Mortals

an ambassador, he thought.

The ambassador hadn’t appeared among them yet. Ray thought, You become an ambassador and you think Great, and then they send you to a place like this, a desert…

They waited. Iris took his hand. He closed his eyes. I envy no one, he thought.

“My hips are out of control,” Iris murmured.

“I certainly hope so,” he said lewdly. He knew what it was. She was noticing someone whose hips were too big. Lately she would ask him if she resembled overweight women her age that they passed in the street, asking if her upper arms were as far gone, if her waist was as thick.

He looked to see who it was she was comparing herself to. She was fixing on the DCM’s secretary in the row ahead.

“Not even close,” he whispered to Iris. “You’re a ridiculous woman.”

“You see nothing, you know nothing, and you lie,” Iris said.

“If you say so.” He closed his eyes again. But I see everything, he thought, I am a camera… The worst image for a life has to be the one bad poets love the most, a candle, burning for what? giving off light for what?… There is no image for life. Life is a sexually transmitted disease, according to my brother. That aphorism had made Rex a bit well known, briefly. People used it. It would get into anthologies of bright sayings.

Iris nudged him. “Open your eyes. It doesn’t look good to seize this opportunity for a nap.”

Programs were being distributed. One reached them.

“There’s going to be music,” Iris said.

“Oh yes. Of sorts. They were trying to get hold of a woman in Molepolole who plays the zither, a Peace Corps volunteer. And there’s a choir group from the Anglicans. They probably have something on tape, too. The big speakers are hooked up over there.”

“What about the refreshments. I’m starving.”

“You go from being stuffed to being starving so rapidly it’s pathological, do you know that?”

“I know.”

“I believe the collation is going to be fairly deluxe this time, not just samoosas being waved about by fleet- footed servers. Samoosas yes, but piled up in platters in one place so you can get at them. Many many salads. Chicken salad.”

He opened the photocopied program and flinched.

“What?”

“The notables, the Batswana. They shouldn’t have put this in print. Two of them won’t come, no matter what they said. The Health permsec will not come. Not a chance. Matsila may or may not, or he may come so late it amounts to the same thing. They hate us at Health. This thing should have started by now. I can tell you exactly what’s going on inside the residence. The ambassador is arguing with somebody about whether to start now or wait until everybody they have on the program is on the premises. I could write the script. But Segoko won’t come. If he does, I will kiss your introitus numerous times.”

“Are you insane?”

“You obsess me.”

“Clearly.”

“Nobody can hear me. Besides, nobody around here knows what introitus means. You can ask them.”

She crossed her eyes at him. She should have let him rest. During the reception part of this, there would be work to do. Everybody was here. Boyle was, radically misdressed in a white linen suit and wearing a red bow tie and, apparently, a leather baseball cap, and holding a handkerchief folded into a pad in one hand, at the ready to tamp away any offending fluids he might produce. The menthol cigarettes Boyle favored came from some outlaw manufacturer in India, probably the last source in the world for these lethal products.

Iris was saying something. She was asking him so softly that he could barely hear her why, by the way, was kissing a certain area of hers a penalty of some kind.

“I’ll explain later,” he said. They were both playing. But actually she had a point. He had to think about it.

This event had to be about to begin. The amount of life you wasted in waiting for things to get under way was enormous. In one of his letters to Iris, Rex had written on the subject of starter tabs on toilet rolls, an innovation in the States. Now they invent these things, referencing his lost hours picking at toilet rolls to get them started.

What had been in his mind was to impose on himself a penalty that was in fact a pleasure, in saying Kiss your introitus. But of course the fact was that she would know very well that he had been doing rather less of that than when they were younger. Although she was as forthcoming in that way as ever, she liked it. He was forty-eight. She was thirty-eight. He wished he had never mentioned it. She would come back to it. But there were other sexual, what? festivities of theirs that had dropped away, like her purposely giving him erections in potentially embarrassing public circumstances. She could do it in a second without touching him any time she wanted, still. I came out of the shower and we were late for breakfast, he thought, remembering… It was at her friends’ place in Carmel and they were waiting for breakfast and she got me hot the way she does, whore that she is, and then I said Now how am I going to go out there? and she said Backwards? She liked to be called a whore during sex. You have the heart of a whore, he would say.

She was waving at someone behind them. It was the man, undoubtedly.

“Is that your doctor?” he asked.

“Yes, it is,” she said, her voice betraying something, some extra lightness. He wasn’t going to swivel around to look at the man. She wanted him to.

Their huge ambassador was at the podium, giving his usual broad initiatory smile but then quickly thinking better of it. He was six foot five and enjoyed his toweringness in this country of small men enough to add to it by routinely wearing cowboy boots with significant heels. He was a man who had been reckless about his exposure to the sun all his life and was now paying for it. He looked dappled. His jaw and cheeks were marked with the sites of excised basal skin cell carcinomas. It was a continuing thing. The last tranche of cancers had been removed by a South African surgeon, who, out of some misplaced aesthetic impulse, had scoured out the sites in the shape of perfect circles. Ned Van Ness had spent too much time in the sun first as a developer and builder and then as a yachtsman, and now he was out in the sun too much here. His big bald pate bore spots of another kind, liver spots, probably. Van Ness had to be missing Galveston, where he was said to be the maximum leader of the city elite, and where you could go yachting. His face was pear-shaped, with full, soft jowls.

Because of his age, Van Ness couldn’t be blamed for being reckless about sun exposure, since the bad news about photodamage had only started getting around in the last five years or so. Ray himself had always been, by instinct, sun-averse. But he had been the only one in his family. His impression was that Rex still went regularly to tanning salons. The explanation there was that having a nice tan would give him his only good feature, physically, so he blocked out the bad news about ultraviolet. His brother was not attractive. He deserved credit for persisting with things as he had, coming on to people, looking for boyfriends despite everything. But why, now, Van Ness couldn’t seem to adapt to the African sun was puzzling. He wouldn’t wear hats. The consequence of it all was that his head looked increasingly like a decorated thing.

The microphone gave a keening sound. The ambassador made a prayerful gesture, his head bent briefly, then resumed his manic smile of welcome. He couldn’t help himself. He was an odd man. He was an awkward man. Ray liked the ambassador because he sensed that the man was having fun. He was a political appointee, here for the status that having been an ambassador gave you for the rest of your life. He would go back to his former life still odd. There was something carefree about him, and it showed in his odd, abrupt, ringing, undiplomatic laugh. Ray had seen Batswana flinch at that overwhelming laugh. He was certain that Van Ness found Africa funny. And the ambassador was transactionally odd in other ways. He was a perfectly amiable character, but when he reacted to something said to him there was often a lag in his response that could be unnerving. He tended to consider you with a long stare, while he thought, and when he responded it was normally sensible or reassuring or whatever was required in the situation. But in the meantime you had been unnerved. Ray liked the idea of patently odd men holding positions of power. He was interested in trying to scope out what it was in them that allowed them to escape the marginalizing juggernauts that crush the standard odd man, the average odd man. At some point in his past Van Ness had worked with a professional to rid himself of his Texas accent. This struck Ray as a strange thing