the stairs very deliberately anyway, because he had to avoid slipping in the blood on the stairs and because he had to favor his knees, his right knee, spare it for whatever exertions were going to be called for.

He began the ascent. The angle was not quite vertical and there was no railing to grip. Dragging the rifle up with him, behind him, was difficult and made for slower going. He wanted to be clear, as clear about what he was doing as Yeats’s Irish airman.

One, step one, was Iris, and there was nothing to say about Iris beyond love and the size of his loss and that