Mortals

the death certificate, his brother had died of cryptococcal meningitis. He wanted to have the death certificate, take it with him. He knew she wanted it too, but she had made no objection when he claimed it.

Sorting out which books to take, which to leave for her to forward to him when he got settled and which to discard, had been an odd experience. He was taking a handful of books, all poetry. He was taking his Milton, his Blake, his Yeats. He was abandoning Gerard Manley Hopkins, which before he had always had with him, for a funny reason. He had been riffling through the Collected Poems, stopping at I remember a house where all were good / To me and then looking through the late poems and finding one in which Jesus cried out that he wanted to return to earth incarnated as a British soldier, which he hadn’t read before and which had struck him as the ultimate incarnation of Christianity in Empire. That had been enough. He had put Hopkins first into discard and then into save for forwarding and then back into discard. He wondered if Morel’s ideas were having an effect on him, because he loved Hopkins but he had dumped him. He was surprised, but it felt all right. And the job was done. He could hold all the books he was taking under one arm.

She was taking too long. He was at the end of his list of what he wanted to see. He wanted to look at some limericks she had written. He had collaborated with her on some of them. He had only remembered them at the last minute. It was a reminder of better times, the limericks were.

She was being dilatory. His taste for language was coming back. Not that it had gone away entirely during the last hellish period of his life, but coming out of hell, he had seen his words and speech suffer. They had been instruments to get from one moment to the next as safely as possible. He was getting it back piecemeal. How many times had he wanted to say to her Hello I must be going, with his heart cracking? Trying to be light, that would have been, with his heart cracking, trying to be Irish in a pub, all the Irish manque people letting it out in pubs.

He got up and went into the bedroom to look at himself in her mirror, the full-length mirror on the closet door. Because he was going to be himself elsewhere. She couldn’t have missed that he was dressed for travel. He had decided to look more professorial. He had purchased some low-magnification glasses at the Notwane Pharmacy. He put them on and took them off, checking both images. He was wearing his black safari suit still sharply radiating the chemicals they used, not carbon monoxide but the other one, fresh from the cleaners. It was looser on him. His arms were thin. It was practically impossible to get safari suits with longsleeved jackets in Gaborone, but in South Africa it would be easier. Or he could work on his arms. He did so then a little, standing there, tensing them. Iris was looking for him. His bags were packed.

She had his folder, the limericks. He wanted to say, Hello I must be going. She would appreciate it, normally. But this was the wrong moment. He sat down and opened the file folder.

“I don’t know why you want to look at these,” she said.

“I don’t know either,” he said.

They were hers. When it had come to letters, she had been willing to give up only a few of his letters to her, and none of hers to him, saying she simply couldn’t. So, after a lot of pointless agonizing rereading of the past, he had let her keep everything. He hadn’t wanted his letters to her. The whole thing had been a mistake. There would have to be a photocopying session sometime. The imbroglio had taken too much time.

He read one of hers.

A man with no sense of direction
Once, seized with an urgent erection
Attempted to screw
A Young Lady he knew
Contusing her neck and midsection.

Then there was one she had written on a visit to Dublin.

A man from the States had a query
To put to his Gaelic League dearie:
Er, Maeve is it fair
To write down Dun Loghaire
Then insist I pronounce it Dun Leary?

That was about street signs in Dublin, place names. It was very personal and parochial. He wanted it.

And then there was

A difficult woman from Charlotte
Though married became quite a harlot
But she had an excuse
For being so loose
Her husband, she claimed, was a varlet.

The past is a forest of signs, he thought. The problem was that you could only read them when you turned around and looked back, unfortunately.

“Do you want these?” he asked her.

“No,” she said.

“Then I’ll take them all.”

There was something else he wanted but that he couldn’t ask for or wait for her to find. They had played a game. It had been her game. She had been seized with the conviction that she had ideas for cartoons that were as good as those that were showing up embodied in The New Yorker cartoons. And she knew there was a market for cartoon ideas. And she had gotten the name of the person at The New Yorker who, as she understood it, received cartoon ideas and presumably farmed them out to different artists, hired hands, so to speak. Undoubtedly hundreds of underemployed smart married women the world over had had the same conviction. But she had set out to prove to him that she was right. So she had sequestered copies of The New Yorker and transcribed actual cartoons into idea form and then shuffled them in among her own cartoon ideas, her own captions, and he had been asked to say which ones he thought were cleverer. And the truth was that he had more often rejected the New Yorker actual cartoons as silly than he had hers. Hers had, on the whole, been as good or better, just as ideas. But then somehow it hadn’t gone further. She had made her point and had let it rest there. Probably it could have been carried to the next level. She might have sold a few ideas. Somebody was selling ideas, here and there, to the art director at The New Yorker. But she had let it rest. She hadn’t pushed on it. One of her ideas that he remembered involved a centaur standing confused in front of two doors, one for an internist and one for a veterinarian. There was the court jester saying to the king, Thanks, you’ve been great. There was the wife saying, Fred, is there someone else? to the husband behind the open New York Times with a lady obviously sitting on his lap. There was the angry punk saying, Get a lifestyle. He decided not to ask for the four-by-six cards on which she had collected cartoon ideas. It was too pathetic. And it was getting late. He had to make the Tlokweng Gate crossing with time to spare. There might be a line of vehicles waiting to get through. The line moved quickly enough on the South African side, through the corresponding gate, Nietverdienst, but on the Botswana side it could be slow or fast. His bags were on the stoop. The rental car, a Beetle, was gassed and ready to go. His heart was beating raggedly. He worked on his breathing and that helped.

He wanted to ask her if he looked okay, meaning okay for the world he was plunging into, the new world. He