he could among the wounded and his dead friend. And Morel had to come because he might be needed especially to help Kerekang, who was in frightening shape and who might be helped to recuperate by a medical doctor, the only one in this part of the wilderness.
He took Morel by the hand and pulled him toward the Cruiser.
“We’re going with you,” he said to Kevin.
Ray pulled hard on Morel’s arm. He knew what he was doing. Morel wanted to go back to peace and also to getting ahead of him in speaking to Iris and warning her and letting a screen go up. It was a problem, and it was too much of one, but there he was.
Morel had jerked himself away from Ray. He was entertaining hopes of a different outcome, still, Ray thought. The man wanted to go to Iris, embrace her, warn her, embrace her and get together with her to figure out how to deal with the man she was married to, the spy. It was a paranoid notion and he knew it, except that it might be true, and didn’t the agency act on ideas of things that might happen, that might come true, all the time, and stop them from happening?
Ray led Kerekang to the Cruiser. No one objected. He helped him into the front seat. Mokopa was the driver, which seemed wrong. It was wrong to have a one-eyed driver if there was an alternative. Ray’s legs were shaking at the prospect of being able to lie down flat in whatever conditions for long enough to sleep, with nothing being asked of him.
He got Kerekang seated.
He turned to Morel with the idea that he would ask him to volunteer to drive. But Morel was looking disaffected and adamant in some way, and he was marginal, gray in the face, strong as he was, and he was a strong specimen, but he was drooping and fighting not to show it. It would be better to have a one-eyed driver than someone who could fall sleep at the wheel.
“Come get in the back with me,” he said to Morel.
Morel was still trying to think of his own alternative, Ray could tell. But there was none.
“This is the best idea, come on,” Ray said.
The truck bed was filling up with fighters. Others would want to lie down too. Ray got to the tailgate of the Cruiser but was too weak to pull himself up into the madding crowd who had gotten there first. He didn’t want to reveal that. He tried to look pensive. A problem was that he had his bundle to protect. He couldn’t bear to let go of it.
Morel was helping him up. And he was mounting the tailgate himself, so the decision had been made.
It was good Morel was there. He was clearing a space next to the wall of the truck bed. He was being rough about it. He was pushing wounded men over. No one was objecting. It was because he was a doctor.
There was shouting and ululating as the fighters packed up. Some were filing off on foot, not many. Presumably there would be a rendezvous with the people in the vehicles, later. He hoped they would be all right, the ones going on foot. The Basarwa at least would be all right. They could live on nothing, they knew how.
They were a convoy of five vehicles, two big Bedford trucks, two pickups, and the beautiful blue Cruiser. They were actually moving, all of them. A whining sound came from the burning hotel. The fire was stupendous.
He had a space to lie down in. He would be all right. Next to him was the dead body of Dwight Wemberg, wrapped in a blanket, his face not showing. Morel was not lying down. He was nearby, sitting on a crate. He was being watchful.
“Rest if you can,” Morel said, taking his bundle from him and placing it under his head. It was not the greatest pillow in the world but it was better than having his head bouncing on the metal. Morel was doing everything he could.
Ray wanted food. It was ridiculous but he believed that if he asked Morel to get him some he would do it.
No one knew how hungry he was. Iris could look at him and tell if he was hungry whether he said anything or not. That was because she was attuned to him. He wanted a meat loaf sandwich, her meat loaf. She had once put raisins in a meat loaf, in the spirit of experiment, early in their marriage, when she had been cooking more than she did now, because now they had help in the kitchen. And the raisins had been a terrible idea, but he hadn’t said anything, and then the next day she had caught him prising them out of the slab of meat loaf in his sandwich. And she had made him promise that he would always tell her the truth about food she prepared. And after that, he always had. He should tell Morel that story. He didn’t know why, unless it was to remind Morel to tell her the truth. She enjoyed the truth.
I’m learning to sleep anywhere, he thought, and fell asleep.
His first thought, when he awakened, was that he must be in a cave, which was not possible, or rather not compatible with the geography of that part of the Kalahari, as he understood it, which was poorly. Only the Tsodilo Hills, where the Bushman paintings were, were substantial enough to have caves in them, and they were too far away, impossible to reach in anything like the time he had been traveling asleep, which was the best way to travel, in a berth on a train or in first class on a plane where you had leg-room and seatbacks went further back than the seats in coach.
He was alone. He was looking up at a ceiling, a slanting-to-the-rear ceiling, or rock. It was low where he was and ascended higher toward the back, higher than, lying there, he could determine. His head was elevated. Whoever had placed him on the tarpaulin had stuck
He sat up. He could touch the rock surface above him, so he did.
Sounds were coming to him from the narrow mouth of the cave. Whatever was going on was going on there.
He was hurting everywhere. He was delighted not to be dead. Waking up, he had thought for a second he might be dead, dead but also alive, alive in the way you would be in all the religions, with their various hells and paradises and so on.
He turned himself around and began to crawl toward the opening of the cave, and he had the thought that in fact he might be existing in some kind of illusion, the illusion that everything was real around him, that this cave was real, but that in fact he was dead, and crawling toward the dim light at the mouth of the cave was an illusion that was a kindness to him.
And as he crawled the fifteen or so feet to the dim light and toward the discussion he could hear going on he hoped to God this was real because there were the stories of people dying and going down a tunnel toward a source of light and meeting their relatives and a neon version of Jesus at the end and then a voice saying your work is not done and then snapping back like a rubber band to the operating room.
Ray thought he would be willing to die if it was going to be pitch black, hello zero, diving through the zero like a clown through a burning hoop and then nothing. He hoped to God the atheists were right. Because if there was an afterlife it would be institutional because somebody would have to run it and he couldn’t go through that again. And the only worse thing would be reincarnation and back to the ocean of human institutions again.
Ray crawled and rested and crawled on. His knees were in hell. He realized that he wouldn’t mind meeting his brother, now, in the death place. They would have new things to say to one another.
He emerged.
“Here I am,” he shouted. He wanted to see if that would have some effect. Because if he was in a death drama, a comic opera of crawling toward the light and toward relatives, nothing he could say would have any effect on it because it would be a script, an ordained thing, like Orientation Day in college.
His voice was better, he noted.
